The honking continues. The SUV’s driver sticks an arm out the window and motions me to follow them onto a residential street, so I do.
I fumble with my seat belt, coffee dripping down my chest and pooling in my lap. The driver stalks toward the back of his car, and the knot of dread in my stomach tightens.
I rear-ended the boy who dumped me a week before prom.
“I am so sorry,” I say as I stumble out of my car, and then, because I didn’t recognize it: “Um. Did you get a new car?”
Spencer Sugiyama scowls at me. “Last week.”
I inspect Spencer inspecting the damage. With longish black hair obscuring half his face, he kneels next to his car, which is barely scratched. Mine has a mangled front bumper and a bent license plate. It’s a used Honda Accord, gray and completely uninteresting, with an odd interior smell I’ve never been able to get rid of. But it’s mine, paid for in full with my Two Birds One Scone money last summer.
“What the hell, Rowan?” Spencer, a second-chair clarinetist I partnered with on a history project earlier this year, used to look at me like I had all the answers. Like he was awed by me. Now his dark eyes seem filled with a mix of frustration—and relief, maybe, that we’re no longer together. It gives me a surge of pleasure that he never got first chair. (And oh yes, he tried.)
“You think I did this on purpose?” Needless to say, the breakup was not a cordial one. “You stopped really abruptly!”
“It’s a four-way stop! Why were you going so fast?”
Obviously, I don’t mention Delilah. It’s possible the accident was mostly my fault.
Spencer wasn’t my first relationship, but he was my longest. I had a couple one-week boyfriends freshman and sophomore year, the kind of relationships that end over text because you’re too awkward to make eye contact at school. At the end of junior year, I dated Luke Barrows, a tennis player who could make anyone laugh and liked partying a little too much. I thought I loved him, but I think what I really loved was how I felt around him: fun and wild and beautiful, a girl who liked five-paragraph essays and also fooling around in the back seat of a car. By the time school started in the fall, we’d broken up. He wanted to focus on tennis, and I was glad to have the extra time to spend on my college apps. We still say hi when we see each other in the halls.
Spencer, though—Spencer was complicated. I wanted him to be my perfect high school boyfriend, the guy I’d one day reminisce about with my friends over cocktails with scandalous names. I dreamed of that boyfriend all through middle school, assuming I’d get to high school and he’d be sitting behind me in English, tapping my shoulder and shyly asking to borrow a pen.
I was running out of time to find that boyfriend, and I thought if we spent enough time together, Spencer and I could get to that point. But he acted withdrawn, and it made me clingy. If I liked who I was with Luke, I hated who I was with Spencer. I hated feeling so insecure. The obvious solution was break up with him, but I hung on, hoping things would change.
Spencer pulls his insurance card out of his wallet. “We’re supposed to swap info, right?”
I vaguely remember that from driver’s ed. “Right. Yeah.”
It wasn’t always terrible with Spencer. The first time we had sex, he held me for so long afterward, convinced me I was a precious, special thing. “Maybe we can still be friends,” he said when he broke up with me. A coward’s breakup. He wanted to get rid of me, but he didn’t want me to be mad at him. He did it at school, right before a student council meeting. Said he didn’t want to start college with a girlfriend. “Spencer and I just broke up,” I told McNair before we called the meeting to order. “So if you could not be vile to me for the next forty minutes, I would appreciate it.”
I’m not sure what I expected—that he’d congratulate Spencer? Tell me I deserved it? But his features softened into an expression I hadn’t ever seen and couldn’t name. “Okay,” he said. “I—I’m sorry.”
The apology sounded so foreign in his voice, but we started the meeting before I could linger on it.
“I really did hope we could stay friends,” Spencer says after we take photos of each other’s insurance cards.
“We are on Facebook.”
He rolls his eyes. “Not what I meant.”
“What does that even mean, though?” I lean against my car, wondering if now I’ll finally get closure. “Are we going to text each other our college class schedules? See a movie together when we’re home on break?”
