by Erin Stewart
“I’m fine!” she screams. “Leave me alone!”
He lifts her anyway, placing her back in her chair. Kenzie steps toward her, but Asad wedges himself between them, pushing Kenzie back by her shoulders.
“Get off me!” she yells at the same moment her boyfriend’s fist lands on Asad’s chin, sending him reeling backward. Asad stands in the middle of the room, rubbing his face, the confusion in his eyes quickly changing to anger as he charges back toward the boy, fists swinging.
I swear the football boy laughs as he half throws, half pushes Asad off him, sending him slightly airborne across the room, directly into the card table holding the drink coolers. I watch him spiral toward them—and me—like I’m watching a slow-motion movie scene where each person’s head turns, mouth agape, as the moment of impact nears.
You just know it ends badly.
Asad’s body hits the table, tipping it and the coolers over. They fall, liquid sloshing, then flying in freeze-framed droplets through the air.
Toward me.
29
The cold is immediate and everywhere, soaking through my shirt, splattering my mask.
Worse than the cold are their eyes.
All of them.
Staring at me as punch drips in front of my face.
I rip off my mask to wipe away the liquid seeping into my eyes. Asad scrambles to his feet.
“Ava, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
I choke back the tears. “I want to go home.”
Piper tugs me by my hand away from the flurry of whispers and raised cell phones into a bathroom with monogrammed towels and potpourri. She flips the toilet lid down for me to sit while she runs my mask under the sink, red punch spiraling down the drain along with white paint and fantasies of a normal night.
“If you want to go, we’ll go. But let me fix you up before you make up your mind.” She dabs at my face with a moistened wad of toilet paper. I push her hand away.
“I can’t keep getting caught between you and Kenzie,” I say. “You have to tell me what happened. Were you really supposed to be driving?”
Piper doesn’t meet my eyes. She drops her hands to her lap.
“Yes, okay? I was the designated driver. I should have been sober. I should have been the one behind the wheel. All of this”—she points to her wheelchair and then to her burned neck—“it’s all my fault. I did this.”
The door swings open and Asad inches his way into the bathroom, which is already tight quarters with Piper’s wheelchair.
“Everybody okay in here?”
I nod. “Yeah, just trying to figure out how this night unraveled into a total disaster.”
Asad clicks the door shut behind him and I can’t help but notice his knee pressed up against mine.
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a total disaster.”
“Oh really?” I say. “Name one part that wasn’t an epic fail—and I warn you that if you say the part where you attempted to dance, I’m calling BS.”
Asad raises his eyebrows and puts his fists up like he’s about to hit a punching bag. He swings a right hook into the air.
“What about the part where I took a jab at that football Neanderthal?”
“You mean when he walloped you?” Piper says.
“I got in a few good blows.”
“I didn’t need you to fight for me.”
Asad lowers his fists, deflated. “I thought I was fighting with you.”
I point to the juice stains bleeding into my white shirt, already drying with deep purple rings. “And I came out on the losing end of a battle with a cooler.” I grab the toilet paper Piper twists in her hands. “She can’t treat us this way because you were supposed to be driving or because I’m your friend now. She’s the one who sabotaged your friendship in the first place.”
Asad interrupts us. “That’s not exact—”
Piper cuts him off. “She blames me. I blame her. Vicious cycle of hate that ends in Ava getting punch-doused at her first party. End scene.”
“I don’t care whose fault everything was,” I say. “This is not right.”
“And what are you going to do?” She stares at me, daring me to reply. “I saw you in there, camouflaging into the wall like usual.”
“Maybe we should just go home,” Asad offers. “Cool off. I can drive.”
“Fine,” Piper says. She wheels toward the front door, but I don’t follow. She’s right. I did nothing. Like always.
I tell Asad to get Piper in the car and I’ll be right behind him.
Then I turn my sights on Kenzie.
She sits atop her puppy-dog boyfriend’s lap, the Wicked tickets next to her on the couch. Her eyeliner kitty whiskers streak down her face, and tears smudge her black-tipped nose onto her cheek.
“If you’re here to tell me this is my fault, keep walking,” she says. “I’m getting pretty tired of Piper’s blame-everything-on-Kenzie game.” When I don’t say anything, she keeps going. “You know, I felt sorry for you when you first got here. I really did. But it’s like you want me to hate you. You’re trying to upstage me in the play, you steal my friend and then come to my home with her just to…what? Flaunt it in my face? I’m sorry your life sucks, but could you please stop trying to ruin mine?”
For a half second, I almost feel bad for her. She must be buried alive in guilt for the crash, and she’d do anything to shovel some of it on Piper.
She sniffles and stares at me, waiting for me to say something.
“What? No curtains nearby to drop on my head this time?” she says, sucking away my temporary sympathy.
I want to say something witty to sting her back. I want to tell her she can’t treat Piper like a castoff and me like a leper. But with everyone’s eyes on me, my words dry up in my throat.
Without thinking, I grab the tickets off the couch and run from the room. I don’t stop until I’m out the front door, down the gravel driveway, and slamming the door behind me in the back seat of Asad’s car.
