Jules didn’t seem to notice the looks from the older guys. Not like Susan, who would suck in her stomach and tuck her hair behind her ears when the football and soccer players came to hang out in the gym where the cheerleaders were practicing. Juliana was thinking bigger; the calendar in her room was color-coded: cheer practice, Spirit Night, homecoming. She didn’t seem to realize how popular they already were. Jen and Jules had both been voted to the homecoming court last year, and Susan was the class secretary.
Jen realized it, though. The people she grew up with suddenly seemed nervous around her. It was lonely at the top, with people keeping their distance, as if the other sophomores weren’t sure if Jen thought them worthy enough to share her presence.
It didn’t help that Jules had a different lunch period than Jen did, and Susan cut lunch out of her schedule completely so she could take an extra elective. Jen had to sit with Bethany and Colleen and their junior friends in the cafeteria.
It was a life other girls envied. It was a life she didn’t know if she wanted.
Juliana had dropped advanced math and science, deciding the workload would be too much for her to balance with cheerleading and her job at Alden’s, the grocery store her parents owned. So the only class Jen and Jules had together was English with Mr. Ward. When Jules got out of gym the period before, she’d meet Jen at her locker and they’d walk to class together.
Today, Jules was late. Jen lingered by her locker, wondering if she should just head for class on her own. She watched another minute tick by on her phone before looking up and seeing her at the end of the hall: Juliana, her forehead glistening with sweat, a bright pink headband pushing her hair from her face.
Next to her, Carly Amato was laughing at something. Jules spotted Jen; she broke away from Carly, waving at her.
“You didn’t tell me Carly was in your gym class,” Jen said, once Juliana had made her way to her.
“Was I supposed to?” Juliana fanned her face with her English notebook. “What’s your problem with her, anyway?”
I’m pretty sure she’s a cokehead. It was an awfully heavy accusation to be flinging around.
“I don’t have a problem with her,” Jen said.
“Whatever.” Juliana brushed past her, into Mr. Ward’s room.
Jen stood in the doorway for a moment, stricken. Juliana had whatever-ed her. Whatever was a door slamming in your face; it meant I am annoyed but I don’t care enough to fight with you. In a lot of ways it was the worst thing you could say to a friend.
Juliana didn’t look back at Jen as she strode up to Mr. Ward and flashed him a pass for her vocal lesson in the choir room. Mr. Ward sighed, pointed at the whiteboard where the page numbers for tonight’s assigned reading were listed. Jules copied it down into her planner and was out the door by the bell.
Jen’s eyes pricked, her lungs compressing with that panicked feeling she got over crying in public. The last time she’d cried in class was after a math test in the seventh grade—the only test she’d ever failed. The boys who sat behind her made fun of her all day; crying in class felt like her body’s way of betraying her. She kept her head bowed while Mr. Ward battled with the girls sitting on the ledge by the window, sunning like turtles on a rock.
“Pleeeeeease can we open the window?” Hailey Rosenfield fanned herself with a marble notebook.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Ward pleaded.
“We are sitting.” Hailey nudged her shoulder into her friend’s. The girls giggled, whined about how they just came from gym. Poor Mr. Ward looked like he was barely out of college.
Jen tuned them out, looking up from her notebook only to copy the journal prompt on the whiteboard. Discuss the setting and how it contributes to the mood of the story. She couldn’t think, couldn’t even remember what she’d read of Wuthering Heights last night.
Juliana was pissed at her. Jen couldn’t think of a time when she’d honestly made Jules mad. It was hard to do, which only made it worse that this stupid argument was over Carly Amato, a girl Juliana had only known a couple of months.
I’m not okay. Jen didn’t realize that it was all she’d written in her notebook until Mr. Ward asked if everyone was done writing, if anyone wanted to share their response with the class.
When the bell rang, Jen tore the page out of her notebook. Crushed it and tossed it into Mr. Ward’s wastebasket.
By the time she got to her locker, she was crying. She buried her head.
A soft tap on her shoulder. Jen found herself face to face with Ethan McCready.
She’d known Ethan since they were kids; she hated that people called him Ethan McCreepy, and she flinched every time one of the soccer guys smacked the back of his head whenever they passed by his seat on the bus.
But if she was being honest with herself, Jen knew that Ethan wasn’t making it easy to defend him. In middle school he’d stopped talking to everyone but two of his friends—computer club boys plagued by ill-fitting jeans and cafeteria pizza breath. It was rare to see Ethan not hunched over a desk, the hood of his sweatshirt up and his earbuds in, no matter how many times teachers told him to take them out.
Most damning of all, though, was that Ethan could, in fact, be extremely creepy. The first time Jen saw him, he’d been watching her.
She was in the woods behind her house, scouring the creek for water-polished rocks, when she heard twigs snapping. She stayed crouched, motionless, hoping to see a deer when she looked up. Instead, it was a boy with a bad haircut in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
“Hi,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Jen held out her palm. Ethan came closer, inspected the rock, which was as smooth and white as a pearl.
After that day, he showed up sometimes. After Jen told him she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, Ethan brought a book from the library filled with glossy pictures of reptiles and amphibians. If they were lucky, they caught toads in plastic beach buckets, but Jen always made him put them back.
Jen thought about inviting Ethan over for dinner, like she did with Susan all the time, but she was too embarrassed to ask her mother. She hated when her mother asked her about boys, and the last thing she wanted to do was admit that she’d been spending time alone with one.
And then Ethan ruined everything.
The summer between fourth and fifth grade, they’d been catching tadpoles. Jen saw a cluster of them, wiggling beside the rock where she and Ethan were crouched.
She cupped her hands and scooped them through the water. “I got some!”
Ethan put his hands over hers to stop the tadpoles from escaping. When Jen looked up, he was watching her, and her gut told her exactly what was going to happen.
His mouth landed on her upper lip, and she thought maybe he’d missed. Before she could blink, his lips found hers. When he pulled away, she tasted Sour Patch Kids.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And Jen ran back to her house, leaving her pail behind.
She’d lied to Juliana and Susan about her first kiss. Said it was with Joe Halpern in the dark of a movie theater in the seventh grade. By then she hadn’t spoken to Ethan in years—she hadn’t gone back to the creek after the tadpole day. She sat far away from him on the bus and avoided his eyes when they were assigned to the same table in art class.
When she noticed the hair that had started cropping up on his upper lip, she got a funny feeling in her stomach.
“You dropped this,” Ethan muttered, and then he was gone.
Jen unfolded the paper. Recognized the words she’d written in her journal at the beginning of class. I’m not okay.
Ethan had scrawled out a response: Do you want to talk about it?
Jen flushed, even though it was impossible for anyone to know what had just happened. She stuffed the note in her pocket and headed to the cafeteria, forgetting that she and Ethan shared the same lunch period.
Her table was already packed; Mark Zhang had his arm draped over Bethany Steiger’s shoulders. Bethany rolled her eyes and pushed his arm off her, even though everyone knew they’d been hooking up since the summer.
When Mark saw Jen, his face lit up. Bethany looked like she tasted something foul, and Colleen examined her nails, trying to look as oblivious as possible.
Everyone also knew that Mark Zhang had had a thing for Jen since she was a freshman.