“But Claudia’s here to see you.” My mom looks at me, her face clouded with concern. It’s then that I look past my mother and see my best friend since forever standing in my bedroom door. She’s dressed in black leggings and an oversized East Rockport Track sweatshirt. Her eyes are rimmed red. Her mouth is a tight line.
“Claudia?” I say, now wide awake. Claudia sniffles a little and holds her hand up in a tiny wave, and my heart breaks for her without even knowing why.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” my mom says, standing up and giving Claudia a squeeze around her shoulders before shutting my bedroom door.
“Come here,” I say, crawling out from under my covers. I pat the bed and in a moment there she is, facedown on my comforter, head buried in my pink cowgirl sheets. She starts sobbing.
“Hey, hey,” I say, cuddling up close. “What happened, Claudia? Please tell me what happened.” But it’s clear that I need to let her cry first—that I need to let her sob—and so I sit and run through a list of horrible, awful things that could make my best friend break down.
Did somebody die? No, my mother would have heard about it already from Claudia’s mom or Meemaw or someone else in the East Rockport gossip loop.
Did her parents split up? No, they’ve been together for a bajillion years and Claudia is always complaining about how they kiss with tongue even in front of her and her brothers.
Did she get in trouble at school? No, Claudia isn’t a Goody Two-shoes, but she’s not a troublemaker either.
Finally, she sits up and takes a big, shaky breath, then wipes the last few tears away from her cheeks.
“I’m sorry … that I didn’t text you back last night.”
I frown. “Claudia, fuck that! That doesn’t matter. Don’t apologize. I want to know what happened to you!” I squeeze her hands and then wrap my arms around her. I’m so much bigger than Claudia that I can always get a really good hold on her when we hug, and right now I’m especially grateful for it.
I wait for her to want to talk.
“Okay, so something happened to me yesterday. After lunch.” She looks down at her hands. Her cheeks are pink. Blotchy hives are exploding on her neck and chest.
“What?” My heart is hammering.
“Remember how I left the cafeteria early? Because I had to get my gym clothes out of my gym locker to take them home and wash them over break?”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “I remember.”
“Well, when I was walking out of the girls’ locker room, I ran into Mitchell Wilson.” She sort of spits his name out—all four syllables. Then she shuts her eyes and shakes her head.
Something heavy starts descending over me, and I know I could be an actual giant and I would still feel like I’m being crushed.
“You know that hallway, right outside of the locker rooms?”
The hallway that’s not that well-lit. The hallway that’s usually empty. The hallway with no classrooms or coaches’ offices or teachers hanging out, gossping with each other in the corners.
I nod, starting to feel sick.
“Well, Mitchell walks up to me, just, like, comes right at me, and does that fucking bump ’n’ grab bullshit,” she says. “Only … when he grabs me, he just, like, pins me up against the wall and he actually slides his hand up under my shirt. And he, like…” She pinches up her face, wincing. “He, like, grabbed me. Grabbed one of my breasts and squeezed it.”
That motherfucking asshole.
“Oh, Claudia,” I say, my voice soft. “Claudia, I’m sorry.”
Claudia is crying again, and I realize that I’m crying, too.
“It gets worse,” Claudia says, wiping the tears sliding down her cheeks with her fingers until she just gives up and lets them fall. “I told him to stop it. That he was hurting me. And he just, like, laughed it off, you know? He just made me stand there like that for what felt like forever, just pawing at me. I could feel his hot breath on my neck. And it hurt. It hurt so much.”
My Claudia. The closest thing I have to a sister. The girl I’ve spent countless hours with collapsing in giggles and screaming in laughter and whispering in hushed voices about our hopes and our dreams and our very worst fears.
“How did you get away?” I ask.
Claudia closes her eyes. “I didn’t. He just stopped, eventually. And he, like, walked off.” Her brown eyes open, and she looks at me again. “And you know what was so creepy? While he was messing with me, he had this look on his face. This dead look. Like I could have been anyone. Or anything.”
I slide my hands around Claudia’s again and squeeze them.
“That’s not even the end of it,” Claudia says. She sniffles.
I stare at Claudia. “Oh my God, did he come back?”
Claudia shakes her head. “No, it’s not that,” she says. “I went to see Mr. Shelly.”
Mr. Shelly, one of the assistant principals. The one who got all over Jana Sykes for her dress-code violation. Principal Wilson’s right-hand man.
“And what happened?” I have an awful sense of what the answer will be.
“Well, I went into his office,” Claudia says. “I still can’t believe I did that. Maybe I was just operating on autopilot, I don’t know. But I went in there and I told him, well … I didn’t go into the details, exactly. I just told him Mitchell had done the bump ’n’ grab game to me and it upset me.”
“Did you call it that? I mean, like, use that term? The bump ’n’ grab game?”
Claudia nods.
“And he, like, knew what it meant?”
Claudia nods again. “Oh, yeah, you could totally tell he knew what it meant. I think they all know. I think they know it goes on and that’s what those guys call it and nobody cares.” Her voice is flat.
“So what happened after you told?” I ask Claudia.
Claudia twists up her mouth into a frown.
“He looked at me and told me that Mitchell was probably just joking and that I should take the break to relax and forget about it,” Claudia answers. She’s not crying anymore. She’s just still. Mad. “And then he said I should probably take it as a compliment.”
“Holy shit,” I say.
We just sit there for a moment in silence. My mind can’t help but pull back my memories of last night—of kissing Seth, of talking to him and just enjoying being with him. And now this. From so wonderful to so horrible in less than twelve hours. From drooling over an Amazing Boy to fuming over an Asshole Boy overnight.
“Did you tell your parents?” I ask.
Claudia shakes her head again. “No. When I was upset last night I just told them I wasn’t feeling well. My mom would flip out and my dad would … I don’t know what he would do, to be honest.”
“You don’t think he would want to murder Mitchell?”
Claudia shrugs, uncertain. “Maybe. I don’t know. He loves the East Rockport Pirates. He used to play defensive end.”
I want to tell Claudia she has to be wrong, that there’s no way her dad would choose to support some small-town football team over his own daughter. But how can I even know I’m right?
“I’m tired of talking,” Claudia says all of a sudden. “I just want to lie here and not think about anything.” She flops back on my bed and stares at the ceiling. “But I feel bad. I should be asking you about your date.”
I give her a gentle push. “Stop apologizing. Whatever. I can tell you about it later.”