“Go, go, go!” I shout, hitting the back of his seat.
Asad hits the gas as Kenzie barrels out of the house, red-faced.
“What did you do?” Piper stares at me from the front seat.
I hold up the tickets.
“Something wicked.”
* * *
My heart races for at least ten blocks, slowing only when the McMansions give way to carports. Piper’s laugh fills the car and wafts out the window with the night air.
“Ava! Who knew you had such big cajones hidden under those compression garments,” she says.
Asad grimaces. “That’s a visual I could live without.”
Piper’s hand floats outside her window, soaring like the girl in her “Phoenix in a Flame” anthem, which she cranks to max volume, the synthesized piano beat filling the car.
We stop for Froyo rather than go home and explain to our parents why our big night out ended at nine-thirty. I unload the wheelchair from the trunk and hold it steady while Asad scoops Piper from the front seat, placing her in the wheelchair so tenderly that I want to tell him to stop. Stop being so nice. Stop being so cute. Stop being so cluelessly endearing with your dorky dance moves.
Stop making me feel.
Inside Froyo Heaven, Asad fills a half dozen tiny paper cups with yogurt samples while Piper loads up on nothing but gummy worms. Adrenaline still pumps through my veins, making my skin buzz with energy instead of itch.
A woman taps me on the shoulder.
“Excuse me?” She yanks a redheaded boy up next to her by his arm. “I’m sorry to put you on the spot, but my son has an unhealthy fondness of playing with matches, and we’ve tried everything we can think of to teach him how dangerous it is.”
The boy twists his arm, trying to free his wrist from his mother’s grip. She holds tight
.
“Maybe you can get through to him.”
Piper pushes me out of the way, a half-masticated gummy worm hanging from her mouth.
“Are you for real, lady?”
The woman looks down at Piper in surprise.
“Well, I just thought—”
“You just thought my friend was a walking public service announcement to help your dumb pyro kid?”
I put my hand on Piper’s shoulder.
“It’s okay.” I squat down slightly so I’m face to face with the boy, my second wicked idea tonight coalescing in my head. “Do you see these scars?”
The boy nods.
“Do you know how I got them?”
He shakes his fiery hair.
“I have a rare condition called vegetitis,” I say, trying not to glance up at his mother because I know I’ll stop if I do. “My mom made me eat all the veggies on my plate, and I told her they made me sick, but she made me eat them and my skin just changed.”
I turn the side of my face so he can see my scars better. The boy’s eyes widen as he turns to his mother.
“Veggies make me sick, too!” he yells.
His mother snaps him from me, her face crinkled in a scowl. “You should know better.”
I stand as I cut off her rant. “So should you.”
The lady huffs away with her child straggling behind her. Asad laughs behind his yogurt bowl, and Piper gapes at me.
“Seriously. Who are you? Is this the old Ava we’ve all heard so little about?”
I swirl Oreo frozen yogurt into my cup.
“I’m not sure who this is exactly,” I say. All I know is somewhere between the punch and busybody ladies using me for life lessons for their bratty kids, I cracked.
I’m tired of being the Burned Girl.
30
Piper texts me Sunday night to remind me about Color Day, a Crossroads High tradition to promote school spirit and good old-fashioned Viking solidarity.
Don’t forget your class T-shirt tomorrow. The last thing you want to be right now is tribeless
Why? You think Kenzie will still be mad?
You bested the queen of the theater in front of everyone. This is NOT over
Riiiight…and she’s the drama queen here?
Trust me. Yellow shirt. Balls-out attitude from last night. Bring both
Monday morning, I walk to my locker in my chick-yellow shirt and matching bandana to declare my undying allegiance to the junior class. As far as I can tell, Color Day is much like any other costume-centered high school event—an excuse for girls to wear less and boys to act like toddlers. My suspicions on this matter are immediately confirmed as Piper and I venture down Senior Hall, passing a variety of girls dressed in red cheerleader booty shorts, some with red tights, others with red-and-white thigh-high socks. Many of them have devil’s horns and red-hued hair, while several boys with completely red faces spray Silly String everywhere.
I’m beginning to think half of teenagerdom at Crossroads High involves pretending to be someone else.
“Seniors only,” a bedeviled girl says, blocking our path. She shrinks when she sees beyond our yellow shirts to my face and Piper’s wheelchair.
“Oh, sorry. You’re fine.” She bites her upper lip and turns back to her huddle of sexy devils.
Piper pumps her fist into the air. “Disability bonus!” she shouts above the noise in the hallway. “Score!”
“I thought today was all about school unity,” I say as we navigate through the sea of red, narrowly dodging a squirt of red ketchup flying toward a wayward freshman.
“Different kind of unity,” Piper says before going into her math class. “You dress like everyone in your class, swear a blood oath, and then mercilessly persecute anyone who looks different. It’s the Viking way.”
Before I get to earth science, Sage scurries up to me, her books clasped tight against her chest and her eyes blinking rapidly.
