I didn’t know what to say to either comment. The fact that Marcia thought I was ready—and good enough—to train someone else at the help line, or that Shivani considered me a mentor. I pulled over a chair, sitting close to her, and found a splitter for our headphones. “We’ll take some calls together to start, sound good?”
I surprised myself by how quickly I slid into the role, the older student, the trainer to the trainee. It had only been a year ago that I was in Shivani’s place—how much had changed over the past few months. As if by some other divine act of good fortune, the calls we took together were really routine: a girl who was thinking of running away, another whose parents’ divorce was sending her into a spiral of depression. Nothing that Marcia had to step in for. As I gave advice and spoke to each caller, I heard the calm confidence in my voice over the headphones—it surprised even me.
When it was time to wrap up for the night, we left together, stepping out into the cool spring night, our breath visible as we left the warmth of the lobby. “Nico, I just want to say thank you so much,” Shivani said as she headed to her parents’ car. “This means, like, everything to me.”
I suspected the freshman girl would tell her friends at school that we were friends—that we volunteered together—as if it was a badge of honor and prestige. She would likely brag about it, but that didn’t bother me. I had noticed since Sarah’s return that some people, especially kids at school, were interested in me in a new way, intrigued. For a few, that faded once Sarah had been home a couple of weeks. But for others, it was as if I had been invisible before and now they saw me. One of them was Daniel.
Ever since the party at Liam’s, he had been acting differently toward me at our yearbook meetings. For one thing, he actually knew my name. On days when we met after school, Wednesdays, I spent forever getting ready, trying on uniforms in the long mirror on the back of my door in the morning, trying to find one where the skirt fit just right, my navy cardigan snug over a white top. I would wash and blow out my long, blond hair and wear it down, instead of up in a ponytail or a loose bun like I usually did.
“Must be Wednesday,” Tessa teased, scooting in next to me in homeroom, taking in my carefully crafted appearance.
“Is it?” I would joke back, pretending to look at the calendar by the teacher’s desk. Of course Tessa knew that I liked Daniel, but unlike the way I encouraged her crush on Liam, she was decidedly negative about my feelings. “He’s got a different girlfriend every week,” she pointed out. “Not a good sign. The best you can hope for is to be that girl—for one week. Really? You want that?”
The truth was that I didn’t want that, I wanted more—something I couldn’t even confess to Tessa or Sarah, that I could barely admit to myself. I watched Daniel closely, and yes, he did seem to date a different girl every weekend and flirt expertly, with just about everyone. But as far as I knew, he hadn’t found anyone to ask to the senior prom yet. As the date approached, a fantasy grew in my mind. We would be working on the yearbook, scanning in photos, and he would lean over my shoulder, checking something on the computer screen. “This looks good, can you move this one a little to the left to make more space for the header?” and I would hold my breath, waiting for it, with his body so close to mine. For him to look in my eyes the way he had at the party. To see that hungry smile.
Sometimes he did. Especially if I stayed late, if we were a small group and ordered in something for dinner with Mr. Stillman, our art teacher, as the only chaperone. When he sat next to me at the long design table, teasing me about being the youngest person on the staff. “This one here is trouble,” he would joke, putting his hand on my back. “She looks so innocent and pretty—if anyone is going to sneak a prank into the yearbook, it’s Nico.” I would blush and mumble something. But for all his flirting, he never actually made good on the imagined promise, the dream that he planted in my head at Liam’s party, that maybe I was something special to him.
One rainy day, when we had PE inside, I heard the girls in the locker room talking about prom and someone mentioned Daniel. He did have a date, and had for weeks, a girl he had gone out with a few times. She was a sophomore, too, but dark haired, curvy—the polar opposite of me. I ducked into the bathroom and felt tears sting my eyes. How could I have been so stupid? It became clear to me, all in a rush, that Daniel had only noticed me in the first place because Sarah had returned. All the time I had been dreaming about him he had probably not thought about me once.