Jamie's eyes were unfocused as he gazed at me. He remained silent and seemed to be barely even breathing, trapped in an internal tug-of-war between apology and argument.

  “Nothing,” he said in a singular breath.

  “Bullshit,” I spat back.

  The people at the back of the line began shouting at us to move forward. The cafeteria could have approached me with pitchforks and torches, and I wouldn’t have moved an inch. Jamie, on the other hand, shifted his eyes nervously toward the hollering students.

  “Why don’t you just stay out of my business for once?”

  I stumbled back as if shot. “Wow, only one morning of hanging out with garbage, and you’re already acting like trash.”

  The muscles of Jamie’s jaw twitched as he sucked in a breath. “You do realize the people you call ‘garbage’ are my neighbors, right?”

  “Don’t give me the ‘poor me’ speech. You’re better than that, and you know it.”

  Jamie charged forward, his body now closing the gap between us. The air hung thick with an unspoken fury that also flashed in his black eyes. There was nobody in this world I felt safer with than Jamie, but in that moment, it was as if the person I knew and the person staring back at me were separate entities, two halves of the same whole, but this half was darker and scarier than the one I thought I knew.

  “You’re not my girlfriend. Stop acting like it.” His demand struck me like a slap across my cheek.

  And that’s when I felt it. Hot, sticky liquid traveled down my cheeks, likely accompanied by dripping mascara. I knew it was probably in my head, but it felt like the whole cafeteria had paused its thunderous conversations and turned into the most humiliating moment of my life.

  My attempt to breathe felt futile, the air replaced by an emptiness that clawed at my insides. The silence was deafening, and every effort to articulate a response felt like grappling with an invisible force.

  So, in a heated second, I decided that words were not going to be my weapon of choice in this battle. With trembling fingers, I pushed him backward … I didn’t even remember doing it. One second, my cheeks were painted with tears, and the next, my palms were firmly thrusting against Jamie’s chest.

  He tumbled backward, colliding with Lucas behind him. The domino effect rippled through the helpless line of students. A cascade of bodies and trays crashed to the floor, creating a cacophony of clattering dishes and startled shouts. The once orderly line morphed into a messy scene of tangled limbs and scattered lunches.

  A lump of guilt formed in my throat as I looked down at the pile of bodies: Jamie sprawled across Lucas, who was half-crushed on top of Kayla. All three of them were stacked like a human sandwich, and judging by the groan she let out, they were definitely going to need to check that poor girl for a concussion.

  Jamie glanced back at me with a mix of hurt and embarrassment. As he pushed himself off the ground, a shadow suddenly loomed over us: Mr. Johnson, his expression as dry as a stale biscuit.

  “What in the world is going on here?” Mr. Johnson demanded, his voice cutting through the chaos.

  I had made it through half the day without receiving a threatening glare from a teacher. I believed I deserved some credit …

  I tilted my head toward Jamie. “Nothing, sir; Jamie just slipped and collided with Lucas.”

  There was a four-second pause where I could see the wheels turning in Mr. Johnson’s brain, likely contemplating whether he wanted to waste his time dealing with our teenage drama. “I think the two of you could benefit from some time at the counselor’s office. Why don’t you follow me there now?”

  Jamie rolled his eyes at me as if somehow all of it was my fault. Okay, maybe fifty percent of it is, but I do not take credit for the full one hundred.

  As we rounded the corner and headed towards the lunchroom doors, my rebellious backpack snagged the side of a passing table. My heart sank as my backpack made an unpleasant ripping sound. My mind was racing with disbelief. Why me? Why today? I took a deep breath and slowly turned my head to assess the damage. A chaotic dance of paper covered the floor tiles as my pencils bounced on their erasers across the cafeteria. My notebooks sprawled open and slid in all directions, but that wasn’t the worst part: Jamie’s cursed water bottle fell to the floor. The lid must not have been screwed on properly because the vodka inside soaked all my belongings, filling the air with the scent of impending doom.

  Mr. Johnson’s lips parted, his eyebrows furrowed, and his chest heaved. Before he could utter a word, I swiftly raised my hand in the air, cutting him off mid-sentence.

