“Mom…”
“Okay, how about we leave now and let Grinders make you a blueberry muffin and a decent cup of coffee?”
Brynna agreed, even though the thought of a muffin or even a single drop of coffee made her stomach churn. Though the dream still hung at the back of her mind, the anxiety that was thrumming through her was focused on school now—a new school, with new people. She hoped there wouldn’t be old rumors. Brynna’s game plan was to blend into the background as much as possible. She would be an average girl with average grades, and when they called her name at graduation (she wouldn’t be there anyway, having gotten early admissions to Anywhere But Here University), the other students would look around and wonder who she was. She didn’t want to be remembered; she wanted to be anonymous.
???
Brynna stepped out of the car, finding her footing on the concrete. She vaguely felt her mother pat her back.
“Have a great day, hon.”
Brynna heard the car door slam shut, felt the weight of her backpack pulling against her shoulders. She looked up at Hawthorne High, a sprawling, one-story expanse of too-new stuccoed buildings with flat roofs that sat before her. There was a huge cemented quad where students mingled now, bunched together in clusters on the concrete or sitting back on the perfect rectangles of Crayola-green grass that looked like they were planted for the sole purpose of introducing nature into a concrete world. Two enormous iron gates were held open and pinned back with hulking chains, and Brynna had the fleeting thought: Are the gates meant to keep people in or to keep people out?
She scanned the crowd in front of her—teenagers, just like her in hoodies and jeans, slashed-up Tshirts and jeans, prissy sweaters and jeans—and waited to feel their slicing stares. Their eyes would go big, but they wouldn’t meet hers. She’d see them nudge each other and whisper, her mind racing to put words in their mouths: “She was so normal before the accident.”
“She was the one.”
“She dared Erica, but Erica never came back.”
Everywhere that she went, Brynna knew the accident followed her, branded her, and she would never be the same. She was crazy with grief, with guilt; she was messed up on drugs, on booze; she wasn’t who she used to be: fun-loving, wild. All the judgment and accusation was in their eyes.
But here at her new school, no one was staring.
A few kids glanced up at her or squinted their eyes, doing their best to place her. One or two kind of smiled. Most were so focused on their friends or their notecards that they didn’t even see her at all. It should have been a relief, but Brynna knew better. The dare, the accident, that night, was like a disease that would silently creep into a vein and poison her whole life. She expected it. She deserved it. Erica was dead because of her.
Brynna wasn’t popular-popular back at Lincoln, but she and Erica were well-known. Even more so after that night. After she came back to school, people gave her sympathetic looks, and girls she barely knew linked arms with her, patted her shoulder, and told her how sorry they were. It didn’t take Brynna long to realize they weren’t interested in knowing her—they were interested in other people thinking that they knew her. Headlines popped up in the three-page community newspapers: A Lincoln High Insider Tells All, followed with someone’s supposed firsthand knowledge of how “the survivor” (that’s how they referred to Brynna now, as “the survivor”) was coping. “We eat lunch together every day,” one of the stories went, “and every day, Brynna cries on my shoulder.” The source listed was a girl named Abby Hart, who Brynna was pretty sure was either a transfer student or the head of the People for Puppies Club at Lincoln. Either way, Brynna and the girl had never shared so much as a sandwich, let alone a shoulder-to-shoulder cry.
Being slightly invisible at Hawthorne High was exactly what Brynna wanted.
“Oh my god!”
The kid that Brynna crashed into was an eyebrow taller than her, with unkempt dark hair expensively cut to look that way. His eyes were a dark brown-black, but his grin was warm. He narrowed his eyes at Brynna, and she immediately felt heat at the back of her neck.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you—” she started.
He shook a finger at her. “I’ve never seen you.”
“What?”
“You’re new, right?” He dashed out a hand. “Evan. Evan Stevens. Don’t call me Even Stevens because it’s already been done circa elementary school through three o’clock on Wednesday.”
Brynna’s eyebrows went up. “What happened at three o’clock on Wednesday?”
“Not important. Who are you now?”
“Uh, Brynna. Brynna Chase.” She looked at Evan’s outstretched hand. He immediately pulled it back.
“Not a shaker? Fine, I respect that. Supergerms and all.”