A pause. “Probably not,” he admits.
So that’s a no on closure.
“We should get to school,” Spencer says when I’m silent a beat too long. “We’re already late, but they probably won’t care on the last day.”
Late. I don’t even want to think about the McMessages waiting for me on my phone.
I give a little wave of my insurance card before tucking it back into my wallet. “I guess your people will call my people. Or whatever.”
He speeds off before I can start my engine. My parents don’t need to know about this yet, not while they’re on deadline. Still shaky—from the impact or the conversation, I’m not sure—I try to relax my shoulders. There really is a lot of tension there.
If I were in a romance novel, I’d have gotten into a fender bender with the cute guy who owns a bar and also works part-time in construction, the kind of guy who’s good with his hands. Most of the heroes in romance novels are good with their hands.
I convinced myself if I just waited long enough with Spencer, he would turn into that guy and what we had would turn into love. While I love romance, I’ve never believed in the concept of soul mates, which has always seemed a little like men’s rights activism: not a real thing. Love isn’t immediate or automatic; it takes effort and time and patience.
The truth of it was that I’d probably never have the kind of luck with love the women who live in fictional seaside towns do. But sometimes I get this strange feeling, an ache not for something I miss, but for something I’ve never known.
* * *
It starts raining again as I approach Westview High School because Seattle. Homeroom’s already started, and I’ll admit, my vanity is stronger than my need to be on time. I’m already late. A few more minutes won’t matter.
When I reach the bathroom and get a clear view of myself in the mirror, I nearly gasp. The stain fully covers one and a half boobs. I run some soap and water on my dress, scrubbing at it with all the strength I can muster, but after five minutes, the stain is still very brown and all I’ve accomplished is groping myself in the first-floor bathroom.
It’s not my perfect last-day outfit anymore, but it’s all I have. I blot at the dampness with a paper towel so it looks a little less like I’m lactating and adjust my sweater so it hides the stain as best as possible. I mess with my bangs, finger-combing them to the right and then to the left. I can never decide whether to grow them out or keep them short. Right now they skim my eyebrows, just long enough for me to fidget with. Maybe I’ll trim them for college, try a Bettie Page kind of look.
I’m almost done fidgeting when something catches my eye behind me in the mirror: a red poster with block letters.
HOWL
JUNE 12
NOON
GRAND PRIZE TBA
Another thing that slipped my mind in the morning rush. Howl is a Westview High tradition for graduating seniors. It’s a game that’s part Assassin, part scavenger hunt. Players chase each other down while trying to decipher riddles that lead them all over Seattle. The first to complete the clues wins a cash prize. It’s put on by the student council juniors every year as a send-off to that year’s graduates, and last year McNair and I nearly murdered each other trying to organize it. Of course I’ll play, but I can’t think about it until after the assembly.
As I exit the bathroom, Ms. Grable, my sophomore and junior English teacher, hurries out of the teachers’ lounge across the hall.
“Rowan!” she says, eyes lighting up. �
�I can’t believe you’re leaving us!”
Ms. Grable, who must only be in her late twenties, ensured our reading list was majority women and authors of color. I loved her.
“All good things must come to an end,” I say. “Even high school.”
She laughs. “You are maybe one of five students of mine who’s ever felt that way. I shouldn’t tell you this, but”—she leans in, cups a conspiratorial hand over her mouth—“you and Neil were my favorite students.”
That is when my heart plummets to my toes. At Westview, I’ve always been packaged with McNair. We are never not mentioned in the same breath, Rowan versus Neil and Neil versus Rowan, year after year after year. I’ve observed everything from terror to sheer joy pass over a teacher’s face at the beginning of the year upon realizing they have both of us in their class. Most find our rivalry entertaining, pitting us against each other in debates and partnering us on projects. Part of the reason I want valedictorian so badly is that I want to end high school as myself, not half of a warring pair.
I force myself to smile at Ms. Grable. “Thanks.”
