School.
Friends. Lunch. Homeroom. Report cards.
It’s all back.
The first clue that the normal world is still spinning—and that it now actually expects me to get back on board—is how everyone comes up to me like I’m their long-lost brother or something.
“Ryden, omigod, hi!”
“What’s up, Brooks?”
“State champions fifth year in a row, man! Eastbay is going down!”
“How was your summer?! I went to France—it was amaaaazing.”
I guess, unlike that day at the lake, because I don’t have Hope with me, they’ve forgotten about her. Or maybe they’re avoiding the subject on purpose. I smile and laugh and hug and fist-bump everyone, like life’s totally great.
No one mentions Meg. I guess it makes sense. She stopped school in November of last year, so everyone’s used to seeing me without her. I wish I were used to seeing me without her.
My locker is the second sign that nothing has changed in the Bizarro World that is Downey High School. I don’t even know which one is mine until we’re given our assignments in homeroom, but clearly someone got the memo before I did, because my locker is decorated. It’s covered in Puma blue and white, with a paper soccer ball with a giant #1 painted on it and lots and lots of streamers and silver glitter. I look down the hall—there are a few other lockers that look like mine, all belonging to my fellow varsity soccer team members. Clearly whoever went to the trouble to find out my locker assignment and get here early to decorate it hasn’t heard that I’m benched for Friday’s game.
I don’t have any books yet, and though it’s almost fall, it’s not really cold enough outside for a coat, so I don’t have anything to put in the locker. So I just close it and go to AP English.
And there she is. Meg Reynolds, dark hair all wild and flowing around her shoulders and down her back, pale face resting on her pale arm sprawled across the desk, vigorously scribbling in a notebook. She looks up and gives me the brightest, most beautiful smile in the whole world. I stop dead in my tracks. The memory is so real, so vivid, I have to fight to get air. And then I blink.
She’s gone. All that’s left is an empty desk with the class syllabus sitting on it. There are plenty of other seats, but I sit there.
Shoshanna walks into class just as the bell rings, so I’m saved from having to talk to her, but she keeps throwing me grins throughout the period.
As soon as the class ends, I hear, “Ryden!” Shoshanna throws her arms around me and keeps the hug going way too long. I try to pull back twice, but she just holds on tighter.
Finally she lets me go, and we exit the classroom together to find Dave waiting for Sho in the hall. I give him a fist bump. “What’s up, guys?”
Shoshanna’s still beaming at me. “What did you think of your locker? Did you love it?”
“Um, yeah. That was you?”
“Yup.” She claps her hands excitedly. “You’re my player!”
Oh God, no. There’s this tradition at Downey where the varsity cheerleaders are each assigned a soccer player during the fall and a basketball player during the spring. All season, the cheerleader wears his number, cheers his name during the roll-call cheers, brings him cookies and little gifts and stuff on game days, and on and on and on. Last year, this girl named Madelyne Binder was my cheerleader. She moved away a few weeks into the season—I think her mom lost her job or something—and I was cheerleaderless. But I had Meg, so I didn’t care. Now it seems I have Shoshanna. At least in this one way. I know she means well, but I really don’t have the energy for this.
“Shouldn’t Dave be your player, since you guys are together now?” I ask.
“That’s what I said!” Dave replies. “But Sho insisted that you’re the team’s star, and she won’t accept anyone less than the best as her player.” He laughs as he says this, like, Isn’t she so cute? so I guess he doesn’t care that his girlfriend basically told him he’s a shitty player and not good enough for her. Well, whatever.
“The locker was great,” I say. “Thanks.”
“There’s more where that came from, mister!” Shoshanna giggles, and she and Dave continue on to their next class.
A few periods later, I’m making my way to the cafeteria when I’m hit with another hallucination. Meg’s smiling face flickers in and out of view through the gaps in the passing stream of students. Unlike the last hallucination, this one doesn’t bring me to a halt. Instead, I pick up speed and push past arms and shoulders and backpacks, desperate to get close to her. I blink once, twice, but she doesn’t disappear this time.
“Meg,” I whisper through my clogged throat.
Meg’s eleventh-grade class photo, blown up to the size of a thirty-two-inch flat screen and framed in light-colored wood, hangs on the wall. She’s not a hallucination. But she’s not real either.