It’s not like I went to her house with the intention of taking anything. I wanted to hang out, because we hadn’t done that in a while, even though we had plenty of free time. I didn’t text, because she’d started taking hours to return my texts, and I didn’t feel like waiting for company. When I entered the porch, I saw the Sugar Babies straightaway, but I didn’t look at them until my knock on the door went unanswered. Then I picked up the note, unfolded it, and read Mateo’s words.
I didn’t know, then, that the two of them had kissed. Ivy didn’t tell me until after she thought he’d ghosted her. But I realized in a flash why I’d started feeling like the odd man out.
“Because I didn’t want things to change,” I tell Ivy now.
“You didn’t want things to change,” she echoes.
“Yeah. For two years, you guys were my best friends. And then suddenly, you’re a couple? You’d already started to ignore me. You did,” I emphasize when she starts to protest. “You’d been leaving me out of stuff for weeks. And we were about to start high school, and I thought…I thought if you guys were going out, I’d be completely on my own. Or you’d have a bad breakup and want me to take sides. Either way, everything was going to change. And I liked things the way they were.”
The irony, of course, is that the three of us fell apart anyway. If I hadn’t been a scared, stupid thirteen-year-old, I might have seen that coming. It was naive to think that ripping up a note, and tossing a gift, would end the attraction between Ivy and Mateo. They were still magnets vibrating in each other’s presence, but—I flipped them. All the things that used to draw them together started pushing them apart, until they were so far away from one another that I was left standing alone in the middle.
Ivy’s face droops, her lips turning downward. “I liked him,” she says quietly, tugging at the hem of Daniel’s sweatshirt. “I liked him so, so much.”
“I know.” I did, but I also didn’t. I didn’t understand, back then, what that kind of liking felt like. My middle school crushes were infrequent and unreciprocated. There hadn’t been a Noemi, and there definitely hadn’t been a Lara. I thought what I’d done was a ripple on a pond, something that would be barely noticed and easily forgotten.
An apology is on my lips, but then Ivy’s brows shoot up and her hands fly to her cheeks. “That is—that’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard!” she says.
And with that, my temper spikes. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, a refusal to accept that what I did was so bad after all, but—considering the day we’ve had, you’d think she might realize the irony of that statement. “Oh, really?” I ask. “The most selfish? The absolute most? Sorry, have you already forgotten the car ride over here? Do I need to remind you that you shut down Spare Me with a bottle of baby oil?”
“That’s not what we’re talking about right now!” Ivy hisses.
“Still relevant!” I hiss back.
Ivy flexes her hands, like she’s getting ready to shove me against the wall. “My whole life could’ve been different if I’d gotten that note! We probably wouldn’t even be in this mess right now. And Spare Me would never have happened.”
Oh, hell no. “You don’t get to blame me for that,” I snap. “That was all you.”
“And Daniel…I’ve been awful to Daniel…”
“Not over this,” I remind her. “You didn’t even know about the Sugar Babies until this afternoon. You’ve been awful to Daniel on your own.” She doesn’t have a good answer for that, and my face burns at the memory of Daniel’s self-satisfied smirk. “Anyway, were you seriously buying all of that back there?” I continue. “Daniel is suddenly your pal, looking out for you, running interference with the cops out of the goodness of his heart? Come on.”
Ivy furrows her brow and lifts her phone, alternating between stabbing the screen and holding it to her ear. “It’s true, though,” she says after a few minutes. “I didn’t get any calls from them. He must’ve actually given them the wrong number.”
“If he did, I’m sure he had his own reasons.” Lara’s card is sticking out of Ivy’s bag, and a sudden, unwelcome thought lands with a sickening thud. Daniel has, as Lara would say, an interesting face. And even though he doesn’t take art, as far as I know, he’s down in this corridor all the time for lacrosse. “Maybe he’s D. Maybe he didn’t come into Lara’s classroom because he heard your voice. Maybe he came looking for her.”
“What?” Ivy’s face is a mask of confusion until she follows my gaze. “Oh no,” she says instantly. “No way.”
“Why not?” I ask. Now that the idea has entered my brain, I can’t seem to shake it loose. “Does it look like his handwriting?”
“I…” Ivy pulls the note out of her bag and opens it. She doesn’t look as though the contents reassure her. “I don’t know. Daniel doesn’t write stuff. He texts, or types. But there’s no way…” She narrows her eyes. “You’re just saying this to distract me.”
“No, I’m not. All day, you’ve been insisting that Lara’s part of this drug scheme. You keep looking for ways to make her fit, but you’re gonna ignore the fact that your brother kept his mouth shut today in a very uncharacteristic way? Not to mention that he was sporting thousand-dollar sneakers just now?”
“What?” Ivy recoils. “That’s ridiculous. He was not.”
“He was. I’ve seen those limited-edition Nikes on the news. They’re a grand, easy.”