I watched as Mr. C stopped by the Weird Girl’s desk and murmured to her quietly. She nodded, and Mr. C smiled at her and turned to tell us to shut up, he had to explain our quarter project.
Immediately Bridget Gibson piped up from the back of the room and asked if we could work with partners. When Mr. C said no, she started whining: “You said we’d get to do at least one partner project.” Then the class started rumbling in agreement, and Mr. C flushed like he feared mutiny and told us to knock it off and open our textbooks. But Bridget was relentless. She actually pouted. “But you promised we could do something with partners.” Because that’s how Bridget is: she thinks everyone owes her something, even some poor son of a bitch who’s stuck making thirty grand a year teaching a bunch of assholes.
And Mr. C caved just like that. “Fine. But this isn’t an in-class project. You have five minutes at the end of the period to find your partner, and then everything is done on your own time.”
Bridget smiled victoriously and linked pinkies with Alicia Rivera in the middle of the aisle. A crop of sweat slicked up on the back of my neck. Partners. Not a good day to find a partner. I figured I’d tell Mr. C I wanted to work alone, and then I remembered Andrew Kang’s stepsister sitting next to me.
When Mr. C wrapped up the lesson and told us to find our partners, I lingered in my seat for a bit, aware of her amid the chaos of scraping chairs and bodies. She was looking out the window, flipping her bottom lip with her thumb.
I tapped on her desk with my pen to get her attention. “Wanna work together?”
She twirled her pen between her fingers, looking too depressed to bother sizing me up. “Yeah. Okay.”
There were tears in her eyes. I knew then that this girl was going through some shit too.
“I’m Bailey. Are you okay?”
“Kacey,” she said. “And no. Not really.”
I felt Bridget’s eyes boring into my back, and I thought about how Kacey had saved me from the humiliation of working alone. I’m not okay either, I wanted to say.
Maybe we were meant to find each other today. Maybe we’re the Not Okay Girls, and we’re supposed to save each other.
CHAPTER FOUR
Something is wrong. I hold two fingers to the throbbing vein at my temple. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Bailey never made it home from Sully’s party last night.”
“Wait, she went home?” Bailey always stays at Jade’s house after parties; she has a strict eleven-thirty curfew, and her mom is oblivious—she really thinks Bailey has kept her promise to be good after the Cliff Grosso incident. She really thinks Bailey spends most of her weekends at Jade’s making cupcakes and watching crappy reality television. Not sneaking out to the Culver’s in Pleasant Plains or to the occasional party.
“At like ten she said she was busted and had to go home,” Jade says. There’s a silent but lingering there.
“What?” I ask.
“Cathy called me this morning. She said Bay isn’t answering her phone and asked me when she was coming home from my house.”
“Bay lied to you?”
Jade is quiet. I realize how I must have sounded. Accusatory. Because Bailey’d lied to me yesterday too, hadn’t she? She said she would text me before she and Jade left for the party.
“I told you,” Jade says. “Something’s seriously wrong. I’ve been blowing up Sully’s phone, but he’s not answering. I’m thinking of driving over there so Cathy can keep calling people.”
I can tell she wants me to come with her to Sully’s. But Jade never asks for anything. “I can be ready in like ten minutes.”
“Okay.” Jade’s sigh of relief fills the line. “I’ll be there in five.”
Jade lives on the other side of Sparrow Hill, all the way on the opposite end of town, which means she was already on her way to me when she called.
The thought fills the hole in my stomach a bit. Whatever is going on with Bailey, we’ll figure it out together. I haven’t been frozen out completely—Jade still needs me.
Whatever my crime was, it’s forgiven. For now.
After Jade ends the call, I look at my screen. Bailey had grabbed my phone one night, taken a picture of herself making a grotesque “derp face,” and saved it as my wallpaper. I never bothered to change it, because it made me laugh every time I looked at it.
I text her: Where are you?? This isn’t funny.
—
I slip out of the house before Andrew can corner me and ask what’s wrong. The answer feels too complicated.
I pause as I pick my way around the spot where Andrew’s Mazda is parked. There are fresh tire marks behind the car, the grooves filling up with snow. I didn’t hear him go anywhere last night or this morning. I entertain the idea that he went to the party for a half a second and laugh.
Andrew can’t drink on his medication, and when I asked him why he doesn’t go to the parties anyway, he said he’d rather get his legs waxed than be the only sober person at a party.
Jade’s already here. She’s idling at the curb in her father’s truck. Warren works nights for the power company. When he’s sleeping, Jade can take the truck as long as she refills his gas tank. I don’t know anything about Jade’s mom except what Bailey told me: she killed herself when Jade was five—Jade walked in on her in the bathtub—and I should never, ever bring it up.
“Babe,” Jade says as I climb into the truck, “I’m freaking out.”
Jade’s eyeliner is smudged and her bun lopsided. I reach over and give her mittened hand a squeeze. The picture of her and Bailey from last night pops into my mind—the one I should have been in—and I pull my hand back.
If Jade notices, she doesn’t say anything. “When we get to Sully’s, I’m going to beat him for not answering his phone. Then I’m going to make him call every single person in his contacts until we find her.”
There are plows out already, trying to stay ahead of the storm. When we pass Milk & Sugar, I sink down in my seat. Ashley sometimes wipes down the windows in the afternoon when it gets slow, and I don’t want her catching me out gallivanting with Jade in this weather.
Jade doesn’t say anything about last night, doesn’t ask what I did, and I wonder if they talked about it. If they came to a joint decision to leave me behind.
The first time I snuck out with Bailey and Jade, we went to the Taco Bell in Pleasant Plains. We laughed at the drunken twentysomethings fumbling their orders into the drive-through speaker and imagined having that kind of freedom, someday. In the summer, we snuck down to the lake, waded in up to our midthighs, and laughed under the moon. Bailey never wanted to go home.
Eventually I realized I preferred my evenings by the fire in the den, playing games of Risk with Andrew and Lauren that stretched to midnight. I’d finally found a version of myself I could live with—found a place where I didn’t feel like I had to escape.