Antisocial

by Jillian Blake

  Unless, of course, you kill it, like I did.

  Rad’s dark-skinned like her father but has her mother’s blue eyes and big breasts. Maybe she’s not super hot by Insta standards, but she is by mine. Rad’s also the most boy-crazy person I know. Or rather, I guess I should say man crazy, since Rad considers high school boys only useful for random hookups.

  “Hey, Nik,” says Rad. “Lemme ask you a question. How many times has Anna texted you in the last three months?”

  When I start to open my open mouth, Rad flashes a palm at me like a stop sign.

  Nikki stares at the tabletop, her cheeks filling with blood. “Not a whole lot,” she says. She doesn’t say it cruelly. Just matter-of-factly.

  “I bet you can count the number of times on one hand and still have, like, a thumb and a couple fingers left over. And has she returned your calls? What’s the average return time we’re talking? A week? More?”

  Like I said, Nikki was confused when I abandoned her. Rad, on the other hand, was angry. She stopped texting me and ignored me in the hallway. I heard from a couple of people that she wouldn’t let anyone say my name around her.

  Forcing myself not to cry and/or puke, I look Rad in the eye. “I’m sorry.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard the expression Hos before bros?” Only Rad could pull off this question as seriously as I know she means it.

  “C’mon guys,” Jethro says. “Chill.”

  Haven chimes in. “You’ve all gotten caught up in dudes before.”

  Rad shakes her head. “Caught up? Or pathetically obsessed with a dude to the point of abandoning our best friends in our last year in high school together?”

  Haven stares at Rad, blinks. “That was a mouthful.”

  Rad is the editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Xandria. So yes, she has a way with words. Everyone (but me) sort of chuckles, and Rad’s face loosens up a little.

  Grateful for the pause, I try to take advantage. “Look, I heard your announcement about the Xandria this morning,” I start cautiously. “I was going to come to the meeting…if it’s okay with you.”

  Rad shrugs. “Not like I can stop you. It’s a free country.” She waits a beat and then adds, “Unfortunately.”

  “What’s unfortunate?” asks Andrew Yang, the last member of our group, as he slides in next to Jethro. A semi-jock, Andrew’s the least misfitty of all of us: he’s a lacrosse player; plus, his conservative Chinese parents don’t let him grow his hair long or wear jeans with holes or anything like that.

  Andrew lifts his thick eyebrows when he notices me. “Anna. You’re here.”

  Before I can confirm, Rad asks, “Why are you here? New Year’s resolution to spend time with the little people? Give back to those less hashtag blessed?”

  Is it conceivable she hasn’t heard? Having to spit the words out to anyone, let alone to Rad, is more than I can handle today. My head is starting to pound, and everything sounds slightly underwater.

  I manage a nod. “Palmer and I broke up.”

  Rad makes a snorting sound. “Yeah, we know, Benedict Arnold. We’re not on another planet. I just figured you would find another Insta to latch on to.”

  “You’re being kinda heartless,” Andrew says.

  She shoots him a look of death. “You ever want to see me naked again?”

  Andrew shakes his head. “Come on.”

  “What do you think?” Rad surveys the table. “Am I being heartless? Because, see, I think Anna was the heartless one. Now that Palmer Meade is all done with her, I’m supposed to be jumping with joy that she’s back? Give me a break.”

  I try to suck air in and find something, anything, to say back. “You’re right. I’ll just go. I’m sorry for messing up your lunch.”

  I get the words out, but the air isn’t coming back in like it’s supposed to. Something flutters in my chest. The beginning of a panic attack. Oh God, oh no, oh no, no, no. Not now. I take a breath, hold it in for three seconds, then let it out slowly as I stand up. New game plan: avoidance. I push my chair back.

  “No, Anna,” Jethro says. “Stay.”

  Now Haven raises his glass of chocolate milk to me as if it’s champagne. “I, for one, never look down on refurbished goods. Glad to have you back in the fold, babe.” He has this weird way of being obnoxious and making you feel special all at once. Either way, I appreciate his easy forgiveness.

