by Emily Lowry
“All snowflakes are unique, just like you.” Chase smiled. “Just a little reminder that you are amazing, just the way you are. You don’t need to pretend to be anything else to anybody. Ever.”
It was perfect. And Chase was right.
Over the past few months I had learned so much. I didn’t need to be perfect, or prove myself to everyone. The only person who I needed to be was me. Chase had helped show me that. Gone were my uncomfortable office clothes that I wore just for people to take me seriously. I enjoyed dressing more casually and feeling cute in what I wore when Chase and I were faking it. So much so that Izzy, Katie and I had gone on a huge shopping trip to pick out clothes I liked. Clothes that made me feel good exactly the way I was. No more playing a part.
Also gone was my incessant need to achieve, replaced by a desire to do things I actually liked. Payton had quit the Pinnacle last week, too embarrassed to cover sports anymore after what she had done to the quarterback.
I still wanted to go to NYU, but I started researching other journalism programs as options for me. I wanted to make sure I picked the course that worked for my hopes and dreams — and not my mother’s.
I spoke to Nicholas about trying my hand at sports journalism after my suspension was lifted. It was a great way to try my hand at a new skill I enjoyed — gossip free! I loved going to football games. And I definitely loved a certain star quarterback.
After we opened gifts, Jordyn, Chase, and I headed to the Riverwalk where we met up with Dylan and Izzy.
We walked along the beautifully lit pathways, shivering in the cold as we went. Swirls of snow drifted lazily across the pathway.
Chase and I lagged behind.
The Monday after our first kiss, I arrived at Evermore wearing Chase’s football jacket. There was no need to make a big production of it. Abigail Murrow and Chase Jones were officially together.
It didn’t take long for someone to capture us on video, kissing in the parking lot. The kiss got so much attention on Click that the app went offline for fifteen minutes, but neither of us cared — we’d both deleted it. We were in this relationship together, and we would not let something like a stupid app get in our way.
We were in this together.
As I shivered my way along the Riverwalk, Chase put his arm around me and gently kissed the top of my head. “So, what do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“This.” He slipped a piece of paper into my hand.
51
Chase
I watched Abby unfold the piece of paper.
She laughed.
It was the checklist we’d created together, the pact outlining the rules for our “Strictly Business” fake relationship. It felt like forever ago, like something from another lifetime. And as for our relationship? It was real now. And, if I was being honest, it was real then, too.
She was all mine.
We agreed to tell no one. Why complicate things? That was one thing I loved about Abby — and there were a million of them. Even when things were complicated, she made them feel simple. Like there was always a right answer.
We walked over to a fire pit where a handful of kids were roasting marshmallows.
Abby crumpled the checklist and tossed it in the fire. “That’s what I think of that agreement!”
Our eyes met.
“I love you, Abigail Murrow.”
She smiled. “I love you too, Chase Jones.”
I pulled her close and kissed her.
She’d never admit it, but she was perfect.
Trey Carter is My Rebel Boyfriend
Rumors and Lies at Evermore High #2
1
Hailey
I pulled my coat tightly around my shoulders to keep out the freezing wind swirling through the quad of Evermore High. My eyes narrowed against the snow, my fingers and toes tingling, almost numb. But whatever cold I felt on the outside was nothing compared to the icy glare I was receiving from my boyfriend, Adam.
“We need to talk, she says.” Adam mumbled to himself sarcastically, shaking his head. His eyes were cold, predatory. A shark about to tear its way through a school of fish. “If we need to talk, we can do it right here. In front of everyone. I want to have lots of witnesses when you make the stupidest mistake of your life.”
“Adam, please, not here.” I weakly grabbed his wrist and tried to pull him through the quad, away to somewhere quieter, where fewer people were staring, waiting. I may as well have been pulling on a statue. He was the captain of the football team for a reason. There was no way I would move him if he didn’t want to be moved. But still, I did not want to be another one of those unfortunate souls who ended up with their break up splashed all over Click.
I’d been lucky with Click. So many of my friends had been victims, but for me, having dated Adam Zamos happily for most of my time at Evermore High, I had enjoyed the Click honor of being one half of Evermore’s often-featured “golden couple” — the football captain and the head cheerleader. A high school cliché at its very best, that today, would fall apart.
“What’s that?” Adam’s voice carried over the blizzard. Students who had been hurrying to get out of the storm now slowed their pace. They studied us, their hands slowly reaching into their pockets and pulling out their phones.
I wanted to scream at them. To tell them that no, I would not be more fodder for the school’s stupid gossip app. If they blasted our breakup through Click, I knew exactly what would happen. Everyone would see it. People would download it. Remix it. Add auto-tune. Graphics. Imagine the most emotional moment of your life captured for the world to see — friends, enemies, strangers.
I tried one last time. “Can we please go somewhere else and handle this like adults?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I had said the wrong thing. There was no creature more likely to lash out than a teenage boy with wounded pride.
Adam’s blue eyes glittered, hard and cold as ice. They were eyes I barely recognized. “What’s that, Hailey? We need to talk? What do we need to talk about?” He was shouting, purposefully trying to get as much attention as possible. And that’s when I realized: he didn’t care how this break up went, as long as he was on the winning side. And, just like any great competitor, he would do whatever it took to come out on the winning side.
