Despite what some might think, Gilbert Blythe had quite an active imagination. He had imagined himself taking hockey lessons from Wayne Gretzky, who would watch him skate and say, "You remind me of myself at that age." He had imagined himself as a doctor, saving lives everywhere from modern hospitals to third world countries.
Over the past year, he had done a lot of imagining that he and Anne Shirley were friends. He imagined that he had introduced himself differently, that he couldn't still feel the sting of a magnetic locker board crashing down on his head. Or else he imagined that she accepted his apology and laughed about her extreme reaction. He imagined seeing the fire in her eyes, only ever to be immediately followed by reconciliation. (He couldn't imagine the fire away completely, but he didn't really want to.)
Where Gilbert imagined, he acted. He practiced hockey enthusiastically, and worked on his science classes diligently, and persisted in talking to Anne as though she wanted to talk to him.
She didn't reciprocate, and no matter how strong his imagination, he couldn't quite bring himself to believe her friends' YouTube assertions that she was actually in love with him, or to let his hopes get too high over a missing pencil. She was a hurricane, and any friendship they might have had lay in the wreckage of the storm he had unwittingly brought down on his head. He started trying to imagine life returning to normal, back to the carefree flirting with other girls who all enjoyed his company.
How had that Anne girl turned normal life into something so boring?
Then came Jane's Christmas party, and her blessedly small basement, where there weren't any corners Anne could duck into. She tried to avoid him when they went upstairs to eat, but he kept his eyes averted, and eventually she relaxed. (Gilbert's cousins had a rabbit hutch. He knew how this worked.) She did disappear once, but he figured he only had to wait until her next video to see why. He was annoyingly aware of Anne's absence, and was glad when Josie chased her back to join the main group.
Gilbert had tried to prepare himself to be casual about spending an entire evening in Anne's presence, but from the moment she had flopped onto the couch on the other side of Diana, his every nerve was awake to her proximity. Even with his back turned, he knew exactly where she was in the room, could feel her warmth and sense the air stirred by her movements. Once during Scrabble, she stretched her legs out under the table and accidentally brushed against his. She moved them back as quickly as though she had been cut, and he stared at the board with a furrow on his brow, concentrating on finding his next play and on not letting on that his heart rate had sped up from the brief contact.
Jane always stoically refused to rise to his Scrabble trash talk, but he could imagine quite the verbal fencing match with Anne. When she challenged him on several of his words, he resisted the urge to parry and riposte, even though she left extremely tempting openings, almost as if she were baiting him. Gilbert imagined the conversations that could have followed each remark, full of admiring rivalry on both sides and sparks of excitement and appreciation in Anne's eyes. He kept his actual retorts to her restrained, unsure where the line was between friendly teasing and here-comes-a-blunt-object.
Something about Scrabble shifted their dynamic. She stopped keeping so far away and pointedly avoiding eye contact. But despite the constant Taylor Swift refrain that had started playing in his head after she laughed out loud at a joke he made during the game, his rational side couldn't bring himself to believe they were out of the woods yet.
He felt his casual mask slip when they gathered around the piano and she started to sing over-dramatically, in the way of someone who was afraid to let people hear her true singing voice. Then she asked him to sing with her, and he almost did because he would want to jump off the roof if she asked him to with that encouraging smile, but he caught himself. He was afraid, too, afraid of singing "my true love gave to me" in an unsteady voice, or with too significant of a look, and spoiling this tenuous time in which Anne Shirley didn't hate him.
When Jane invited him to play something Christmasy, he launched into the opening bars of "Clocks," by Coldplay. Josie accused him of showing off, but he wasn't showing off, he was apologizing—begging and pleading, just short of on his knees. His every word and gesture for the whole evening had been an apology for those cursed missed opportunities he couldn't get back, a plea for the hint of camaraderie he felt tonight to linger on into the new year.
He did switch to Christmas songs, and Anne came to the piano to sing. He imagined that she stood near him on purpose, that she spoke a little louder than necessary to make sure he heard her over the others, that she was the one trying to apologize to him for closed doors and wasted time. Behind the imaginings was the voice of reason, telling him that the area by the instrument was confined, that Anne always got louder when surrounded by friends (which didn't have to include him), and that a girl who held grudges more steadfastly than anyone he had ever known was not about to drop them just because she had learned he had musical talent.
Still, the time around the piano gave him the courage to photobomb Diana's selfie with her best friend, to lean in further and further, to be close to Anne for a few seconds that were caught in glorious digital images that the magnificent Diana Barry texted him before the night was over.
He drove home exhausted from the amount of self-control he had exercised that evening, elated at the reward of a "Merry Christmas" that was returned, and convinced that normal life was never going to be good enough for him ever again.
As he collapsed into bed, he reviewed the few precious moments that evening in which Anne Shirley forgot that she wasn't his friend. And against the voice of reason, he let himself imagine that those moments were only hints of things to come.