Not that you spent all seven hours actually working. There wasn’t actually seven hours’ worth of work. Most of it wasn’t that hard. Even the history worksheet wasn’t hard, you just wanted to ask Farshid what he put down for question ten.
When you finished your work, Ms. Anderson let you pick a book from the small shelf in the corner, but all the books were old and beaten up and written before you were born, not new ones like Mr. Clemens keeps on one wall of his classroom, crisp new paperbacks with the spines still unbroken and the pages clean and unfolded. Not to mention they were all written this century.
Still, you picked up a book about some rich kid finding ways to still have problems at boarding school. It was so boring you skimmed ahead and found out this guy basically shoved his friend out of a tree, and then the friend died. So what are you supposed to take away from that, anyway?
You already felt like crap, and the book just made you feel crappier.
“You good?” Brody snaps you out of it. He’s standing next to you, squinting in the sunlight. After all that time in the windowless ISS room, it’s way too bright.
“I’m good.” You are. ISS sucks, but making a new friend kind of makes up for that. “Thanks.”
“Sure, bro. I gotta catch the bus. See you tomorrow?” He holds out a hand; you clasp and go for a bro hug. He claps you once on the shoulder and gives you a grin.
“See you.” You watch him go, picking at the cuticle on your left middle finger, which is doing that annoying thing where it sticks up. Normally you’d take the bus—or ride home with Marshall, if he doesn’t have practice after school—but today you have to wait for your dad to pick you up. He and Mom are convinced you’d try to get around your grounding if you took the bus. What do they think you’d do? Get off at the wrong stop? Go egg a house?
You spot Cooper coming out of the side door by the science wing, and you wave at him, but he doesn’t see you. You scan the line, but there’s still no sign of your dad, so you jog over.
“Hey! Coop!”
He finally looks your way.
“Oh. Hey.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” You shrug. Your backpack smacks your lower back. “You?”
“Not much.” He bites his lip and looks around you, past you.
“How was Sephora? Find anything good?”
“A couple things.”
You wait for him to say more, but he’s still not looking at you.
“Everything all right?” you ask.
When he finally does look at you, there’s something in his eyes that makes your stomach do a backflip.
“You really have to ask?”
He sounds angry.
Heisangry.
At you.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask. “I told you I couldn’t make it—”
“It’s not about you being grounded and missing Sephora,my dude,” Cooper says, but when he saysmy dudeit’s more sarcastic than ironic. “It’s about why you were grounded.”
“Come on, man, you know I didn’t mean anything by it. I wasn’t thinking, and Reggie bet me twenty bucks, and—”
“You don’t use a word like that without meaning it,” Cooper says. “That’s messed up.”
Your jaw is clenching up. Youdidn’tmean it.
You didn’t!
“It was just a joke.” How many times do you have to explain yourself? Like no one’s ever told a bad joke before. “I’m sorry.”
