“Yep,” I said tightly.
“It’s such a relief, you dating such a nice boy,” my grandmother said.
The sentence hung there awkwardly as my grandfather pulled into the driveway.
I needed to correct them. I had to correct them.
“Actually, we’re not—” I began.
“We should have him over for dinner,” my grandfather said, cutting me off.
“That would be wonderful,” my grandmother said. “I can make my chicken pesto. Or maybe the porcini risotto. Sasha, find out if there’s anything he doesn’t eat.”
“I don’t know if he—” I began, trying to think up an excuse. But my mind was blank. All I could think was, He needs to talk. On the phone. “Eats mushrooms,” I finished lamely.
“Then it’s a good thing you’re texting him right now,” my grandmother said.
Ugh.
“Okay, I’ll ask,” I promised, desperate to escape the conversation.
And then I went up to my room and scrolled through Instagram as I waited, mindlessly liking photos without really looking at them. My stomach was churning. I hated not knowing what Cole wanted to talk about. Hated feeling tethered to my phone, waiting for it to ring.
When he finally called, he sounded sheepish, and embarrassed, and hungover, his voice crawling over gravel as he asked point-blank if I was going to tell anyone about what he’d done.
“You mean the topless pictures you took without my permission and refused to delete?” I said, not bothering to sugarcoat it.
“I messed up,” Cole admitted. “But I really wasn’t going to show them to anyone. I just, you know, thought it would be hot. To have some.”
“Well, you could have asked,” I said.
“I could?” he asked hopefully.
“I would have said no.”
“Bummer.” I could hear the smile in his voice. The way he didn’t quite understand that all wasn’t forgiven. “Not even if I sent you some first?”
“Cole,” I scolded. “I need you to take this seriously.”
“I am,” he insisted. “That’s why I called. Because I seriously need a favor.”
“Which is?”
“Can you maybe not tell your grandparents about this?” Cole asked. “Because I’d hate if it got back to my gran. She’s pretty Catholic.”
So that’s what this was about. Damage control. I was unspeakably disappointed all of a sudden. I’d expected—I don’t know. A real apology. A sense of awareness. Except of course not. Cole expected to get away with things—ordering drinks underage, having food delivered to campus, and now how he’d behaved toward me.
It wasn’t like I was so desperate to tell my grandparents that I’d taken my clothes off in a boy’s room. I could just picture Eleanor’s panic, her horror that I was my mom all over again when it came to boys and bad decisions. Her fear that she’d become a great-grandmother at sixty-five. Still. It would have been nice if Cole let me make that decision for myself.
“Um,” I said. “I guess I don’t have to say anything.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Okay, great. Glad that’s settled.”
There was this long pause, and I wondered why we were still on the phone, and then he asked, “Hey, since you’re here, you have Tanaka for AP Euro, right?”
“Right,” I said warily.
“Do you think he’s going to ask us about trade routes on the test?”
I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Waited until I was reasonably certain I wasn’t going to sound pissed before I answered, “Um, well, he was really cagey when this girl in my class asked, so we should probably go over them.”
“Hundred percent,” Cole said.
And then, before I could fully process the fact that we were talking about the AP Euro test, he hung up.
Chapter 18
I WAS WALKING TO SCHOOL ON Monday morning when I heard a horn blast behind me. I turned around, afraid that it was Cole.
It was Lily.
“Hey,” she said, rolling down her window. “Climb in.”
Adam waved merrily from the passenger seat, apologizing for his backpack as I climbed in. Everything felt different as I buckled my seat belt, like we were actually friends, instead of people who sat at the same lunch table, just pretending.
Lily barely even knew me, and still, she hadn’t hesitated before rolling up her sleeves and trying to fix what was wrong. That was more than I could say about anyone else.
I’d thoroughly stalked her on Instagram, going back far enough that I could see the break when she’d stopped hanging around with Cole’s crowd. When the pictures changed from group selfies with Whitney and Friya to beautifully photographed food and art museums and a Stranger Things Halloween costume with Adam and Ryland that was absurdly spot on.
But none of that prepared me for climbing into the safe, small world of her car without warning. She’d seemed impossibly distant for so long, someone I could only admire from afar, but now, she was within reach.
She had on her cat’s-eye sunglasses again, and a soft teddy bear jacket, the same kind I kept seeing on influencers.
“Cute jacket,” I said.
“I just got it,” Lily said.
“It’s horrible,” Adam said. “You look like my grandma’s toilet rug.”
“Your face looks like my grandma’s toilet rug,” Lily shot back.
“Subject-noun agreement,” Adam said gravely.
I shook my head, amused. They had grammatical rules about insults. It was too much.
Adam took a huge bite of a sugary pastry he was holding, and my stomach gurgled appreciatively. The car smelled amazing.
“Wow,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What is that?”
“Pineapple bun,” Lily said. “Want one?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
Adam passed me a little oval-shaped pastry in a cellophane bag. It was fluffy and sweet and buttery, with a sugary crumble on top.
I took a bite and almost moaned.
“So good,” I said. “Except I’m confused about the pineapple part.”
“They only look like pineapples,” Adam explained. “They taste like plain Danish.”