  “Principal’s office, yeah, I know.”

  I didn’t say a single word during the walk down to the offices. Jamie and I sat in two rusty metal chairs, waiting for the principal to expel us, no doubt. Sometimes, there were simply no words. There were no letters that could equal the thoughts that rattled and ricocheted through my mind like a pinball machine. And no sentences that could express the ache that burned in my chest after my best friend practically poured acid on my heart. Instead of wasting worthless verbs and adjectives and screaming at Jamie for being an inconsiderate ass, I just sat there, silent and still.

  I fused my eyes to the door, my pulse matching the ticking of the clock as the seconds passed with the speed of a snail on morphine.

  Fumbling with the buttons of my calculator, I juggled all my belongings, clutched in my arms. There were forty teachers and faculty members in the area. Yet, not a single one offered me a garbage bag to help manage the mess of my scattered belongings after the zipper on my backpack was broken by a loose nail on the cafeteria table. Jamie attempted to help by gathering as many of my notebooks and textbooks as possible from the lunchroom floor, but they had turned into a soggy mess of alcohol-soaked cardboard and paper.

  There was a faint sound of flipping pages that prompted me to flick my head towards Jamie. That journal stealer is reading my diary!

  “Give that back to me!” My anger escaped in a sharp scream that quickly became a whisper as I noticed the receptionist’s hostile gaze fixated on us from behind her plastic IKEA desk.

  Jamie wiggled his thick eyebrows at me with an evil little grin. “You should thank me for picking it up off the floor before a stranger found it and learned all your dirty little secrets.”

  “First of all, I don’t write my secrets in there, and second, my journal wouldn’t have been on the floor if you hadn’t pissed me off!” I hissed.

  Jamie continued flipping through the pages of my journal as if it were a treasure map to a lost fortune. “Oh, you absolutely have a few secrets in here …”

  His eyes creased inward as they passed by sentences meant to be private. “You know, these little poem things you write aren’t half bad. Maybe you should become a writer after high school.”

  I snatched my journal back from Jamie’s grasp. “They’re just dumb words on paper. Nothing I can do anything with.” I lowered my head to my lap and chewed on my lip.

  A long, drawn-out breath exhaled from Jamie’s lungs as he drifted his eyes to the ceiling, “At least you have something you’re good at.”

  “You’re fourteen, not fifty. You don’t have to figure that out yet.” I was still furious at Jamie, but I wasn’t going to let him talk that way, even if I wanted to hit him with a frying pan.

  Jamie placed his head against the cold center block wall behind him. “Then why does it feel like everybody else has?”

  “Because we’re friends with Lucas and Kayla and they’re superhuman freaks who make the rest of us normal folk look dumb in comparison.”

  “I think we both know there’s nothing normal about you.”

  I snorted out a chuckle. Jamie’s smile liquified my icy glare like a hot August day melting a popsicle.

  “I knew I’d get a smile out of you.” He turned to face my flushed cheeks. The ends of his black hair rested over his eye as he stared at me with a half-apology and half-flirtation. “So, you don’t hate me?”

  “No,” I confessed begrudgingly. “But I don’t understand what’s going on with you right now.” I shifted my body closer to his. “You don’t talk to me anymore.”

  He shrugged me off. “I talk to you.”

  “Not like you used to, not about important stuff.”

  Jamie’s eyes left mine and moved to his palm, his fingers picking at his nails. He always avoided eye contact when he didn’t want to talk about something, like maybe if he couldn’t see me, then possibly I couldn’t see him.

  “What happened with you today? You’ve always said hanging out with the Donahue brothers was like signing your prison sentence. And I mean, sure, we’ve snuck beer from your dad’s fridge before, but you broke into my parents’ liquor cabinet without even talking to me about it.”

  Jamie still wouldn’t look at me. “I just really didn’t want to deal with today.”

