by Ellie Hall
“No, I bet he does remember you.”
Chloe started hanging her clothes in a closet with doors painted with chalkboard paint that had “Welcome Chloe and Jia” written on them. A few pieces of chalk were in a container on the wall, waiting for them to add anything they wanted. Nice.
“Let me remind you just how un-memorable I was in high school. We went to Washington DC for that debate competition our senior year, and there were a dozen of us from different schools sitting at the same table for dinner one night. I sat across from this guy . . . Travis, I think, and we all chatted. Then, the next day, you were talking to him in the hall of the conference center, and I joined you. He introduced himself to me. I reminded him that we’d met the night before, and when I walked away, he said to you, ‘I swear I’ve never seen her before.’ Remember?”
“It’s been a long time since you were that girl. You’re plenty memorable now.”
Maybe. Chloe felt like she’d gotten past it. But she shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s something about being here that is making me feel invisible all over again.”
“So we’ll just have to make sure you own your fabulousness while you’re here.”
That was easy for Jia to say. She sat at the foot of the bed with her stylish hair, great posture, and oodles of confidence. Every bit of her body language showed that she owned her fabulousness. She always had. Just like Chloe had always been the invisible friend.
“But I’m not going to own my fabulousness for the sake of Josh. I held on to the hope of him for more than three years in high school, and I’m not about to start again just because he’s here and looking yummy.”
“Of course not for him! For you.” Jia leaned toward her, squinting. “Stars above, did you glitter your arms for this? And your face? Well, that’s one way to be memorable.”
No. No, no, no. It couldn’t still be noticeable. Chloe ran to the full-length mirror and leaned in close. “Beverly’s stupid bird made it spill on me. Well, okay, he just scared me and I made it spill on myself, but I have tried everything to get it off! I swear glitter is the garbage can of craft supplies.”
“Well, you know what they say—you can’t spell ‘glitter’ without the word ‘litter.’” Jia got up and lifted Chloe’s arm, inspecting it. “Do you remember Tammy Somerhalder from our bio class? She was my partner when we did that lab with the high-powered magnifying glass. She looked at her arms with it, and she still had glitter embedded in her skin from decorating for the ‘Under the Sea’ dance a full year before.”
“A year? So I’m going to look like I belong at a seven-year-old’s mermaid birthday party for a year?”
“It’s not so bad. You just look like you shimmer.” After seeing whatever expression had crossed Chloe’s face, Jia amended. “Like you’ve got a healthy glow about you. It’s fine.”
They heard a slight crackle, then Gabrielle’s voice came over the loudspeakers and Chloe was suddenly back in homeroom. “Welcome, Salt Creek High School alums to your Mighty Coyote Ten-Year Reunion! You all should’ve gotten a schedule of events at check-in. And if you haven’t discovered it already, there’s an envelope in the top drawer of the desk that will show which of those activities you’ll be helping with and what your assignment is. Check it soon, because our get-to-know-you-again activity starts at seven, and the two helping out with that will need to meet in the little gym thirty minutes before to get everything planned. See you soon, Coyotes!”
Chloe and Jia raced over to the desk. The top drawer contained two envelopes—one with each of their names on it.
Jia ripped hers open and started talking about the activities she’d be helping with and who she’d be working with. But Chloe didn’t hear any of it because she couldn’t take her eyes off the first item on the list: Get-to-know-you-again Activity, with Chloe Carson printed neatly and snugly right next to Joshua Trevorrow.
She had roughly two minutes to change clothes and race out the door.
4
Josh
Josh had barely finished talking to some old friends in the hallway and set his suitcase on the bench at the end of his bed—and not nearly enough time to comprehend the fact that he would be sleeping in the room where he’d spent way too many hours learning about logarithms and parabolas and calculating the half-life of a bacteria—when Gabrielle’s voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone about the envelopes.
He walked over to the desk, opened the drawer, picked up the envelope, and pulled out its contents. And there was his name next to the get-to-know-you-again activity. As if the universe was trying to give him an even bigger sign than his grandma had been trying to give him for the past year, he was partnered up with exactly one person: Chloe Carson.
The location on the card read Small reception room (in high school, it was “the little gym”). He’d practiced basketball there as a student plenty of times. One glance at his watch told him that he needed to leave right away. He hung up the shirts from his suitcase and then headed to the little gym.
As he walked down the now carpeted hallways decorated with framed art instead of posters about pep rallies, Chloe ran through Josh’s mind in a loop. He hadn’t talked to her for long, but she seemed even more amazing than she’d been back in high school. He’d liked her then but hadn’t ever told her, and he still felt bad about it.
So how was he supposed to fix that? Apologize to her for it? He couldn’t exactly say, “Hey, Chloe. I thought you were pretty cool back in high school. But everyone expected me to date Tara and, like a stupid teenage boy, I figured that many people couldn’t be wrong. Funny story—it turned out they were wrong. Completely. Sorry I only admired you from afar and never asked you out.”
Chloe probably hadn’t even been aware of him back in high school, so telling her something like that now would just make things monumentally awkward.