“Plainish,” Lily and I both said at the exact same time.
“Wow, you guys portmantied!” Adam grinned, delighted.
I ate another bite of the pastry. I’d never had anything like it.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“85 Degrees,” Lily and Adam said.
“It’s a Taiwanese bakery,” Lily explained. “They have sea salt iced coffee too. It’s amazing. We should go sometime.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to downplay how excited I was at the idea of Lily taking me to a Taiwanese bakery that put sea salt in their iced coffee.
Lily’s locker and homeroom were on the other side of campus, which explained why I never saw her. Adam and I started to walk toward our lockers, and Lily went the other way.
“Wait,” I called, and she turned around. “Can I have lunch with you today?”
Lily’s grin was a beautiful thing.
I glanced over at Friya’s empty seat in English, confused. Her Spanish class was next door, so she was always early.
And then she walked in holding hands with Nick. He was beaming, a beanie tugged low over his hair, the sleeves of his denim jacket pushed up. Friya was giggling and playing with her hair, and looking like she was fully aware everyone was watching them.
She slipped into her seat, flashing me a grin. Nick, who had followed her over, stared down at me.
“Sasha, right?” he said, like I hadn’t been in his English class for the past six weeks. Like I was a stranger whose identity he needed to verbally confirm to be sure.
“Yep,” I said.
“Listen, could you do me a solid and switch seats with me?” he asked.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Friya added, her expression pleading.
“No,” I said, my mouth dry. “I don’t mind.�
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I packed up my things, trying to remember where Nick sat. And then I did: he was next to Michelle. They were doing to me exactly what they’d done to her on the first day of class. I’d been so flattered when I was on the receiving end. But now I could see how horrible and selfish it was, the way they rearranged people as though we were objects on a shelf. As though this school, and everything in it, belonged to them.
I found Lily in the courtyard behind Humanities. There was literally no good reason I could think of to stick a fountain there, and yet someone had. It was disused, though, a giant empty bowl.
Lily was balancing on the edge, a container of snack bar sushi on her lap.
“It used to be filled with the blood of my enemies,” she joked, nodding at the fountain, “but for some reason, people found that off-putting.”
“Can’t imagine why,” I said, sitting down and taking out my turkey on wheat. “Can I vent for like one second about what just happened in English?”
“Go for it,” Lily said, picking apart a piece of ginger and dropping it into her puddle of soy.
I ranted about the seat change, and Lily rolled her eyes, agreeing that they’d been rude, and that she was sorry I had to sit next to Michelle Warner, who was a level-four bitch.
“I know,” I said miserably. “We’re in Mock Trial together.”
“That’s right,” Lily said. “I keep forgetting you do that. I don’t know how you can stand them.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“It’s weird, because two years ago the Mock Trial crowd was awesome,” Lily mused. “And then a bunch of people graduated, and Todd’s army of assholes took over, and everyone with a soul fled to debate.”
I’d seen the debate team around, mistaking them at first for the drama crowd, because they were so loud and quirky. They seemed nice.
I sighed, feeling sorry for myself.
“Okay, I have something that’ll cheer you up,” Lily said. “So we’re doing this unit on monuments in Paris. Les Invalides, Hotel De Ville, all that stuff?”
I nodded, impressed by her accent.
“And Mlle Dupont mentions how under the Arc de Triomphe is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And this girl Chloe raises her hand and says, ‘Okay, but wouldn’t they know who the soldier is?’”
Lily snorted with laughter before continuing, “We’re all staring at her, like ‘What are you talking about?’ And she explains, ‘Well, if all the other soldiers came home from war, or died or whatever, and there was one soldier missing, why wouldn’t they know who he is?’”
I burst out laughing.
“No!” I said, delighted.
“Yes!” Lily crowed. “And poor Mlle Dupont had to explain that ‘Unknown Soldier’ was actually a metaphor for the thousands of war dead.”
“What’s a metaphor for what now?” Ryland asked. He and Adam had come from the lunch line, and they both had wrap sandwiches and lemonade. “I heard, like, the last sentence of that story, so you’re gonna need to tell it again.”
Lily did, and it was even funnier the second time.
“I keep picturing Chloe—it was Chloe Machado, right?” Adam said, and Lily nodded. “I keep picturing her sitting there, staring at this picture of the Arc de Triomphe like, ‘OMG, how has no one figured out the name of the single soldier who was missing in action during World War I?’“
Ryland cackled.
“Dumb questions give me life,” he said. “I’m like a dumb questions vampire.”
“That metaphor doesn’t work,” Lily told him.
“Why not?” Ryland demanded, laughing.
“You’re literally going to make me explain it?” Lily tossed her crumpled chopstick wrapper at him.
It was so different sitting with them, watching them goof around and delight in being ridiculous. It felt relaxed. Comfortable. I bit into my sandwich, realizing that, for the first time, where I was sitting seemed to fit.
“Borderline acceptable use of literally,” Adam warned.
“Oh my god, don’t you have some academics to decathlon?” Lily asked, not very nicely.
“Don’t you have some art to club?” Adam shot back.
That was when I realized.