  Rad glares at the guys. “I’m sorry, but I, for one, have had enough of her damsel-in-distress, wiggly-voice, panic routine.” With that, she marches out of the dining hall.

  Nikki glances at me, seems like she might say something. Like she might actually apologize for Rad’s brashness, something she’s been doing for as long as we’ve all known each other. Instead she picks up her tray and follows Rad out, making her loyalties clear. As I watch her go, I feel the prick of tears, the moisture pooling quickly in my eyes, so I open them wider and scrunch up my mouth to keep my chin from quivering Claire Danes–style. To make it worse, I can feel Jethro’s eyes on me, and I know if I look back at him, the tears will be unstoppable.

  But now I hear the soft sound of Jethro’s voice in my ear. “Know what would be better than this place?” he asks.

  He’s the only other person who knows about my coping strategy, and he’s giving me a lifeline. My mind races across the earth, searching, searching. Trying to find the perfect location. The other boys are talking among themselves, ignoring us for the moment. Or pretending to.

  I look up at him. His face is so close to mine.

  “Swimming with turtles in the Enchanted River,” I say finally. “It’s in the Philippines. They call it enchanted because the water looks like it was sprinkled with sapphire and jade. The indigenous people say it was done by fairies.”

  Jethro opens his lips, revealing the tiny, adorable gap between his two upper front teeth. “I was thinking more like a hike and some camping between the stone towers in the Tianzi Mountain Reserve in China. The clouds hang over you like cotton puffs. You can paint the landscape while I make dinner over a fire.”

  He taps the table twice with the flat of his hand, then heads off with a smile.

  You’ve probably figured me out by now: I’m that girl. The one who had friends she cared about, and who cared about her, for all of high school.

  Who then screwed it all up when she fell for a boy.

  Alexandria Prep—founded in 1904, motto Dare to Be True, known as Prep—has one of the best basketball teams in Virginia. The reason we’re so good? The boy I fell for: Palmer Meade. The star power forward. The MVP. How did a girl with SAD who spends her time in the art lab end up dating the captain of the team, you ask?

  Well, Palmer doesn’t talk about it much, but we have a lot more in common than you might think. Palmer sleeps in his uniform the night before every single game. I once witnessed him worry himself sick (I stood outside the bathroom door) when he brought the wrong socks to wear for a game. Like, literally vomiting. He sweats through his sheets the nights before games and keeps track of every other promising recruit that Duke—his school of choice—is watching. He has a binder. It’s intense.

  Has he ever been diagnosed or treated? Nope. He’s a star athlete. Guys like Palmer don’t have “anxiety issues.” They’re just “superstitious.” They have their rituals for success, and they might need a sports psychologist occasionally. But when you’re getting recruited by the best colleges in the country, no one wants to know more.

  So maybe Palmer liked that he and I could safely talk about his little “problem.” Or maybe we just had that inexplicable chemistry. Whatever it was, for all of first semester, we were inseparable. I fell hard for a boy who seemed way out of my league.

  Cliché, I know. But he was so sweet, so beautiful, so eager to learn about things he didn’t know about—including my art and all the Colombian fútbol I watch with my dad. Soon I was consumed by him, swallowed way up. I wanted to be wherever he was. So I started watching basketball. Going to all his games. H
aving dinner with his parents and eventually spending more and more time with his friends. Which meant I was spending less and less time with my friends.

  Including Jethro.

  “How long till eighth period is over?” Andrew asks, puncturing a pudding-cup top with his spoon.

  I snap back to attention. The cafeteria is emptying now. Everyone else at our table is gone. Andrew and I have been eating together, mostly in silence, for fifteen minutes.

  “Well, there’s about half an hour left in fifth,” I say, grateful that he’s talking to me. That someone is.

  “I need weed if I’m making it to eighth,” he says, sucking on a chocolaty spoon.

  I could use some drugs myself. I went off daily antidepressants six months ago. SAD people aren’t supposed to take them forever. Dr. Bechdel and I are focusing on therapy instead of my popping quick-fix Xanax, but right now I’d take anything.

