“The mirror in my bathroom needs to be replaced,” I stated.
“Oh?” Mags touched her neck. Her gaze dropped to the bandagesI’d wrapped around my left hand. “What happened?”
“My fist had an impromptu meeting with the mirror. Seven years bad luck. Or was it seventeen? I can never remember. Não, obrigado,” I said, waving off Beatriz’s sack lunch. I patted my flask in my coat pocket. “I’m on a liquid diet. Ciao.”
I left without looking at Beatriz’s soft, confused gaze, or else I’d crumble. I couldn’t look at any of them with their eager, hopeful, “Let’s be a family” expressions.
They didn’t save me then. They can’t save me now.
Outside, I reached for my flask. The first taste burned some of the memory dream out of me. A second gulp, and I felt confident enough to talk to James without him suspecting I’d been on the verge of falling apart a few short moments ago.
“Mr. Parish,” he said, opening the back door of the sedan for me. “Are you ready, sir?”
“Do I have a choice?” I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Another day at the circus.”
***
My first class of the day was AP English. Ms. Watkins, a thin, mousy-looking woman with puffy brown hair and glasses, welcomed us in by reading a passage fromNakedby David Sedaris that had the class howling with laughter.
“For this unit,” Ms. Watkins said, “we will be studying the craft of memoir. You will be reading some of the great memoirists—Sedaris, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion—and we will be synthesizing the mechanics of writing with the particular art form of the autobiography.”
I sat up a little straighter.
Fine. So there’s one class I might actually survive without gouging out my eyes with a pencil from boredom.
“Your writing assignments will be a mix of essays on the writers we willbe studying, and you will have the chance to tell some of your own stories.” Ms. Watkins had a warm smile. “There is no such thing as an ordinary life.”
No matter how much we may want one.
After a promising start with English, it was downhill from there, with the classes being ungodly simple and pointless. I made it through the day without burning the school down—a minor victory. But as I approached my last class—AP Calculus—my stomach twisted with an unfamiliar sensation.
I amnotnervous over a guy. Not me. Not ever.
After all we’d been through together, I couldn’t allow my heart even the slightest injury. That it was still pumping was asking enough. But goddamn, the second I laid eyes on River Whitmore, my pulse kicked up a notch, and a little thrill zipped down my spine. Like a tiny reminder of what it meant to be alive.
I took the empty seat beside him again, keeping my bandaged hand in my coat pocket. He refused to talk to me or even look my way, yet I felt his attention on me, his tapping pencil and jouncing leg like Morse code that I was getting under his skin.
I behaved myself for forty-five torturous minutes, basking in River’s nearness. His scent. A woodsy cologne underscored by eau de gasoline. The combination was a potent, heady mixture that gave me inappropriate thoughts.
More than usual.
Do one good thing. Just one. And maybe the nightmares will leave you alone.
I tossed a small, perfectly geometrically folded piece of paper onto River’s desk.
“What the hell is this?” he whispered.
“Pop quiz,” I said. “Do you like me? Check yes or no.”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Relax. It’s my phone number.”
River did not, in fact, relax. His eyes widened, and an actual blush crept up his muscled neck.
“What the hell for?” he demanded, though his voice soundedthicker than it had a moment before.
“In case you need tutoring. Say your grades start slipping and you’re in danger of being cut from the team. You call the hot new guy to help you ace the test, just in time for the big game.”