“Kenzie’s out for blood,” she says. “Your blood.”
I try to act unfazed.
“So what? She’s going to ghost me like she did Piper? We weren’t that close anyway.”
Sage tilts her head to the side like she’s trying to figure me out.
“Kenzie didn’t ghost Piper,” she says. “Piper cut her off. When we went to visit her in the hospital, she wouldn’t see us.”
I stare at her. “Wait, what?”
“Acted like we died in the crash. Kenzie took it the worst, obviously, because she thought Piper blamed her. Now they’re both too busy blaming each other to ever back down.”
Her voice trails off just as Kenzie turns the corner toward us. I brace myself for a showdown right here in the middle of the science corridor. Shouting match? Hair pulling? Girls don’t actually throw punches, do they?
I force my spine a little straighter as Kenzie nears, feigning a fraction of the boldness I felt Saturday night. My hand balls into a fist, my fingernails digging into my palm.
Kenzie looks past me.
“Sage.” She says her name flatly, like she’s summoning a schnauzer. Sage heels, crinkling her eyebrows together to show me she has no choice but to follow.
I hurry to class, jumping at the sound of slamming lockers and checking over my shoulder. When Asad slaps me on the back, I almost leap out of my skin.
“Whoa, settle down there, killer,” he says, helping me steady the tray of mealworms.
I write our daily worm report, describing the dry, discarded skin because Magical Mr. Mistoffelees and Macavity are molting again. What if I could crawl out of my skin, shed it behind me like these disgusterous guys like it’s no big deal?
Do they even realize the incredible gift of starting over?
Wearing the same-color T-shirt suddenly makes everyone completely focus-impaired, but Mr. Bernard makes a good effort to use our color identification system as an object lesson for biological survival.
“As humans, we form communities based on similar attributes. Your shirts show to which community you belong,” he says. “For every species on the planet, finding this community is not a luxury; it’s an essential element of survival.”
His object lesson disintegrates when he makes the mistake of involving Kenzie’s jockface boyfriend as an example, since he is the only red in a sea of yellows. Either way, he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s the loner in Mr. Bernard’s analogy and takes the opportunity to stand on one of the lab tables, shouting, “Seniors rule!”
Asad leans close to me. He smells like vanilla and coconuts, which is a decidedly feminine aroma, probably from his mother’s or his sister’s shampoo, and somehow the idea that he uses their products makes him even more adorable.
I force myself to look at the squiggling mealworms to get my mind off the idea of him in the shower. Rum Tum Tugger, the smallest of the bunch, has already scrunched himself into a little alien-like ball. I mark “pupa stage” on our observation sheet.
“Okay, so here’s the skinny from the drama grapevine,” Asad says. The fluorescent lights illuminate a deep bruise running purple along his jaw and fading yellow into his cheek. “First, my social capital is through the roof. My fight has catapulted me to the top of the stage-crew social ladder, which is admittedly about three rungs high, but still, I’m like a drama-geek hero. Tony even high-fived me in the hallway this morning.” Asad beams at me, leaning closer. I try not to inhale. “Oh, and second, Kenzie wants you gone.”
“I know. My existence offends her.”
Asad shakes his head and explains he doesn’t mean in some existential way. She’s started a petition to remove me from the play because I’m not a “team player.”
That’s why she ignored me this morning. She’s got bigger plans than a little hair pulling in the hallway.
“Ugh,�
�� I groan. “I’d rather just get this over with by slapping each other around a bit and calling it good.”
“Is that an option?” Asad says. “That’s definitely something I’d like to see.”
“Perv.”
He holds his hands up guiltily. “What? What red-blooded American boy can pass up a girl fight?”
I hide my smile by pretending to search for something in my backpack.
“Don’t worry, Ava,” he says. “A lot of people are on your side.”
“I have a side?”
“Oh yeah, I haven’t seen the drama club so divided since the great orchestra/a cappella debacle of freshman year. A lot of people believe you should have won those tickets and you have every right to stay.”
The thought of the cast and crew deciding whether I stay or go twists my stomach. I’ve only been here two months. If people are picking sides, who will pick mine?
I get through the morning, still expecting a Kenzie attack every time I cross her path. When a food fight breaks out between the ketchup-throwing seniors and the mustard-wielding juniors at lunch, I’m sure she’ll condiment-slosh me from behind.
But she doesn’t. She keeps her distance, and by the end of the day, I figure this petition is the worst Kenzie has in store.
Asad meets me at my locker so I don’t have to face drama alone today, and Piper joins us because she doesn’t feel like going to volleyball. Between Asad and Piper in the hall, I feel stronger. Like everything’s going to be okay because no matter who is on my “side,” I can count on these two people by my side.
I’ve just about convinced myself that I should walk right up to Kenzie and tell her to take her little petition and shove it, when Asad stops in front of the auditorium doors, staring down at the phone in his hands. His face drains.
“What?” I say, grabbing for his phone. He tries to snatch it back, but I flip it around before he can.
My face fills his screen.