“You’re going to Emerson, right?” she asks, and I nod. “Your essays were always so insightful. Planning to follow in your parents’ footsteps?”
How difficult would it be to say yes?
While of course I’m worried about how people respond to romance novels, there’s another fear that pulls my shoulders into a shrug when people ask what I want to be when I grow up. As long as being a writer is a dream that stays in my head, I don’t have to face the reality of potentially not being good enough. In my head, I’m my only critic. Out there, everyone is.
As soon as I declare myself a writer, there will be expectations that come with being Ilana and Jared’s daughter. And if I somehow fail to meet them, if I’m messy and imperfect and still learning, the judgment would be harsher than if my parents were podiatrists or chefs or statisticians. Telling people means I think I might be okay at this—be good at this—and while I desperately want that to be true, I’m terrified of the possibility that I’m not.
At least no one expects me to know my major yet, so while I picked Emerson largely because of its great creative writing program, I’ve been telling people “I’m not sure yet” when they ask what I’m going to study. I never expected to want to follow in my parents’ footsteps, but here I am, dreaming of running a finger along my name on a cover. Ideally in a glossy raised font.
“Maybe,” I concede at last, which feels like a half-confession, but I justify it with the fact that I won’t see Ms. Grable again after graduation. For someone who loves words, I’m occasionally not great at speaking them.
“If anyone could publish a book, it would be you! Unless Neil manages to beat you to it.”
“I should get to class,” I say as gently as I can.
“Of course, of course,” she says, and wraps me in a hug before heading down the hall.
Today is full of so many lasts, and maybe most important is that it’s the last day I can one-up McNair once and for all. As valedictorian, I’ll end our academic tug-of-war. I will be Rowan Luisa Roth, valedictorian of Westview High School, with a period at the end. No comma, no “and.” Just me.
My inner rule-follower guides me to the main office instead of homeroom. I’ll feel worse walking into class without a late pass, even on the last day. When I reach the office, I push open the door, square my shoulders—and come face-to-face with Neil McNair.
Rowan Roth versus Neil McNair: A Brief History
SEPTEMBER, FRESHMAN YEAR
The essay contest that started it all. It’s announced the first week of school to welcome us back from summer break. I am used to being the best writer in class. It’s who I’ve been all through middle school, the same way, I imagine, this skinny redhead with too many freckles has been at his school. First place, McNair and his beloved Fitzgerald, second place, Roth. I vow to beat him at whatever comes next.
NOVEMBER, FRESHMAN YEAR
The student council president visits homerooms to ask for volunteers for freshman-class rep. Leadership will look good on my future college apps, and I need scholarships, so I volunteer. So does McNair. I’m not sure if he actually wants it or if he just wants to further ruffle me. Nevertheless, I win by three votes.
FEBRUARY, SOPHOMORE YEAR
We are both forced to take gym for a physical education requirement, despite the hour we spend trying to convince the counselor we need the space in our schedules for our advanced classes instead. Neither of us can touch our toes, but McNair can do three pull-ups, while I can only do one and a half. His arms have no definition whatsoever, so I don’t understand how this is possible.
MAY, SOPHOMORE YEAR
McNair scores a perfect 1600 on the SAT, and I score a 1560. I retake it the next month and score 1520. I do not tell a soul.
JANUARY, JUNIOR YEAR
Our AP Chemistry teacher makes us lab partners. After a handful of arguments, chemical spills, and a (small) fire, which was maybe mostly my fault but I’ll carry that with me to the grave, he separates us.
JUNE, JUNIOR YEAR
In the election for student council president, the vote is sliced perfectly down the middle. Neither of us concedes. Reluctantly, we become copresidents.
APRIL, SENIOR YEAR
Before college acceptances start rolling in, I challenge him to see who can rack up the most yeses. McNair suggests we compare percentages instead. Assuming we’re both casting wide nets, I agree. I get into 7 of 10 schools I apply to. It’s only after all the deadlines have passed that I learn McNair, crafty and overconfident as he is, applied to just one school.