“Crap, I have Mock Trial after school today,” I said with a grimace.
“Ditch it,” Lily said. “Come to Art Club instead.”
“There’s going to be pizza,” Ryland said. “And no offense, but your lunch is making me sad.”
My perennial turkey on wheat sandwich was making me sad, too.
I could skip one Mock Trial meeting. It wasn’t like my grandparents would find out.
“Maybe,” I said.
“If you don’t, you’ll regret it,” Ryland said.
“Six out of ten dentists agree,” said Adam.
“It’s four out of five dentists,” Lily retorted.
“Fine, fourteen out of fifteen dentists agree,” said Adam.
Everyone glared at him.
“Stop breaking humor,” Lily complained.
Which is how I found myself staying after class for the Art Club meeting instead of walking down the hallway to Mock Trial, where I was supposed to be. Where for ninety hideous minutes I was supposed to stare at the clock to see how much longer I was going to have to stare at the clock.
I chatted with Ryland as everyone trickled in. Surprisingly, he was a closet YA novel enthusiast. Mostly, he was obsessed with graphic novels, but his particular arena of nerd also extended to books. We talked about our favorites, and I could see why he and Lily and Adam were friends. I hadn’t gotten it before, but I did now.
Mr. Saldana came into the room after the pizza arrived to see how we were doing.
“Sasha,” he said, spotting me. “What a nice surprise. What brings you to Art Club?”
“Lily convinced me,” I said.
“She’s a photographer,” Lily called from the other side of the room. “You should see her work!”
“I’d love to,” Mr. Saldana said.
“Um, maybe next time?” I felt terrible. Mr. Saldana thought I’d joined Art Club for real instead of just stopping by for the afternoon. And now he was expecting to see my photos, which would inevitably lead to the confession of how none of them were more recent than last April.
“It’s a deal,” Mr. Saldana said, grabbing a slice of pizza.
“Great,” I said weakly.
“‘Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe,’” he continued. “Susan Sontag. She wrote a wonderful little essay on photography. I think I have a copy, actually. . . .”
He turned around, rummaging one-handed through his bookshelf, before pulling out a slim volume. He gave it to me, insisting I take it home and read it.
“I have a hunch you’ll really get something from this,” he said.
“Thank you.” I stared down at the little book.
“It’s not a how-to manual,” he warned. “It’s more about the ethics of seeing the world through a camera lens. What we have a responsibility to capture, and how we use our power to capture those things.”
“With great power comes great responsibility,” I joked.
“Yeahhhh Spiderman!” Ryland called.
Mr. Saldana laughed.
“Exactly,” he said. “And the added responsibility of returning that book. I don’t charge library fees, but I take overdue fines out of your class grade.”
With that warning, he took a bite of his pizza and headed off.
After he left, Lily put on a documentary about this painter Chuck Close, who was face blind, but had become a famous portrait artist anyway. He broke faces down into little squares, using painting to see what was obvious to everyone else.
It was a smaller group than I’d thought, just six of us. Mabel wasn’t around, even though I’d seen her in the hallway between classes, and when I asked Ryland about it after the documentary, he shrugged and was like, “It’s callbacks for the fall pl
ay.”
He sounded sad over it, and when I asked, he said, “If she gets a decent role, she won’t be around as much.”
“You have to stop moping about that and say something,” Lily told him, joining us.
“Did you want to audition?” I asked Ryland, confused.
They both laughed.
“God no,” Ryland said.
“He has a crush,” Lily put in. “On Maaaaaabel Choiiiii.” Ryland swatted at her, and she grinned in his face. “But he’s just waiting for the universe to deliver happiness instead of going after it himself.”
“I’m waiting for the right moment,” Ryland returned.
“If you do that, you’ll miss your shot,” Lily warned. “Because there’s no such thing as the right moment.”
Lily’s eyes met mine for just a moment, as though she wasn’t just saying it for Ryland’s benefit. I frowned, confused at what she meant, but she had already looked away, and I wondered if I’d imagined the entire thing.
Chapter 19
FROM THAT DAY ON, I SAT with Lily at lunch. It was so natural, so seamless a transition, that it seemed things had always been that way. Of course we were friends, of course we had lunch together, laughing at Adam and Ryland’s quips and rolling our eyes over their puns. Of course we teased Ryland when Mabel stopped by and he lost his cool, especially after she announced that she had a callback for Rizzo in Grease.
It seemed impossible that I had spent so many weeks smiling and nodding as Whitney laughingly made little digs at everyone, and as Friya internet-stalked her ex. That I had cared about keeping Cole’s attention, which turned out to be the opposite of what I wanted.
Nick was back at their lunch table now. I saw him sitting there on Tuesday. Cole was slouched down, stuck between the two couples, playing with his phone and looking completely miserable. I remembered what he’d said, about how much it sucked to be stuck between two couples and their drama. I felt a little bad for him, but not bad enough to walk over and say hello when he waved at me.
I wasn’t desperate for their acceptance anymore. It didn’t get me anything except an unwanted seat at a lunch table where I’d never truly belong.
“You’re not staying for Art Club?” Lily asked after eighth period on Wednesday, when I started to pack up my things.
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