“You don’t think he’ll keep hooking up with you now, do you? Cover blown. No way. He’s gotta cut his losses to keep his girl.”
I hate the way Luke talks. I’d have to actually get stupider to understand it. I give him a look that hopefully verifies how completely idiotic I find him to be. It doesn’t seem to register, though, because he puts a sweaty hand on the back of my neck, underneath my ponytail. It’s a place Joe has touched with his fingertips and his lips and even the crook of his arm, and I hate it being touched by Luke.
“You know what I’m saying,” he says into my ear. I jump away from him. Elise is walking by at the same moment, and I try to give her a help me out of this look, but she gives me a you like the attention, don’t you look instead, and I’m so shocked by it, I can’t even squeak at her.
“Get off me,” I finally manage, when Elise is in her seat and I remember I have no one but myself to protect me against things like King of Hockey and Tool-ness, Luke.
“Don’t kid yourself,” he says, but he does get off me and head toward his own seat. I wipe the back of my neck, like somehow I can wipe away the memory of him or at least the physical sensation of his hand on my skin, a feeling that lingers too long and makes me queasy.
It’s already basically the worst morning ever, but Jemma’s been watching the whole thing with a pinched, horrified, just-tasted-sour-lemon face. And I am that sour lemon.
“No one told Sasha,” she says. It’s a whisper, and judging by the way she flips her hair with the words, a massive favor she thinks she’s paying me. And maybe she’s right, but I hate that she wants me to owe her, after everything.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” We both know it’s crap, but it’s, like, the only thing I can possibly say at this point.
“I used to be jealous of you, you know,” Jemma says. The lights are dimming in the auditorium, and in a minute the teachers will instruct us to find our seats, but for a moment it’s me and Jemma and a decade of feelings between us. “Seems like a long time ago now. Nothing to really be jealous of anymore.” She says it like she’s only now figuring it out, like she’s putting together her deepest feelings right in front of me, in real time. “I mean, you look pretty. Don’t get me wrong. Obviously you look pretty. Or hot or whatever. But look what you had to do to get there.”
She heads to her seat, not giving me a chance to respond or breathe or blink or anything, really. She’s wrong, of course. But goddamn, it hurts.
The day gets worse from there.
I sort of think everyone except, apparently, Sasha Cotton knows about me and Joe. And Sasha Cotton really doesn’t know about me and Joe. She compliments my purple polka-dotted scarf and asks me if I got a haircut, because my hair looks “like, swingy.” Elise lets me sit with her at lunch but she doesn’t say a single word, and when I try to take one of her fries, she actually pushes the tray away from me. Mrs. Drake approaches me in the hallway and says we need to have an appointment later in the week.
And Zed has come forward with a specific idea for how to take down Jemma, thus starting the twenty-four-hour ticking clock.
ASSIGNMENT: Weed. Your dad’s weed. Tell that counselor at your school. Show the evidence.
@SSHOLE: Dude.
BRENDA: I don’t feel like that will necessarily work.
ZED: We can’t control the outcome. We can only control the journey.
AGNES: There is no right.
ZED: There is no right. There’s only best. There’s only going far and reaching forward. Together. We’ll be right there with you.
I read it in my car at the end of the day, blinking back tears. I grind the palms of my hands into my eyes, like that will stop the feelings, but it doesn’t. I shake my head, but Zed and the rest of my friends can’t see it.
Star doesn’t say anything. I refresh and refresh and refresh, but she’s nowhere to be found. I even go so far as to give her a specific shout-out, asking her opinion of my Assignment, which I’m pretty sure is completely against the rules, but I need something to hold on to, and I have so few options left. Zed hasn’t posted on her page again, and I hate being left out of her life. I thought we were in it together. I’m scared for her. And for me. And for Jemma, sort of, too. I guess I’m scared for us all.
I’m down to twenty-three hours to basically destroy my former best friend.
I look in my glove compartment for my copy of The Secret Garden with all the notes that I so, so hope are Star’s. But it’s not there. The feelings, all of them, every feeling I’ve ever had maybe, are boiling in my stomach, and I’m going to tell Cate and Paul, I’m absolutely 100 percent going to tell them everything, and tell Elise everything too, because I cannot take the pressure on my own for one more second, with my life kind of in shambles around me.
But.
Joe texts me.