The little gym still had hardwood floors, but the half-court basketball lines on the floor were gone and the scuffed walls had been painted and decorated with several mirrors mimicking large windows, complete with drapes. A refreshment table sat along one wall, already loaded with food.
And seated on the edge of a small, portable stage at the other end of the room chatting with Gabrielle was a very beautiful Chloe. Her hair was down now, loose brown curls falling to her shoulders. She had changed into a red shirt and fitted dark jeans—he didn’t remember her having ever worn such a bold color in high school, but it looked great on her.
She smiled broadly when her eyes met his, and he smiled back.
How was he even more attracted to her? He suddenly really cared what she thought about him, so making a fool of himself with an awkward apology was definitely out.
Gabrielle clapped her hands and stood. “Yay, you’re both here. Okay, let’s get this going. I’m going to let the two of you choose how to do this activity. I’ve got paper and pencils here if you need them, and, if you can’t think of something different to do, there’s a bingo sheet you can use, where people go around and find someone who fits the item in the square and have them sign it.
“And,” she hefted a bucket from the ground and placed it on the small table that held the papers and pencils, “here are some tokens. Everyone will be able to earn tokens all weekend and trade them for raffle tickets at the end. You decide how people earn them here. Not everyone has arrived yet, but I’m guessing there will be about eighty people. Sound good?”
Josh and Chloe both nodded, so Gabrielle clapped again. “Good!” She glanced at her watch. “Okay, you’re down to twenty-six minutes to prepare. Annnnnnd, go!” She rushed out of the room, her heels clacking on the wooden floor.
Josh’s brow crinkled as he looked at Gabrielle and then back to Chloe. “Are we on a reality TV show?”
“It sure feels like it.” Chloe glanced around. “If so, they hid the cameras well.” Both of their eyes fell on the papers on the table. “So . . . get-to-know-you games. That’s exciting.”
Josh laughed out loud at
how monotone her sentence sounded. “I’ve done enough corporate events to know that at least half the people in every crowd hate get-to-know-you games.”
Chloe nodded and picked up the stack of bingo papers. “So I’m not alone in wanting to toss this game out of the running?”
“Definitely not.” He motioned to the recycle bin. “Be my guest.”
Chloe walked over to the bin, dropped the stack in with a flourish, and then pretended that it was a toilet, and she was flushing them down the drain.
When she walked back, he stepped up close to her—close enough to hear her sharp intake of air. He reached behind her and pulled free the dryer sheet that had been sticking out from the bottom of her shirt. She surely didn’t want everyone else to see it when they showed up for the activity.
The gesture put him almost as close to her as they’d been when he’d bumped into her outside of the school. That time, his reactions had been mostly been born of shock. This time, a strange kind of electricity coursed through him at being so near to her. Based on Chloe’s gasp, the reddening of her cheeks, and the exact way her eyebrows rose, she might possibly have felt it, too.
He held up the dryer sheet as evidence of what he was doing. Her cheeks reddened significantly more, and she snatched it out of his hand, fisting it into a ball and shoving it in her pocket. “Nothing to see here.”
He couldn’t help but smile.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing a piece of paper and one of the pencils and sitting down on the edge of the stage. “So how do we make this not boring?”
Chloe sat next to him, facing him, one leg bent in front of her. He mirrored her pose so they could see each other and put the paper on the stage in front of them.
“Well,” she said, “we can’t just come up with interesting questions to have people answer because it’s too big of a group. Besides, how well do people really get to know each other in a group setting? People only do that when they’re talking one-on-one.”
“And I’m guessing we can’t get away with just saying, ‘Okay, everyone, find someone to chat with.’” Although, right now, that was all Josh wanted. To talk one-on-one with Chloe and find out more about the person she had become.
Chloe laughed, and the sound made him happy. He was finding out that just being around her made him happy. “Probably not if Gabrielle joins us.”
“True. Okay, so the goal is to get people interacting, right? The goal isn’t getting them to the point where they could take a pop quiz about each other. So, let’s make a game out of it.”
They both sat in silence for a moment, thinking, before Chloe’s eyes widened and she said, “I’ve got it!” Which was good, because all he’d managed to think about was how Chloe gazed up and to the right while she was thinking, the corner of her left eye crinkling, her teeth biting the side of her bottom lip. And how that made him think about how much he wanted to kiss those lips.
“Remember when we played Four Corners in Mr. Kleinman’s history class? He’d ask a question, and we each went to the corner of the room that went with our answer.”
Josh nodded. “There’s plenty of room here, and we don’t have desks hindering us like in Kleinman’s class. We can have each group discuss and choose a spokesperson to try to talk others into leaving the corner they originally chose and joining theirs.”
“Yes! And we’ve got those tokens—we can just give them to the original team who recruits the most new members.”
“Okay, so now we just have to come up with some questions that each have four responses. Preferably about high school, so we can get some nostalgia going. Like,” Josh paused, this time making sure his brain was actually thinking, “which was the better lunch item in the cafeteria, country fried steak with mashed potatoes, pulled pork sandwiches, soft shell tacos, or orange chicken with rice?”