He gets in.
7:21 a.m.
“ROWAN ROTH,” MY worst nightmare says from behind the front desk. “I got you something.”
My heart rate spikes, the way it always does before a sparring match with McNair. I’d forgotten he’s an office assistant (aka Suck-Up 101—please, even I’m better than that) during homeroom. I’d been hoping to keep him confined to my phone until the assembly.
With his hands clasped in front of him, he looks like an evil king sitting on a throne made from the bones of his enemies. His auburn hair is damp from a morning shower, or maybe from the rain, and as predicted, he’s in one of his assembly-day suits: black jacket, white shirt, blue patterned tie with the crispest, tightest knot I’ve ever seen. Still, I manage to spot his flaws right away: his pants a half-inch too short, his sleeves a half-inch too long. A fingerprint smudge on the left lens of his glasses, one stubborn piece of hair behind his ear that won’t lie flat.
His face, though—his face is the worst part, his lips bent in a smirk he perfected after winning that ninth-grade essay contest.
Before I can respond, he reaches inside his jacket pocket and tosses me a travel pack of Kleenex. Thank God I catch it, despite a serious lack of hand-eye coordination.
“You shouldn’t have,” I deadpan.
“Just looking out for my copresident on the last day of our term. What brings you to the office on this stormy morning?”
“You know why I’m here. Just give me a pass. Please.”
He furrows his brow. “What kind of pass, exactly, do you want?”
“You know what kind of pass.” When he shrugs, continuing to feign ignorance, I lower myself into a deep, dramatic bow. “O McNair, lord of the main office,” I say in a voice that oozes melodrama, intent on answering his question as obnoxiously as possible. If he’s going to turn this into a production, I’ll play along. After all, I only have a few more chances to mess with him. Might as well be ridiculous while I still can. “I humbly ask that you grant me one final request: a fucking late pass.”
He swivels his chair to grab a stack of green late slips from the desk drawer, moving at the pace of maple syrup on a thirty-degree day. Until I met McNair, I didn’t know patience could feel like a physical piece of me, something he stretches and twists whenever he has a chance.
“Was that your imp
ression of Princess Leia in the first twenty-five minutes of A New Hope, before she realized she wasn’t actually British?” he asks. When I give him a puzzled look, he clucks his tongue, like my not getting the reference pains him on a molecular level. “I keep forgetting my great vintage Star Wars lines are wasted on you, Artoo.”
Because of my alliterative name, he nicknamed me Artoo, after R2-D2, and while I’ve never seen the movies, I get that R2-D2 is some kind of robot. It’s clearly an insult, and his obsessive interest in the franchise has killed any desire I might have once had to watch it.
“Seems only fair when so many things are wasted on you,” I say. “Like my time. By all means, go as slow as humanly possible.”
Sabotage has been part of our rivalry nearly since the beginning, though it’s never been malicious. There was the time he left his thumb drive plugged into a library computer and I filled it with dubstep music, the time he spilled the cafeteria’s mystery chili on my extra-credit math assignment. And my personal favorite: the time I bribed the janitor with a signed set of my parents’ books for her kids in exchange for McNair’s locker combination. Watching him struggle with it after I changed it was priceless.
“Don’t test me. I can go much slower.” As though to prove it, he takes a full ten seconds to uncap a ballpoint pen. It’s a real performance, and it takes all my willpower not to dive across the desk and snatch it from him. “I guess this means no perfect attendance award,” he says as he writes my name.
Even his hands are dotted with freckles. Once when I was bored during a student council meeting, I tried to count every freckle on his face. The meeting ended when I hit one hundred, and I wasn’t even done counting.
“All I want is valedictorian,” I say, forcing what I hope is a sweet smile. “We both know the lesser awards don’t really mean anything. But it’ll be a nice consolation prize for you. You can put the certificate on your wall next to the dartboard with my face on it.”
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