“What am I looking at?”
“The dude’s ex-girl. Best I can tell, they broke up six months ago. She dumped him right before their winter formal. She and her girlfriends drove to his house to pick him up, and when he stepped outside, they collected his ticket, hopped back in the car, and sped away. Didn’t stop her from having a terrific night.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“He set up a one-post hate page about it. Along with this picture.”
One new message from rory (cb techie), my Doc said. I clicked it. It was the same pic, but this one was grossly doctored, so the girl looked like she’d been beaten to an inch of her life. Her white smile was now filled with gaps and broken teeth; both her eyes were black-and-blue; a thin stream of blood dribbled down from her cracked forehead. A giant bruise bloomed on her cheek, and what looked like fingerprints—strangle marks—dotted her neck.
“Tell me you know where this waste of space lives.”
I full-screened Rory. He quietly watched his screen, watching me. He nodded.
“Jonah Logan is a Philly boy.”
“Where’s Kyle?”
Two hours later there were only three plates on the counter next to the Thai food Dad brought home. This was when I should have shared what Rory had discovered, but quite honestly, I was too pissed at Kyle. And that came first.
Mom was loading up a plate to take back to her office, clearly back in the midst of the same old avoid-Kyla deadline. Dad had the living room screen cued up for the last few episodes of that anime series Kyle had turned him on to. Now he frowned.
“Kyle’s at Nate’s? I think.”
“Yeah, right. Dad, it’s important to know where your children are.”
“Just as it’s equally important,” Mom said, juggling her plate, her Doc, and a glass of wine, “not to yell at your parents.”
Everyone looked immensely relieved when the doorbell rang.
“Maybe that’s Kyle now,” Dad said.
“If we’d invested in a RingScreen,” I said as I went to answer it, “maybe we’d know.”
If we’d invested in a RingScreen, I could have strategized with my heart.
It was Mac. (What was with him not pre-txting his arrival?) Even though Mac ran hot and the evening temperature, exhausted from its ups and downs, had finally flatlined in the bland upper forties, he was graciously wearing a scarf.
“Can you come outside for a minute?” he asked.
“Let me grab my coat.”
As I layered up, I thought of the thousand things I wanted to say to him. And none of them had to do with the South America–sized hickey on his neck. I knew it was only there because I’d said no. It was not too far from a petty vengeance I would have enacted myself.
(Fine. Yes, it was.)
When I went back outside, Mac was pacing.
“I just came by—” he said at the same time as I said, “So Rory found out—”
We gave each other strained smiles.
The last time Mac had come over unannounced we’d been pulled further into our “just friends” mess. This couldn’t be good. If only for postponement purposes, I quickly went first. I told him about Philly and Jonah Logan and how the whole thing didn’t feel right and how I planned to take a bus to Philly tomorrow to get to the bottom of it all.
“You sure about this?”
“No.”
In fact, if Ellie’s slap-happiness had taught me anything, it was that rapid-fire decision making did not always lend itself to the best results. So I was pretty certain it was a bad idea to face off with Jonah. But I also knew that if I told my parents, they’d call the lawyer, who was on vacation. And even supposing they could reach Rick, in a few days he would draft some kind of cease-and-desist doc. Shortly after that, he’d mail it to Jonah. Jonah would then lawyer up. And during that whole process, we’d lose all element of surprise, and I’d be past my college-application deadlines.
“But I don’t have a whole lot of other choices.”
I’d practically lost every single friend I had over this video. If taking a gas-guzzling, Philly-bound death trap toward an unpredictable, possibly dangerous scenario might salvage my future? Sign me up.
This was where Mac would normally offer to skip school and come with me. Instead he squinted up the street like some weary gunfighter in an old Western.
I swallowed hard. “Your turn.”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“Can’t do what?”
Mac chewed on his lower lip.
“Us,” he croaked. “It’s like I said from the start. I can never be just your friend, Kyla.”
I was suddenly aware of the weirdest things. How our breath made perfect cumulus clouds. How all this fluctuating weather meant the subways would be filled with sick people. And how utterly unsurprised I was by Mac’s words. I’d been expecting this. All those times I knew Mac would dump me after he got what he wanted, it looked exactly like this.
“Say something,” he said.
What was there to say? Mac was “just friends” breaking up with me. And that meant we’d never again lie side by side and say our words directly into each other’s mouths. He wouldn’t send fake messages to my teachers from Dr. Graff that pulled me out of class because he’d found a song that would, like, change my life. I wouldn’t hear his cackle laugh anymore and I’d never see him get ubersentimental after watching that dumb underdog soccer movie. And there was definitely no possibility he’d be my first. Mac hadn’t gotten what he wanted. Neither had I. What was the whole stupid point?
I struggled out of my coat. Then I whipped it at him.
“I hate you, Mackenzie Rodriguez!”
“Kyla—”
“I fell for you the second I saw you, freshman year.” I flung my scarf at him. “And since then I have watched you make out with almost every female on the planet and still you’ve managed to be the best part of any of this, you dumb jerk. But you want to stop being my friend? Now? What, because some new skank is there waiting for you? Go ahead!”
Hat.
“End our friendship.”
New faux-leather gloves.
“Ruin the entire point of this whole crummy exercise in not dating because you’re impatient and you can’t wait a little longer for me.”
One shoe. “This is what I was trying to prevent all along…” Other shoe. “…you complete and total a-hole.”
Fresh out of winter wear, I stood gasping for breath. It looked like Mac had been standing next to a snowman that melted. He pressed his fists to his forehead almost like he was going to laugh, but then he flung his head back and kind of, like, howled instead.