  “I know school’s not your thing—”

  “Not my thing?” His hot breath scoffed. He pulled back, and he narrowed his black eyes like a Jaguar preparing to strike. “You think I don’t like school because it’s ‘not my thing?’” His glare shot to mine. “I can’t do the work, Alex! And it’s not about concentrating harder or studying more. No matter what I do, I just don’t get it. Words swirl around the page like a cyclone, numbers collide like two trucks on a highway, and nothing I do ever straightens them out!”

  “So, instead of asking for help, you thought it’d be better to get shitfaced?”

  “I’d rather be the drunk kid than the dumb kid.”

  I finally understood all the irrational stuff he had done over the summer, every fight he got into, every night he spent passing out on my floor, and every troubling rumor he’d been part of over the months. Jamie wasn’t being reckless for the fun of it; he was building a persona, a mask that could hide what he thought were failures.

  Jamie was never able to shake that first day of high school. It followed him around like a somber shadow. And as the rumor of Jamie’s day with the Donahues infected the school like a perilous plague, the tighter Jamie’s mask became. From that day on, he spent half his time with us and half his time with them—split between two worlds.

  If you wear a mask long enough, it becomes a part of your face.

  Chapter eleven

  It’s easy to forgive,

  It’s impossible to forget.

  10:20 p.m.

  Images of Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews twirling in tiaras and ball gowns flashed across the screen, slapping my retinas like some royal fever dream. Lucas, Kayla, and I were sprawled out in the living room watching the first Princess Diaries—because isn’t watching a movie what everybody does after an emotional breakdown after five years of not speaking to each other?

  “I can't believe you two talked me into watching this,” Lucas complained from the couch in front of the TV.

  I lifted my head off the ground, which I had draped with various pillows and blankets. “Hey, it’s your fault for not convincing Mom and Dad to get Netflix.” My parents had an aversion to technology and refused to convert their DVD collection to anything stored on a server.

  I staggered to the TV and bent down to the console, which held a vast collection of movies and VHS tapes. My parents also had not upgraded half of their collection from its original publication format.

  “No!” Lucas bellowed with a cry, “I beg you, don’t make me watch the next one.” He flipped his head to Kayla, trying to appeal to the more reasonable one of us.

  Kayla pouted at him. “But the next movie has Prince Nicholas! His witty banter with Mia launched an entire generation of girls’ unhealthy obsession with enemies-to-lovers!”

  Lucas crooked his head back at her. “Is that supposed to be your sales pitch?” He turned back to me. “Come on, Alex. There has to be something else we can do.”

  “Well, your hair isn’t long enough to braid, so I don’t know.” I shrugged, only to be met with a stern glare. “Dude, it’s 11:30 p.m. in Nowheresville, Massachusetts. The only thing open is the movie theater, which reeks of thirty-year-old burnt butter.”

  Kayla stretched her arms in the air and let out a deep yawn before placing her palms on the armchair’s edge. “We could play truth or dare...”

  “No!” I bellowed.

  “Why not?” Kayla protested. “Not like we have anything else to do, and if I have to sit through any more awkward silences, I’m going to start painting Lucas’s nails like we used to do.”

  Lucas leaped up from the couch and crossed his big arms over his puffed-out chest. “That was one time.”

  The corner of Kayla’s mouth rose with way too much joy. “Three times, actually. I vividly remember a purple, pink, and red incident.”

  “It was green, not red. And I second Alex. Last time you made me play truth or dare, I ended up naked in Lovers’ Lake, floating on an inflatable yellow duck wearing sunglasses.”

  Kayla pushed herself off the armchair and matched Lucas’s stance; fighting was foreplay to those two. “First of all, that was the best night of your life.” She poked him in the bicep, driving her point forward while simultaneously making me gag as I was forced to watch yet another rerun episode of their flirtation. “And second, I only dared you to take your shirt off. You were the one who went to second base butt naked with a duck.”

  Lucas stepped forward, no doubt close enough for Kayla to feel his breath on her cheeks. “After you dared me to shoot seven shots of tequila off your stomach!”

  Kayla slid her teeth along her lip. “You didn’t exactly complain about it at the moment, did you?”

  “No … I mean … I …” Lucas stumbled over words.

  Kayla padded the edge of Lucas’s shoulder. “That’s what I thought, big guy.”

