“Are you sure you don’t want to stay home?” Mom tried instead, one last time. She wasn’t going to make me take those pills. That was my call. “Or go in a little late?”
“Nope, I’m good,” I told her, but regretted it the second Grace’s Subaru pulled up and I discoveredJamesbehind the wheel. It turned out Grace was sick.
James had been more of a dick than usual, so maybe he was concerned, but I doubted it was about his sister. Here and now in homeroom, I glanced over my shoulder to catch him texting from the back row. I was a terrible texter-on-the-sly, so I just kept my phone in my locker.Grace?I wondered.Maybe Isa?
Isa was also bizarrely absent today, and she and James were pretty close—close enough to be a long-standing musical duo. Last weekend’s family game night had wrapped up with one of our traditional talent shows and they’d gotten a standing ovation for their rendition of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
I’d tried not to stare at Grace while James played the piano and harmonized with Isa’s hypnotizing vocals.Ride?I’d texted her later that night, and she wrote back:Or die!
We’d been saying that to each other ever since our friendship had publicly ended freshman year. Three years to the day,actually. Because three years to the day, I’d horrifically broken up with the third point of our triangle, Isa Cruz. “It’s girl code,” I remembered Grace telling me. “I don’t want to lose you, Ev, but I do want to egg your house and call you a complete moron.” Tears slipped down her cheeks, and I resisted the urge to wipe them away. “How could you do that to Isa?”
I shifted in my seat, knees accidentally banging the bottom of my desk. I’d tried over the years to make up with Isa—I didn’t want to be her boyfriend again, but I did miss her as my best friend—but even if we were cornhole partners at a family cookout, she made sure I knew we weren’t partners in any other way, shape, or form.
I really wanted to try, though. Hopefully sometime she would let me back in.
Say the word, Isabel Cruz,I thought,and we’ll start a new Snapchat streak.
But as of now: Happy third anniversary to the day my life took a double-downward spiral!
With only ten minutes left in homeroom, I asked Mr.Goldberg for a hall pass under the guise of a bathroom break. I’d decided to retract my earlier “I’m good” statement and ask Mom if she’d mind telling a white lie to get me out of school. Did that make me a wimp? Maybe, but I didn’t care. I already knew I’d need to steel myself from shuddering in the Bronco.Dad,I’d think.Dad, Dad, Dad.
If I slept for several hours, I could pull it together in time to go see Abigail’s science fair presentation later. It was all about the wonders of beekeeping, and she’d worked so hard on it.
My locker was on my way to the restrooms, so I made a pit stop and input my combination before popping open the latch. I grabbed my phone and it lit up to show a few notifications, but the one I zeroed in on was a text from Grace.What’s the demon count?I imagined typing back to what I assumed would be herI’M HAVING AN EXORCISM!!!message.
But no, fifteen minutes ago, she’d written:Just go with it.
I rubbed my forehead, not really in the mood to play “Friendly or Flirty?” Messaging with Grace could be agonizing sometimes, because it required so much analysis on my end. If she was joking around, I was cool with joking around. But if she was flirting with me, I wanted to flirt with her for as long as I could. Was I delusional in thinking that she might like me the way I liked her? That, per one of Margot’s young adult romance books, we could be a friends-to-lovers scenario?
Text threads provided little to no context, so it was tough.
My valiant response was a question mark.
A gray bubble appeared:You’ll see.
You’ll see?I inwardly groaned.What does that mean?
I started tapping something back, but then heard a pair of heels in the hall. With Isa absent, it could only be a teacher. “Crap,” I muttered, shoving my phone into my pocket andslamming my locker shut. I needed to hurry back to homeroom. There was no time to set up and put a plan in motion with Mom, but now I thought that was for the best. I needed to stay busy, stay distracted, stay out of my head.
Because, god, I really didn’t want to think about my dad.
Chapter 5
James
Everett and I were the only ones from the Adler-Barbour-Cruz triumvirate that emerged from homeroom. “You didn’t mention Isa earlier,” Everett said. “Is she sick, too?”
I glanced over to see him walking with his hands in his pockets and looking at the floor every two seconds, like he didn’t want to risk making eye contact with anyone for too long.It’s a good thing you’re good at sports, bud,I thought. Being the soccer team’s star striker…and the swim team’s medley relay ringer…and the baseball team’s prime pitcher really did wonders for Everett’s popularity. Together he and Grace were the life of the party at family gatherings, but while my sister brought that energy to school, Everett was painfully shy unless he was surrounded by teammates.
Not that I was judging. Just observing.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “I haven’t heard from her.”
Isa still hadn’t responded to my text, and while part of me wanted to see her name pop up on my phone—to know that she was all right—the other didn’t. The last thing I wanted to read was an apology telling me that it was never going to actually happen between us. And yeah, that was rich coming from the guy who’d issued the ultimatum.
In any case, it’d be tough to send her another message. Principal Unger and her eagle-eyed staff had cracked down on phones this year; if you were caught using yours, it was confiscated and received a one-way ticket to Unger’s office, where it stayed until you picked it up after the sweet freedom bell rang. The line of students waiting to reclaim theirs usually stretched into the front lobby. Our teachers didn’t miss a beat.
“Gotcha,” Everett said before we diverged into different hallways. The four of us had the same homeroom, but our academic tracks didn’t overlap much. Isa, god love her, was the genius. With an AP-everything schedule, she never failed to top the high honors list that was posted every quarter. And Brown, of course. Isa had gotten intoBrown.She’d been trained like an Olympic athlete, preparing her entire life with authoritarian coaches—sorry, I mean “Mr. and Mrs.Cruz”—and tutors for each test. The Ivy League was her gold medal. I was proud of her but wished she could’ve won it without all the added stress and anxiety. “Go outside and open that new meditation app,” I remembered saying the night before the SATs when she was on the verge of having a panic attack.“Izzy, do a two-minute deep breathing exercise and then listen to me….”
