“Do you need a formal invitation?” Jean patted the seat beside him. “Pop a squat.”
So she did. Lilith realized that from this vantage point, seated among friends, the cafeteria felt completely different. It was warm and bright and loud and fun and, for the first time, lunch went by too quickly.
They had lots to say about music, but what surprised Lilith most about that lunch period was that they had things to talk about other than music. Like how Jean was nervous Kimi’s parents wouldn’t extend her curfew on prom night.
“You gotta go over there, dude,” Luis said. “You gotta sit down on the awkward couch with her awkward dad, tell him about your college prospects or whatever. Pump yourself up, but be respectable and respectful. Girls’ dads love that crap.”
“I can’t believe I’m taking advice from a freshman,” Jean joked, taking a fry in the eye from Luis.
But the freshman turned out to be something close to a genius at biology. When Lilith moaned about her homework, Luis started singing: “The plasma membrane is the bouncer keeping all the riffraff out.”
“What’s that?” Lilith had asked.
“It’s, like, my version of Schoolhouse Rock!” he’d said, and sang the rest of the song, which was catchy and contained a mnemonic device for every part of a cell. When he finished, Jean started clapping, and Lilith hugged Luis before she even realized what she was doing.
“I don’t know why I never thought to make up songs to help me study,” she said.
“You don’t have to.” Luis grinned. “I’ll teach you everything I know. Which is, like, everything.”
Now, in biology, Lilith remembered Luis’s low voice singing to her the day before—and amazingly, she got the answer right. She couldn’t wait to tell him.
At lunchtime, she found him in the cafeteria, pumping the soda dispenser for more ice. She trotted up and started singing. He turned and grinned and harmonized the final line with her.
“Lifesaver,” she said. “Thank you.”
“More where that came from,” Luis said with a lopsided grin.
“Really?” Lilith asked. She would love this to become a regular thing. She couldn’t afford to hire a tutor for all the subjects she was failing.
“What do you got after lunch?” Luis asked, sipping the foam from his Coke before it spilled.
“American history,” she groaned.
“I have an amazing rock opera breaking down the battles of the Civil War,” he said. “It’s one of my best.”
“Lilith?” A tap on her shoulder made Lilith spin around. Cam was holding out a lunch tray of her favorite: lasagna.
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “What part of ‘die’ did you not understand? Do I need to say it louder?”
“Dude, I’ll eat that lasagna,” Luis said.
Jean Rah had gotten up from his table. “What’s going on, guys?” he asked.
Cam passed the tray to Luis as Lilith said, “Cam’s out of the band.”
“What’d you do this time?” Jean said, shaking his head. Next to him, Luis was forking lasagna into his mouth, wide-eyed.
“Lilith thinks I photocopied her lyrics and spread them all around the school,” Cam said, tugging at the collar of his T-shirt. “It’s unclear why she thinks I would do that, but she does.”
“Naw, Lilith,” Luis said, wiping sauce from his lips with his hand. “I’m the library aide, and I had to make some copies yesterday. That copy job was right ahead of me in the queue. All I knew was it was like a thousand pages long.” Luis rolled his eyes. “You have to have a code when a job’s that big. This one was sent from an external computer. It came from the account ‘King Media.’?”
Jean frowned. “So it was either Chloe King or—”
“The intern,” Cam muttered. “Luc.”
“Whatever,” Lilith said, weirdly angry that the story she’d believed about Cam was falling apart. “Cam’s still out of the band. Jean, Luis, I’ll see you guys after school for practice.”
But when Lilith got to the band room after school, her friends weren’t there. Instead, the Perceived Slights were getting ready to practice.
Or rather, their new guitar tech—a quiet girl named Karen Walker, who sat next to Lilith in biology—was setting up their instruments. She chewed her lip as she plucked the strings and turned the pegs of Chloe’s gleaming electric guitar. Lilith could tell Karen didn’t really know what she was doing, but the band members weren’t paying much attention. They were lounging on the risers, drinking smoothies and playing on their phones.
“Um, June, did you just send me your geeky classical Spotify station?” Teresa asked the blonde to her left.
“It’s Chopin, and I listen to it when I fall asleep,” June said.