“It could be a prank.” Leigh shrugged, drawing her legs under herself. “Or a secret high-stakes bet. Or ghosts. I have it on pretty good authority that the school is haunted.”
She waggled her eyebrows at me and I kicked the air between us. “Shut up.”
I couldn’t stop myself from pulling up the memory of last night in the sci-fi section in vivid, photographic detail. Zoom in on a thumb brushing against the stripe of skin under the hem of my shirt, the taste of Brandon’s hot exhale.
God. I was made of pins and needles. There couldn’t be a worse day to be forbidden from taking a run.
“What is that face?” Leigh asked.
I reached up, touching my cheek. “What face?”
“Ever.” She tipped her head at me. “Come on.”
I groaned. “Don’t start that again.”
“Then tell me about your face!” She laughed, flinging her pillow at me. It flew in a black and white blur and landed at my hip.
I picked it up and hugged it, half hiding behind the zebra stripes. I hadn’t expected to feel so embarrassed. It wasn’t like I’d never kissed a boy and told my friends about it after. My friends back home would never let me get away with keeping that kind of secret. They would want all the gory details so they could do a director’s commentary over it. He said what? Now you know he’s a virgin.
And so on.
“Something happened yesterday,” I said.
She braced her hands against the edge of her bed frame and leaned forward, her slanted front teeth biting down on her lower lip.
“I might have kissed a ghost,” I squeaked. “And by ‘might have,’ I mean ‘Whoa oh my God that definitely happened.’”
She let out a squeal that bordered on banshee-like. “I knew it!”
I threw her pillow back at her as footsteps slammed to our door, which flew open without a knock. Meg gripped the door frame, ready to throw herself at whatever horror was waiting for her.
“What happened?” she gasped.
“Sorry,” Leigh said in a strangled voice. “The burglars stole my tampons.”
Meg let out a long sigh that was more weary than relieved. “Oh. Put it on the list. You guys only have a couple more minutes before I have to walk you to your first class.”
“Will do,” I said, quickly grabbing the single sheet of paper we’d been given. I waved to Meg with it as she closed the door again.
Leigh smothered a fit of giggles in her pillow.
I threw the paper back at my desk, not caring as it floated to the floor. “Now when they find the burglars they’re going to be like ‘Hey, why did you steal all of that girl’s tampons?’”
“Good!” Leigh snickered. “I hope they have to buy me a new box. That’s what they get for putting my entire future in jeopardy.” She propped her chin on the pillow and forced herself to stop grinning. I could see the tic of more giggles lurking in her jaw. “Please go on. You were telling me about the haunting of your underpants?”
“Oh my God,” I said with a shocked laugh that echoed off of our cement walls. “No, I one thousand percent was not. We kissed. Well, we kissed a lot, but it was strictly first base. Not even a hint of stealing second.”
But that might have been the fire alarm’s fault. Not that I was going to posit that theory to my dear roommate, who was busy joyfully bouncing on her bed again.
“Save your sports metaphors for someone who gets them,” she said. “I have been on this hype from day one.”
“Which was nine days ago.”
“Nine days of being hell of right. You guys had the stink of high school sweethearts all over you. Just like Jams and Hunter. And I was right about them too! I should work at a carnival or something.” She stared off into space, possibly imagining her booth at the carnival of her dreams. She blinked at me a second later. “So, what now?”
“What now is we’re in lockdown,” I said, leaping off my bed and grabbing the list of stolen items off the floor. “We were talking about trying to get off campus, before we found out that camp is kind of, you know, ruined.”
“Getting off campus is a great idea!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t know if that’s actually true.” I shook the paper at her. “Burglaries. Lockdown. Entire future slipping through my fingertips.”
“You’re only seventeen once. You’re young, you’re hot, you’re away from home, and you’re sucking face with a ghost. Live your life! We can’t study after hours anymore. What do you have to lose?”
“If anyone catches us, we’ll be sent home and we will both lose the chance to go to this school.”
And my parents would kill me twice. Once for running away from home and once for getting caught sneaking around with boys.
Leigh’s mouth flattened into unbridled annoyance. It was the way the Lieutenant looked at Isaiah’s diet and my hair. “Ever Lawrence, is there a nice boy with too much hair and the wrong name waiting for you in Sacramento?”
The only thing waiting for me in Sacramento was a swamp-ass August, a car with half a gallon of gas in it, and the name I had to share with my dad. There might be parties or hangouts with stolen kisses from nobodies, but there wasn’t a somebody. There wasn’t a typewriter-wielding, esoteric-fact-spewing, pencil-twirling, just-enough-tongue-using ghost in Chuck Taylors anywhere but here. Balls.
I threw my hands up. “No. There’s not.”
She clapped her hands like a giddy child and hopped to her feet again. She sang an off-key jingle to herself. “I am the rightest girl in right town. The mayor of right town is Leigh!” She skipped over to my phone and pressed a button to see the time. “I can buy you like seven minutes if you’re okay with me telling stories about your bowels to Meg and Trixie.”
“Wait, what?”
She dropped to the floor and gave a shave-and-a-haircut knock against the carpet. It took a moment for the two answering knocks to sound under my bed.
She glanced up at me, eyebrows high on her forehead. “Seven minutes, starting now.”
*
I was out of breath by the time I made it to the upstairs lounge. As I groped in the darkness for the door handle, I was struck by a cold flash of panic that it would be locked and I’d be stuck on a forbidden floor, in the pitch black, with nowhere to go. But the handle eased under my fingertips and I slid inside the pumpkin.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim, uneven light coming through the small windows, my pulse was deafening in my ears. I flexed my bare feet against the pumpkin’s thin, knobbly carpet, glad that I’d thought to kick off my shoes and socks before slipping into the stairwell. The floor below me was full of competitors, none of whom would bat an eye before reporting any sign of rule breaking, especially today.
Sneaking around was practically begging to be dragged off campus and thrown back into the furious and heartsick arms of my family. All over a dude. Some white boy with shaggy hair who I’d known for barely over a week, who I’d once mistaken for a figment of my own imagination.