That’s what this was to him. Another game to win.
If he didn’t care about the breakup, did that mean he didn’t care about the relationship?
About me?
Even if the answer killed me, I had to know.
“If you care about me, or cared about me, at all, ever, you’ll walk with me.” I kept my voice firm, though my heart was breaking. Had we been living a lie? “We’ll go somewhere private. Somewhere we can talk. Somewhere we can get closure.”
“Screw your closure,” Adam snapped.
So that was it. We would do this in the middle of the quad with dozens of phones pointed at us. Click was a fact of life at Evermore. Famously, a former student had used the app to manipulate and sabotage the football team’s quarterback, Chase Jones. The school, unable to trace the app, couldn’t do anything about it other than send out an email telling students that they should delete Click. Yeah, right. Not a chance of anyone doing that. The gossip, the rumors, they were just too good.
And now I would be the next topic.
“Is this really how you want to do this?” I asked. I was giving Adam every opportunity to prove me wrong, even though I knew that it wouldn’t do any good.
He swore and rolled his eyes. “Who cares?”
I shoved my hands into my pockets. I wanted to hide from Adam, to hide from the cameras watching our every movement. But I couldn’t. I’d finally get to be one of those lucky girls that would have actual footage of their heart breaking circulate through high school.
“Was I anything to you?” I asked. I knew how weak my words sounded. How desperate. Almost like a little child begging for reassurance. Any
thing — ANYTHING — to avoid being blasted on Click.
“You were the hottest cheerleader. Captain of the football team dates the hottest cheerleader.” He spoke as if he were stating a fact, his voice carrying all the emotion of a burned-out history teacher reciting World War dates.
Was that all I was to him? A hot cheerleader?
It lined up. I made the cheerleading squad in my first week of freshman year at Evermore. A week later, Adam asked me out. He was a sophomore, one of Evermore’s rising football stars, and I was fresh cheerleader meat. It only made sense. Fast forward two-and-a-half years, and here we were. I had lived my entire high school career in his shadow. Everything I was at Evermore was tied to him.
He must have seen the pain on my face, because he continued. However, this time, he kept his voice low — too low for any of the phones recording us to catch what he was saying. These words were just for me.
“That’s all you are, Hailey Danielson. A hot cheerleader. You don’t have enough gears upstairs to figure it out, so I’ll just tell you: there’s not a guy out there who cares about anything besides what you look like when you’re wearing your pretty little uniform. You want to think you’re special? You’re not. You’re just the cheerleader. Dating you is a checkbox. You’re a video game trophy, just in real life.”
I was too stunned to reply.
A wicked grin crept across his face, but before it grew too large, he pretended to cough into his glove. When he pulled his hand away, he was the picture of a heartbroken boy. The lie was so convincing that it amazed me he didn’t have false tears, too.
“I can’t believe I meant nothing to you, Hailey,” Adam shouted, his voice loud enough for Click. “I can’t believe all the things I did for you meant nothing. And now you’re dumping me because football’s over? No. Screw that. You’re not dumping me, I’m dumping YOU.”
He stood close to me and lowered his voice to barely above a whisper. His parting blow, meant for my ears only. “I would have dumped you before I left for college in a few months, anyway. So, thanks for the head start.”
And with that, he turned and stormed away.
The thousand eyes of Click fell on me, a crushing weight that drove my shoulders to the ground. I broke up with Adam because he never had time for me, never wanted to go on dates or do anything after school. But that’s not the story that would run rampant through the halls of Evermore High.
Truth was relative, and I was both victim and villain.
And so began the fall of the golden girl.
2
Trey
“Trey Carter, I say this with sincere love in my heart: You. Are. Insane.” DeAndre Davis sat in the passenger seat of my van, playing with a Bic lighter. He sparked it, blew out the flame. Sparked it again, blew out the flame again. “You won’t even make it through the front door. They got rules to keep guys like us out.”
“Not if we don’t follow ‘em,” I replied.
My van door creaked as it opened, then closed with a heavy thunk.
Leo Yang poked his head out the window. “Good luck, you’ll need it.”
We were parked in a small lot a few blocks from Main Street. I rapped my knuckles on the hood twice for good luck, then gave a one-finger salute to my friends inside. Yeah, the music producer had rules to keep people out. But those rules didn’t apply to me. Rules only worked if you followed them, and I found life a lot easier when you didn’t bother.
Mountain Cat Music was the premier (read: only) music label in Evermore. It existed inside a two-story brick building towards the edge of town. Colorful graffiti covered the walls. Every spring, Mountain Cat paid for their walls to be painted stark white. Then they invited local artists to tag the building again. It was the principle, they said, when the seniors inevitably got their pitchforks out. A way to encourage people in Evermore to make new art. They weren’t getting rid of graffiti; they were making a blank canvas for more.
Two vehicles were parked outside. A cherry-red Civic and a pickup truck painted to look like it also had graffiti on it. I made a note of the license plate on the Civic, then climbed the metal staircase to the second-floor entrance and pushed open the door.
