The One-Way Street

She can hardly believe how nervous she is.
She’d performed onstage in front of her entire high school, made countless presentations to peers and faculty, and never before had her heart pounded with the force it’s displaying now. Of course, never before had she dreamed of doing anything this bold.
She is going to tell him how she feels.
She is going to melt when he tells her he feels the same.
She is going to finally know what it’s like to fall into a man’s arms in triumphant relief, full to bursting with bubbly happiness. She is going to know what it feels like to have someone care about her heart and her mind, and now about her imperfect complexion and her slightly less-than-slender waistline. Happily ever after. The way it is in the movies. The way it always is in the books she reads and the songs she listens to.
She can’t remember the walk to his house ever being this short. Perhaps she’s walking faster than she usually does. She has to tell him before she loses her nerve. And she loses her nerve quite a bit. Especially around him.
Two more blocks to his front door. She fingers the note she has in her hoodie pocket. She hopes extra hard that she doesn’t have to use it. It will be better if she can say it to his face. Letters just seem like such a cop-out. She wants him to know that she’s strong enough to not hide behind a pencil and paper, just this once.
A block and a half to go. What if she can’t do it? She’ll probably stumble on her words, or stutter the whole thing out. He might think it’s a joke, and she’s not sure if she has it in her to pass it off as one. He knows that she is much better writing her feelings than she is talking about them. Maybe the letter wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
One block left to go. She’s walking faster now, getting breathless. Her heart is screaming at her to stop, as much in anxiety as in exertion. Maybe she’ll just tell him that she has something important to say, but that she doesn’t have much time to say it. That’s right – she’ll just pretend that she has somewhere to be and that she wrote down her feelings so she’d know what to say. And she decided to just give her notes to him, since she can’t stay and discuss it.
Half a block more now, and she can see his driveway. There’s an orange car there that she’s never seen before. Is his sister visiting from college?
Just a few hundred feet more, and now he’s coming out of the house. Her stomach twists up into an uncomfortable knot and her heart tingles and squeezes inside her chest. She has to march past the discomfort, for if she doesn’t tell him now she might never.
She stops abruptly in her tracks just before the hedges that surround his mailbox. The girl that’s following him is not his sister. Perhaps she is a cousin, or a friend.
He is embracing Girl. It is not the embrace of a brother, or of a cousin. He is looking into her eyes the way the men do in the movies. Girl is falling into his arms with a natural grace. Her face is pretty and her waist is slim. Her hair is perfect.
They are full of bubbly happiness.
Girl gets into the orange car and drives away. He watches her go. His smile is glazed with contentment. Slowly he disappears into the house.
Behind the hedge, her heart squeezes up again. Her hands are cold and sweaty now, and her knees are not sure if they can still support her.
A single tear rolls down her cheek, onto the letter that is now in her hands. It falls to the ground.
And a storm cloud rolls over her head.
Just like it would in the movies.