Chapter 14
Jade laid on my bed Friday after school, propped up by my light blue pillows and collection of well-loved stuffed animals. She had my goose from Logan propped against her knees, staring at it curiously.
I sat at the desk just underneath my window, applying my foundation.
It was a little before five, and the bus to Chesterville for the away game would leave Brentwood at five-forty-five.
Jade’s makeup was already done—I’d slaved over her glitter shadow first—but I still had time to finish mine.
She said she didn’t feel good enough to help me.
I looked at Jade in the small mirror I was using, but she didn’t notice.
After the cola waterfall at the bowling alley last night, Maisie’s group left with three frames left to bowl.
Jade had let go of my random act of kindness when I checked on Maisie in the bathroom, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if she thought about it.
I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d say if I told her I saw Logan yesterday.
The butterflies in my stomach stirred at the thought of him. Even now, my hand tingled with the pressure of his skin against mine. Just the mere thought of his name in Jade’s presence felt terrifying—like she could somehow read my mind in that moment.
“Where did you get this?” she asked suddenly.
I glanced over my shoulder to find her fiddling with the goose’s legs. “Uh—”
“It’s new, right?”
“My, uh, mom picked it up from somewhere.”
“It’s lame.” Jade flicked its leg. “Like something you’d find in a claw machine or something.”
Was that just a really good guess or did she know? “It’s not lame.” A strange protectiveness washed over me. “I think it’s perfect.”
Jade put the goose down on her stomach and lounged deeper against my pillows. Her cheer uniform matched my blue bedspread perfectly. “Mads,” Jade said to my ceiling. “Do you think it was weird that Connor got Maisie a pair of sweatpants?”
It turned out that I hadn’t been the only one concerned about the drowned girl in glasses yesterday. It had been someone who was holding sweatpants yesterday outside the bathroom at Allen’s Alley—it’d been Connor. He’d gone out to his car and retrieved the pair for Maisie.
I continued powdering my face, glad Jade was suspicious of someone other than me. “Weird how?”
“Come on. It’s definitely not normal. Why does he care if Maisie looks like she peed cola? Why would he go out of his way to grab her a pair of sweatpants from his car?”
Hey, Bobcats, he’d said to Maisie’s group yesterday. What a coincidence.
“Why is everyone acting so weird?” Jade let out a harsh sigh. “Landon dating that freakshow, Connor being nice to nerds, Reed quitting the football team—it’s like everyone’s mutinying. Everyone except Ashton, Kyle, and Riley, and I never saw that coming.”
I pivoted in my chair to look at her straight-on. “I’m not mutinying.”
You thought about it, my thoughts challenged. You’re still thinking about it. About him.
“No,” Jade disagreed with the voice in my head. “You’re not. You almost did, with the whole Logan thing, but you didn’t even waver.”
I wavered, I wanted to cry. I so wavered.
“You didn’t vote for the MLTs, though,” Jade went on before my moral dilemma could sink too deep. “That was out of character for you.”
“Like I said before, if you’d reminded me, I would’ve given you a label. You didn’t need to put me on the list.”
“It wouldn’t have been fair otherwise.”
Fair. Fair? My jaw nearly dropped. “I never would’ve put you on it—”
“Yes, you would’ve. You’d be going against Top Tier rules if you didn’t.”
The Top Tier rules. The open house felt like forever ago, when I sat on the window ledge happily kicking my feet while Jade rattled off the Top Tier guidelines.
I’d been excited then. Eager. I’d finally been at the top of the pyramid, and the idea of walking through the halls with everyone’s attention on me had been beyond invigorating.
I hesitated, dragging my eyeshadow brush through the pan of blue pigment, looking at Jade once more in the small mirror on my desk. “Does it… feel how you expected? Being in the Top Tier?”
Jade didn’t hesitate. “Better.”
I looked at myself in the mirror—really looked at myself.
Even with the foundation and concealer, there was no hiding the little puffy bags underneath my eyes.
And my eyes, they seemed… quiet. That perfect little bubble I’d been floating in had popped somewhere along the way, leaving me with nothing but a dampened feeling of dread.
Was it Logan who popped that bubble of happiness?
Was that bubble of happiness even better? Or did it just feel better?
“Is this how it is when you call Logan at night?” Jade asked suddenly, voice soft, curious. “Just staring up at your ceiling while his voice is in your ear?”
Something about the tone of her voice had me pausing before answering. The gentle quality seemed to come out of nowhere. “Called,” I said. “Past tense.”