  I leaped from the floor to interrupt the scene before me. “I still think it’s hilarious that a six-foot-four giant can’t hold his liquor.”

  Lucas gasped as he looked back at me. “Excuse me, but I was an athlete. I didn’t pollute my body with toxins like you two alchys and stoners.”

  “Hey, watch your facts.” Kayla shifted her weight to her back foot. “I was simply a social delight at parties, who occasionally indulged in a few margaritas. Alex and Jamie were the stoners.”

  Okay, so that was technically true ... but I was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of being right. “Hey, don’t bring me into this. Jamie was a stoner; I merely took advantage of the stash he hid in my bedroom.”

  Kayla’s face lit up with a blanket of mischief that sent a shiver of caution down my legs. I swear, between her and Jamie, I’m not sure how we lived past high school. That look meant a plan, and not just any plan, a Kayla plan, which typically involved breaking the law and waking up dressed in somebody else’s clothes in the middle of a park.

  Lucas jabbed his finger at Kayla like a parent scolding a child. “Stop that.”

  “What?” Kayla questioned back with a knowing grin.

  “That look! Stop with that look!”

  “I don’t have a look.” She chuckled through her protest.

  “Yes, you do! Your cheeks rise, and your eyes lower. You look like Harley Quinn plotting revenge against the Joker.”

  I raised my judging eye at my dork of a brother. “Wow, you can take the boy out of the comic store, but you can’t take the comic store out of the boy.”

  A scowl painted Lucas’s face, giving me just enough satisfaction to smile back.

  Kayla flipped her head towards me. “Where exactly did Jamie hide his stash?”

  “In the clubhouse, why—” Ohhhh, now I get it … “I’m on it!” I ran up the stairs; Kayla followed close behind, with a whining Lucas next to her.

  “My clothes are staying on this time!” he notified Kayla as we entered my bedroom.

  “We’ll see about that.” She winked.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Gross, dude, that’s my brother.”

  I crouched to the ground before the clubhouse’s tiny door, dragging my knees forward into the cove of forgotten friends and lost loves. I stopped once I heard the familiar echo of the high-pitched squeak from beneath my leg. I plunged my fingernails into the curves where the two pieces of dingy wood met, then pushed them up until the wood popped freely off the ground. I stabbed my fingers into the dark hole beneath and fumbled my nails over the surface below. About an inch towards the right, my index finger brushed against the corner of something with a distinct crinkling sound.

  “Bingo.” I snatched the bag out of the hole and shuffled my way back out of the tiny room, cracking my neck back and forth as I stood. “Damn, I don’t remember my bones making so many crunching noises coming in and out of that thing.”

  Lucas leaned against my desk, his weight making the wood yelp. “Why are you holding a Cheeto bag?”

  I placed both of my thumbs on the inside of the bag and opened it dramatically. “Because inside this five-year-old sack of preservatives and orange food coloring is the cure to our night’s boredom.”

  “There’s no way that stuff is safe.” His face twisted with a cross of disgust and trepidation.

  Kayla rolled her eyes at Lucas. “It’s weed, Grandma, not meth.”

  He angled his body toward Kayla’s. “It’s a five-year-old joint that’s been kept in a Cheeto bag under musty floorboards since senior year.”

  I hopped on my bed, landing with my legs firmly crisscrossed underneath. “Still not seeing the problem?”

  “You do realize we are adults now? Not rebellious teenagers.”

  I hacked out a laugh before my brain could devise a witty comeback. “You were never a rebellious teenager. You were an unwilling accomplice to our idiocy but never a rebel.”

  I reached my hand into the Cheeto bag, orange dust leaving a residue on my fingertips as I pulled out the horribly rolled joint. “Okay, Boy Scout, toss me the lighter I know you keep in your back pocket.”

  The heel of Lucas’s shoe dug into the wood beneath as he placed all his weight on his back leg and crossed his big arms. “I don’t have a lighter.”

  “Yes, you do.” I jabbed my voice back. “You haven’t left home without a lighter, pocketknife, and a matchbox since you were thirteen.”

 

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