  “Rad’ll get over it, by the way,” Andrew says. “Someday.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to lose hookup privileges on my account,” I tell him.

  “Please. Empty threats. You know that girl is horny as hell.”

  I do know that, and I’m about to respond when I notice there’s an odd murmur around the dining hall. Prep has a strict cell phone policy, but half the kids in the room have their faces six inches from their illuminated screens, eyes wide and darting back and forth and up and down as they read things aloud to their friends. I see the chem teacher, Mrs. Bodkins, and the dance teacher, Ms. Sozio, and the few other teachers unfortunate enough to be on lunch duty flitting around in vain, trying to get people to put them away.

  “What’s up?” I wonder aloud.

  Andrew’s watching the weirdness in a daze, but he drops his spoon and whips out his Galaxy, which sits inside a plastic case with a picture of Zedd on it. How anyone can listen to EDM as much as he does is beyond me. We push our trays aside and lean over the table, heads close, to look at the screen.

  According to the To: line, everyone at school has gotten the same email and attachment. Andrew opens the document, and at first I’m not sure what I’m seeing.

  It’s some kind of list…names and places and words and phrases and questions.

  Jennifer Lawrence

  itchy red bumps

  easier quadratic equation

  Jared Leto hair

  Adele

  nye party dc

  keke palmer sexuality

  suck stupid bitches

  how hang besides netflix and chill

  1D

  5SOS

  Forever 21 coupon codes

  Batman vs. Superman

  Demi Lovato

  girl from star wars

  birth control

  homeroom origin definition

  mixing medications

  best hangover cure fast

  how to get rid of puffy eyes

  caffeine pregnancy

  how to stop eating

  life is so boring

  husky puppies

  best way to pop a zit

  the Biebes

  STD symptoms

  fast easy hair

  do colleges stop looking grades

  second best ivy league

  essay on Dostoyevsky free

  give good head

  game of thrones season 6 free

  divorce mediation washington dc

  redskins playoffs

  calories in lettuce

  knockoff kate spade

  I hate school

  how much weed is felony

  first time anal

  The list is more than thirty pages long, so there must be hundreds or maybe thousands of terms. Andrew swipes the list up and down like he’s looking for something, or maybe he’s just as confused as I am, having a hard time taking it all in.

  “Whoa,” Andrew says. “Weird.”

  I’m slow on the uptake, apparently, because I suddenly hear everyone else around me saying what Andrew quietly confirms: “It’s searches. Like, Google searches.”

  “Whose?”

  Andrew shrugs. “I mean. They look like things kids here’d search, don’t they?”

  Commotion is spreading across the dining hall. And laughter, so much laughter. A couple of people shout out search terms from one table to another, as if to say, Was that you?

  I grab Andrew’s phone.

  Midway through the list, I see searches that look horrifyingly familiar.

  how to fix a friend breakup

  avoid rebounding with a close friend

  I nod, swallow hard. There, smack in the middle of the list, are my very own, very private, very embarrassing searches from around nine-fifteen this morning, when I was hiding between classes in the Dwight Library bathroom, thinking about facing Rad and Nikki again, and—maybe most of all—preparing myself to see Jethro.

  J and I spent so much of last summer together, when I needed him most. Without him I never would’ve gotten to the relatively healthy place that I’m in now (I know, I know, I still have mucho work to do). But then, just after Jethro helped me get back on my feet, Palmer happened. Palmer and I shared a bond through our anxiety, but he’d never seen me at my worst—I could let the past be past. With Jethro that’s never been possible. He’s seen too much.

  My vision bends around the words like they’re a fish-eye camera lens, and my breath comes in little wheezing puffs that don’t quite make it all the way to my lungs.

  “What’s up?” Andrew asks me.

  “Nothing,” I say. “These are just freaky. Someone recorded all these?”

  “Someone,” he says with a half smile.