“Perfect,” Chloe said, putting a hand on his leg. She seemed to immediately realize what she had done and removed her hand, but as they talked through other question possibilities, the memory of her hand on his leg stayed, a hand-shaped tingling of energy.
Josh usually hated when his plans went awry. But not, apparently, when it was Chloe thwarting his plan to leave.
5
Chloe
Teenage Chloe had dreamed countless times that a teacher in one of the classes that she and Josh shared would partner the two of them up for a project and put them in a room alone together. She’d gotten that wish—even if it was so many years later. As nice as it was though, she had gotten over Josh a long time ago. She had her 10 Reasons Why I Should Get over Josh Already list as proof.
Josh hadn’t exactly ignored her in high school—ignoring was something that required actually noticing a person first. Josh had never even noticed Chloe, which meant that he hadn’t been attracted to her at all. In some ways, that had felt like a bigger rejection, and she wasn’t about to put herself up to that again.
But still, the seventeen-year-old inside her was still kind of celebrating the daydream-come-true-ness of the situation. Especially when Josh leaned in to grab the dryer sheet from the back of her shirt. As embarrassing as that had been, it had sent her pulse racing and her skin tingling.
Now that everyone was filing into the room, it felt as if it was time to present the project they had been partnered on.
It was clear when Josh stood on the stage, mic in hand, welcoming everyone, that he was completely at home in that position. Remembering back to the bio on him that she’d read in their reunion packet, that made sense.
The largest crowd of people she usually “presented” to was somewhere around five. And that was more of a meeting with family members of someone in her care. Definitely nothing like standing on a stage in front of dozens of classmates she hadn’t seen in a decade.
Josh knew how to work the crowd, and had even gotten them laughing. Their first few questions had gone pretty well. He did one while she handed out the tokens to the winners, then she did one while he’d handed them out. People were laughing and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Gabrielle even had a smile of approval on her face.
“Okay,” Josh said, “what is your favorite ridiculous viral trend of our senior year? Go to this corner if it’s the parody lip sync videos to the song “Call Me Maybe.” That back left corner if it’s the Ryan Gosling “Hey girl” memes, this corner if it’s planking in random places, or go to the back right if it’s our very own SCHS Post a Selfie with Mr. Petrocelli trend.”
As everyone made their way to different corners and started talking amongst themselves about how to convince others to come to their corner, Josh held the microphone away from him and leaned in close. “What’s your guess on this one?”
He’d asked after every question and they’d each given their predictions. It put him in such close proximity that Chloe nearly forgot to breathe, which didn’t help with her desire to only say clever things around him. Neither did the fact that he smelled amazing. “I’m going to guess ‘Selfie with Mr. Petrocelli,’ because of the nostalgia factor and the fact that so many of us did it.”
Josh nodded. “I’m going with planking.”
The first three groups all managed to get people switching to their corner, which hadn’t happened with the previous questions. Chloe kept track of how many moved so she could figure out which team won the round. In the group that had chosen planking, Robbie Eldridge stepped forward as spokesperson.
“Well, we don’t have a ton to say about this, because what we want to convey doesn’t need words. Right, team?”
The moment he said “team,” everyone in the group moved in unison into a planking position. People lay face-down and straight as a board on the floor, on the steps to the stage, on the stage, and under the refreshments table. Someone was even planking across the legs of three people who had gotten down on their hands and feet in a crab-walk position.
Josh chuckled and shook his head at the display. “I never really understood planking.”
“And that,” Robbie Eldridge s
aid, “is exactly why planking is the best viral trend of our senior year.”
Chloe hadn’t needed to keep track of each group’s numbers, because a good half of the people in all the other groups flocked to the planking group and did their own planking.
After she handed out all the tokens, she said to Josh, “We’ve created a monster.”
“But more importantly,” he leaned in so close, she could feel his breath on her ear, every nerve ending in her body zapping with electricity, “I won.”
Josh handed her the microphone and the paper with their questions and she suddenly wondered if her heart was beating loudly enough that the microphone was picking it up and everyone in the room could hear. Was it always this hot in here? She needed to breathe more. Everyone went back to the middle, so she tried to focus on the paper.
“And the last one is a ‘Would you rather’ question. Go to this corner if you’d rather take one of Miss Addington’s math tests. Go to the back left if you’d rather go to early morning attendance detention with Mr. Beauchene, back right if you’d rather give a presentation in Mrs. Rosekrans’s English Lit class, or this front corner if you’d rather see Josh’s abs.”
She hadn’t immediately realized that she’d said something wrong until the crowd reacted. “Sanchez’s labs! I meant go to this front corner if you’d rather do one of Mr. Sanchez’s labs! You know, for biology! Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I said that. Mr. Sanchez’s labs!” Maybe if she said the right thing enough, it would erase everyone’s memory of her saying “see Josh’s abs.” As hot as her face felt, it had to be fire engine red.
Tina Glasgow raised her hand. “You said ‘See Josh’s abs’ first—I vote we keep it that.”
Several others voiced their agreement, and soon nearly half the group was making their way to the front corner. With everyone buying into the mistake, this was never going to be forgotten. It was going to go down in SCHS history, and they’d still be talking about this moment at their fiftieth reunion.