“And what about us? Do we just stop?”
He looks at me, genuinely mystified, and says, “Stop what?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Never mind.”
I walk away before I can say anything else. I wanted him to be the jealous one. But now I’m the jealous one. The jealous and confused one.
I head to the library because I can’t think of anywhere else to go. I wish I knew where Katie was. I wish there was a way I could text Ryan and have him be as excited by that text as he’d be by one from Taylor.
Dave Hughes, a guy from the team, sees me walk into the library and waves me over. I wonder if he’s going to ask me about the party and the mansion, but it ends up he’s just being friendly. He asks me how my weekend was. I tell him it was fine. He clears off some of his stuff so I can sit down. I put my head down and try to sleep.
“Good ol’ Monday morning,” Dave says.
I nod on the desk.
“It’s gonna get better,” he tells me. Because that’s what people say.
I am already mapping out the rest of the day. Usually lunch would be the next significant part, because that would be the next time I’d see Ryan. But now I’m not sure. I’m thinking I should skip it. I wish Katie had the same lunch period as me. But I’m going to have to wait until sixth period to see her.
I hope she’ll have better news than I do.
6
Kate
When we were little kids, Lehna and I painted a mural in my garage. It’s a fairy-tale scene, a little too Disney for my taste now. There are towers and dragons and a multitude of girls with long hair. There’s a prince, but I swear the prince is really a girl in disguise. I’ve never seen such a delicate boy. In the sky, hovering over a castle, is my name. On the other side, over one of the dragons, is Lehna’s. It’s that simple. No and, no friends forever. Just this:
KATIE LEHNA
Right now—as I stand in front of my locker knowing that Lehna will show up at hers any second and that when she does we’ll have to either look at each other for the first time since I drove away or, even worse, not look at each other—I think of all the tiny details we painted. The rings on the fingers of the princesses. The scales on the bodies of the dragons. So many rays of the sun, and so many blades of grass, and so many tiny pairs of shoes that hover above the ground because we didn’t want the colors to mix or smudge.
I spent most of yesterday in the garage, staring at it. I had to move all these boxes and plastic bins away from the wall so that I had a clear view. My parents had no idea what I was doing. They kept walking past the open garage door and pretending not to look in, maybe hoping I’d taken on an epic task of organization, only to discover that I was sitting on a bin of Christmas decorations, staring at a wall.
I took a break for lunch. Ate a sandwich in the driveway in the sun.
At around three, my mom came in carrying her laptop.
“Aunt Gina just called. Your photo is on The Daily Dish! It’s not of you—don’t get too excited—but you’re in the background.”
She kept holding the laptop out, trying to show me, but there were so many boxes between us that eventually she just held up the computer and pointed. The screen was at the wrong angle. I couldn’t see anything, let alone myself.
I smiled.
“Cool,” I said.
And then I turned back to our mural, unsure of what I was hoping to find there.
And now, here is Lehna, spinning her combination next to me.
“You wanted to see me?” she asks, because just as we both know she has History next period and that tome necessitates a trip to her locker, we also know that I have Volleyball and need precisely nothing from mine.
I nod, but she isn’t looking.
“So what do you want to say?”
My mind is blank.
“Did you see me in The Daily Dish?” I ask, without meaning to.
She slams shut her locker and narrows her eyes at me.
“I mean, it doesn’t really matter. The picture wasn’t even supposed to be of me. I didn’t actually even see it; I just wondered…”
She looks past me, down the hall.
“I have to go. Class starts in, like, two seconds and I need to text Candace.”
“Candace!” I say. “So what happened? I can’t believe I forgot.”
“I can,” she says.
“Lehna,” I say. “Really. Can’t we just get over whatever this is? I want to hear about Candace.”
“I really have to go. I can tell you at lunch. Unless, of course, you’re going to be hanging out with your new best friend.”
“Mark isn’t in our lunch period,” I say, which I guess is the wrong response, because Lehna shakes her head and stomps down the hall with such finality that I don’t even consider going after her.
* * *
On my way to the gym I see Ryan leaving the teachers’ lounge, carrying a stack of literary magazines.
“Last issue of the year,” I say, catching a glimpse of the cover. I recognize the work of Elsa, a quiet girl in my AP Studio Art class who makes intricate collages.
“Oh wow,” Ryan says. “I’m no longer invisible.”
I laugh and continue walking, but he stops me.
“Hey, um, actually…”
And I know where he’s going to go with this, and I realize there was a scenario Mark and I didn’t plan for.
We know that we aren’t going to volunteer information about Saturday night unless Ryan and Lehna ask us directly. But we were assuming that Ryan would ask Mark, that Lehna would ask me. What do I do if the reverse happens? I am not good with quick decision making. I’m much better at obsessing for so long over a decision that the answer becomes irrelevant.