  Suddenly we hear a shriek from the Instas’ table, and all eyes turn toward them. “Knockoff Kate Spade? Knockoff? I ask for one thing for my birthday, Joe, and you wanna get me a knockoff?” Maggie DeMarco, a junior on the spirit squad, is practically standing on her seat, shouting at Joe Tyler, a senior lacrosse player, who looks like he’s shrinking with each shrill word. “Do you know how much that watch I got you for Christmas cost? Do you?”

  “Who do you think did it?” I whisper to Andrew as we take in the scene.

  “Haven.” He gives me a shrug, like, Who else?

  I stare back at the list as more commotion erupts around us.

  Whoever it was, they’re not making my long, painful climb back up the friendship ladder any easier.

  We’re allowed to use our phones at school only when there’s an alert or update sent through the Prep scheduling-and-course app, so on a normal day, kids are usually ducking into bathroom stalls to see what snaps or texts or DMs or messenger alerts they’ve missed. But on my way to class, I pass seniors standing in front of their lockers, brazenly scrolling through the list on their phones and looking down the hall wild-eyed, starting rumors and trying to figure out who typed what. After four years, we seniors have learned to check and hide our devices like David Blaine working a deck of cards.

  Around every corner I turn, I hear Haven being talked about:

  “…prolly can see what’s on all our phones.”

  “…hacked into the Department of Defense,” one guy says.

  “Someone needs to lock Haven Dodd in nerd jail,” the junior whose locker is under mine is saying.

  “That’s not a thing…,” I murmur.

  “ ’Scuse me?”

  “Nothing.” I slam my locker and hurry to class.

  Did Haven actually do this one? He didn’t seem particularly jumpy at lunch, but there’s been plenty of hacking at school this year, and Haven and his fellow hacktivists are usually guilty somehow. Jethro’s the only one who doesn’t get involved—he’s too worried about losing his place at MIT.

  For the most part, what Haven does is funny. Most recently: right before Thanksgiving, during the Prep Spirit segment at assembly, he superimposed a photo of a turkey head on Vanessa Eubanks’s face and distorted the audio so that she sounded like a kidnapper calling for ransom on one of those crime shows. Usually I can’t stand ass
emblies, but I must’ve burned a hundred calories laughing at turkey-Vanessa.

  A few randoms look in my direction as I head into the life-sciences wing. I focus harder on the floor in front of my feet. Someone must have matched me to my searches already. Oh God. I can’t decide which one is more humiliating: how to fix a friend breakup or avoid rebounding with a close friend.

  Ugh, couldn’t I have waited until I got home?

  Even if no one’s pinned the searches on me yet, what’ll happen after school, when everyone has a chance to really study the list? Then again, at least the Knock List—as it’s already been named—seems to have pushed my breakup off the top ten most gossip-worthy things that have happened recently.

  Environmental science passes in a blur—some smeary, colorful, sideways-moving activity: a student doing something with a soil sample and a petri dish, another student doing something with a pipette and a microscope, a teacher’s voice wah-wah-wahing in the background, markers squeaking across the whiteboard.

  And by eighth period I still haven’t run into Palmer.

  Here’s to small mercies.

  The one thing that will truly make me breathe easy is being in the art lab. I need to work on my senior project, anyway—and painting helps me unwind, even more than Xanax. As I hightail it through the senior lounge, avoiding eye contact with my peers, I can’t help but notice Nikki standing in a small circle with Mattie Eizenberg and some of his Insta-crossover friends.

  “I hate this place….Prep is dead to me,” Mattie’s mimicking with his slight Southern lilt. “Think how pathetic it is…people just typing in random shit they feel. It’s like Google is their therapist!”

  Some of the girls around him laugh, even though it’s not that funny. Mattie’s striking white-blond hair, which he always keeps up in a perfect man bun, combined with his flair for the stage make him a natural for the lead role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the spring play. He spends a lot of time in tights for the role, but he’s not gay. Au contraire. He’s a Thesbo, yes, but he’s good-looking enough that even some of the Insta girls sometimes vie for his attention.