TEN MINUTES BEFORE SECOND PERIOD, THE HALLS are quiet. People have finally seemed to realize that this is a big deal. A teacher they liked is gone for good—is that what it takes?—but I still hear them murmuring about who the student could be. I don’t hear Lucas’s name once.
With every step I take toward the classroom where he sits, my insides twist tighter. My sneakers squeak on the freshly waxed floor, its chips of mica glaring at me like fireflies.
I knock into somebody and mutter a halfhearted apology without looking up. Then a hand is on my shoulder. I look up, and there’s Juni, folding her arms.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I don’t bother trying to tell her it’s nothing. With a pained look on her face, she steers me past the stairwell and out the side entrance.
“I have something to tell you, too,” she says. “You want to go first?”
I shrug and think distractedly, God, I need a thicker jacket. It’s so cold out today.
“Okay,” she says. “Explain.”
“No, I . . .” I stare down at my shoes.
“Tell me what’s up, Claire. Please. Look at me.”
It’s hard to look up, and when I do, she has that sternness in her eyes. She cares fiercely, Juni. I feel as if she knows already. I hate her for it. I love her for it.
A plane hums overhead, leaving whiskers of white exhaust behind. The breeze sighs in my ear. “I did something bad,” I say. “You know how Lucas . . . you know how people thought he was the one who . . .?”
“Yeah.”
“That was me. I turned in a form saying it was him.”
Her eyes go wide.
Words keep rushing out of my mouth. “I wasn’t thinking, I—I got angry, and I couldn’t talk with anyone, and I—”
“You could’ve talked to me. I know we fought, but you still could have—”
“No, I couldn’t have,” I burst out. Her mouth closes, and I rush on. “I’m so tired, Juni. Don’t you get it? I lost it with you two last week because I’m sick to death of you guys being so much better than me, Olivia drowning in attention, you being so fucking perfect!”
My words spiral out into the sky. Huge and irretrievable.
I breathe hard. White mist uncoils before me in the cold.
She’s about to say we’re done—I know it. Between this and my not calling her when she got out of the hospital—she’s going to friend-dump me, and I’ll be alone, and I’ll deserve it, won’t I? Won’t I deserve it?
“I thought you knew me better than that,” she says quietly.
I try to swallow. My tongue is harsh and dry. “That’s why I didn’t call on Sunday. When I heard you landed in the hospital, I . . . God, it’s horrible. But part of me was like finally, you know? She finally does something that doesn’t make the rest of us feel inadequate. Make me feel inadequate.”
Her eyes crease with—is that sympathy? I can’t look long.
“And it’s not just that you’re so smart, and that everybody’s in love with you, and that you’re amazing at everything you do. I mean, that’d sure as hell be enough, but it’s—it’s the way you act.” I look down at my sneakers. “When you sleep over, when it’s the three of us . . . even in private, you’re never mean. You’re never insecure or angry or . . . how do you do it? How are you real, you know? Years of us being friends, and I still feel like it’s not fair, that somebody can be so—”
“Claire,” Juniper says, “it was me.”
“What was you?”
“Mr. García. He was with me.”
Something ruptures in my chest. I stare. Her gray eyes are calm and serious.
The knots in my mind come loose, unleashing the force of a million memories.
Strangely, the first thing that comes to mind is the mess of frizzy hair I had in fourth grade; I remember wanting miles of flowing blond hair, Cinderella’s or Rapunzel’s or Juniper Kipling’s, because even back then she was the golden girl.
I remember starting to detest my eyes in the mirror, their color, their shape, their short lashes. I remember sixth grade, the stick-thin prepubescent frames of the popular girls, Juniper the most graceful and most beautiful of all. I remember wanting to be like her so viciously, so fiercely, that when we first became friends, I dreamed that I could absorb something of her into myself, relinquish who I was and what I’d been given.