A secretary — young girl, not much older than me — sat at an industrial-style desk. Gold hoops dangled from her ears and bubblegum pink lipstick was smeared on her lips. She stopped playing on her phone long enough to look at me, her expression oozing with the contempt you could only find from someone born into the right family. “And you are?”
“Triple D towing, ma’am,” I said. I was wearing blue coveralls with a yellow patch stitched over the heart. I hadn’t shaved in a few days and my hair was messy from being stuck under a hat. In short: I made for a believable tow truck driver. “Got a report from the PD about a stolen Civic that needed to be picked up. License P-R-N-1-6-9.”
She scoffed. According to the noise, I was the single dumbest person on the planet. “My car isn’t stolen.”
“You’re the owner?”
“Obviously.”
“Okay. Well, we’re gonna need to give it a tow to the impound. Big George has already hooked ‘er up to the truck, but being the nice guy that I am, figured I’d stop in here—”
“BIG WHO HAS DONE WHAT?” She shot to her feet, her black-lined eyes bulging. “WHERE’S MY CAR?”
I put my hands up, playing the apologetic idiot. “We got Big George about to—”
“MOVE.” She grabbed her jacket and charged past me, shoving the door open and stepping into the cold. She stopped when she saw that there was nothing in the parking lot. “Hey—”
I closed the door. Turned the deadbolt.
“Excuse me!” She banged on the door, her voice shrill.
“Sorry,” I said, “I got a meeting. Really important. That jacket looks warm, right? You’re good? You’re good. I’ll be five minutes. Or ten. Fifteen at the most. Maybe go get yourself a coffee or something.”
“LET ME IN YOU LITTLE A—”
Before she finished her sentence, I jogged through the reception area and shoved my way into the head honcho’s office.
The owner of Mountain Cat Music, Mick Howell, sat before me, looking entirely unsurprised at my abrupt entrance. Legend has it he was born nine months after the original Woodstock. If the legend was true or not, I didn’t know, but the hippie influence had never left Mick Howell’s life. His silver hair was pulled into a ponytail, and he wore a faded Grateful Dead tee. As I barged in, he was placing a stick of incense in a silver dragon and lighting it.
“Who’s the baby banging on my door? And what has he done with my secretary?”
“Think she went out for coffee,” I said innocently. “Name’s Trey Carter. Part of Stonewash Sunrise.”
“Never heard of ‘em.” Mick waved out the match and set it in an ashtray beside the incense burner. His face wrinkled like a worn map. His eyes narrowed when he looked at me, a shade of recognition coming into color. “Carter… Carter… wait, you Rayna Carter’s kid by any chance?”
“Yessir.”
He whistled through his teeth. “Voice like a waterfall in a forest, that one. She doing good?”
“We get by.”
Mick sat back in his chair like a mafia king appraising a petitioner. “So, what’s Rayna Carter’s boy want with me?”
“An opportunity.” I’d rehearsed this speech a thousand times. I set a USB drive on the desk. “Put Stonewash Sunrise in your studio and cut an album with us. We’ll blow you — and Evermore — away.”
“We got a thing on the website to submit through,” Mick said.
“Save yourself the bandwidth.” I slid the USB drive to him.
He plugged it into his laptop, opened our track, and pressed play. A guitar riff filled the small office, followed by the opening chords to our song, Winter Past. Mick closed his eyes and steepled his fingers as he listened to the music. When it was finished, he shut his laptop.
“Hmm.”
That’s it? Hmm? I waited for hi
m to continue, my heart beating nervously.
“You have anything out? What are your sales like? Spotify downloads? YouTube? Anything?”
Sales? None. Spotify downloads? Zero. YouTube? Nope. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “We were thinking this album would be our big premier. Give you the opportunity to showcase local talent. Homegrown.”
Mick cocked his head to the side, then burst out laughing. He slapped the desk as he laughed, tears welling in his eyes. “You’re giving me an opportunity? Kid, you come in here and ask to cut an album in my studio and you can’t even bring me an audience? You got moxie. But I can’t make money on moxie.”
My hopes faded. Originally, the plan was simple. Approach Mick and convince him to take a chance on local talent. Show him how good our music was. “But the song is good.”
“How’s the nice way to say this?” He tapped his incense stick and ash fell onto the dragon. “It’s perfunctory. It does what a song should do, but nothing more than that. Melody’s nice, instruments are tuned, but kid — you got no soul. No heartbeat. What’s it about? A girl?”
“I don’t write music about girls,” I said quickly. That was one rule I would never change.
“That’s your problem,” Mick said. “You don’t write music about anything; you just play your instrument and sing a few words. You got talent, kid, but until you got soul, I can’t give you anything. Can teach music, can’t teach soul.”
I pocketed my USB stick, deflated. My hopes had been riding heavily on this meeting, and now it was over. And I’d lost. “How do you get soul?”
“Comes from life,” Mick said. “Comes from playing in front of a crowd and seeing what they respond to. Music ain’t music until it has an audience. You know you have soul when a live audience falls in love with you.”
“Can I come back when—”
“No,” Mick said flatly. “You took your shot and I let you stay longer than you should’ve.”