“Right. Called.” She swung her legs over the side of my bed and sat up, running her hands over her curls. “Do you think we should kick Reed out? If he quit the football team, does he really belong in the Top Tier?”
I almost gasped, and not just because the topic change threw me for a loop.
Kick out Reed? “He voted in the Most Likely Tos,” I reminded her, fighting the urge to whirl around again.
“If we kick him out, he could tell everyone who voted for who. Plus, I doubt Connor would let his dethronement slide.”
“Connor’s been—annoying. Sometimes I think I’d be better off dating Ashton or Kyle. Speaking of.” Jade got to her feet and came up behind me. She reached around me and plucked my eyeshadow brush from my grip. “You need to date Kyle.”
I jerked back from her. “Kyle?”
“We need something new.” Her hand landed on my shoulder, forcing me still.
She barely waited for me to shut my eyes before she began dragging the brush against my lid, smudging the eyeshadow I’d just finished.
“Something to replace the excitement of Landon dating Lacey, because she so doesn’t deserve the spotlight.
And the fact that she’s sitting at our table now? Ridiculous.”
“Almost as ridiculous as me dating Kyle.”
Jade’s fingers were almost painful against my collarbone. “You’re not still hung up on Logan, are you?”
“No! But we agreed—not Kyle.” I huffed. “Logan would be better than Kyle.”
As soon as the words came out, I regretted them. Had I really just said a Bulldog was better than a Bobcat? I waited for Jade to jump me, to tell me that Kyle was in the Top Tier and Logan was a nobody from Jefferson, but she didn’t.
Instead, she almost looked like she was fighting a smile. “Wow, really?”
My mind worked overtime to come up with something believable. “I mean, if I say Kyle is better just because Logan is from Jefferson, doesn’t that make him right?”
Jade’s head tilted ever so slightly. “Makes him right?”
“About girls like us peaking in high school.”
It was funny how that phrase almost tasted like a declaration of… something. I didn’t want to be this way—I didn’t want to feel like I was torn between being silent and picking fights with Jade—but I couldn’t figure out how to get my feet underneath me. I couldn’t find our normal.
And I wasn’t totally sure why.
All at once, Jade’s expression cleared like storm clouds rolling out of the way of the sun.
The foreign hardness in her gaze dissipated, softening, as if that were some test I had passed.
Which didn’t make any sense—if that’d been a test, I would’ve thought she’d deem me a failure.
But her expression seemed too pleased to have disappointed her.
“I didn’t think of it that way,” she told me, flipping my hair over my shoulder. “But you’re so right, Mads. As always. This is why I say I’ll trust you ’til the end.”
“And I’ll follow you,” I said, throat feeling like it was closing.
“’Til the end?” she prompted, raising the eyeshadow brush once more.
I closed my eyes, but there was no ignoring the sinking feeling in my stomach. “’Til the end.”
The Brentwood Bobcats ended up crushing the Chesterville High Vikings with a six-point lead, effectively ending the other school’s winning streak.
Cheering at away games always felt more crucial; our student section was smaller, since fewer people came out to games, which meant the Brentwood Babes had to be on their A-game.
And, of course, we were.
We rallied our student section like no other, totally out-cheering the Vikings and their pitiful stunts. Coach Chelsea had beamed at us, and before we broke after the game, she gave us our reward—a weekend free of cheer practice. “Your focus was incredible,” she’d said. “Great job, Babes!”
Except my focus hadn’t been there at all, because I couldn’t help but think about Logan.
He’d be on the field of his own tonight, calling a play and drawing his arm back to throw the ball.
How far could he throw? If he ever had to run the ball, how fast was he?
I was suddenly overwhelmed by the idea of watching him play, my mind’s eye filling in a picture that had me biting down on my lip.
No. No more.
Connor had driven to the game, so instead of taking the bus back to Brentwood, Jade and I just rode with him.
I leaned my head against the glass of the window, the bumps in the road keeping me from falling asleep entirely.
Well, that, and the fact that Kyle was sitting on the other side of the bench seat in the back with me.
I didn’t trust him to keep his hands to himself.
“Connor, drive faster,” Jade insisted from the passenger seat, arms crossed over her chest in a way that channeled a pouty toddler. “If Jefferson gets there first, I’m going to wring your neck.”
Beside me, Kyle muttered, “Bet you two like that, anyway.”
My reaction was instinctual—I slapped his arm. Hard.
“What was that for?” he asked begrudgingly.