Chapter 12
EVERETT
I t was news to no one that Jahnvi hated me.
I never truly understood why, but she always has.
And hey, I’m as competitive as the next person.
If she decides to hate me, then I’ll pretend to hate her back.
The only problem was that pretending all the time sometimes made me believe that I truly did despise her.
And that wasn’t necessarily the case.
She was annoying and nosy, admitted. But she’d never done anything in particular to make me hate her. Again, people hate people only when they’ve done something horrible to them. But now I was questioning my little saying.
Is it possible to hate someone, even though they have done nothing to you?
Because the feeling I was experiencing resembled visceral hate. It boiled up from my inner stomach to my throat.
And this anger wasn’t directed at Jahnvi, but at KJ, who’s been one of my closest friends since middle school.
Only now, I was thinking I may actually hate him.
I hated how close he was sitting to Jahnvi.
I hated how she was laughing at him with her eyes all crinkled.
Jahnvi and I have had a truce in our rivalry since third grade.
The rules of the truce were as follows: If there was a group project of any kind that involved a presentation, Jahnvi and I would cease fire with all snide or downright rude comments and put in our maximum combined effort on the project in order to beat all our other classmates.
We enacted it after a presentation. The teacher had promised candy to the person with the best presentation.
Jahnvi and I were dead set on getting that little piece of candy, and we both guessed it would be one of us who’d get it.
But to our great surprise, some other girl got the piece of candy, and we both went home sugarless.
Ever since then, whenever there was a group project, we worked together to combine our talents. And we always did well.
Today was the day Jahnvi broke the truce. She partnered up with KJ on our AP Lit project instead of me. As soon as our teacher mentioned partners, I looked across the classroom her way.
And usually, she would already be looking at me.
But not today.
What made her break the truce? And why all of a sudden? She’d never acted like that before, not once. Had I hurt her feelings during lunch? Was it the whole thing with Evelyn showing up at my house last night?
It wasn’t what she thought. Nothing even happened!
Evelyn had been a friend of mine for a very long time, and she had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend of hers. I was just doing what any friend would’ve done, what Jahnvi would have done.
I was just trying to be a good friend.
And her little sign hadn’t made Evelyn storm off or anything like Jahnvi thought. Evelyn was just aggressive when it came to driving, and Jahnvi probably heard her tires squeal as she zoomed off and created a little story in her head.
But why was this upsetting her now?
Evelyn showed up at my house all the time. She’d even shown up way later than 10:30 at night. Jahnvi had never had a problem with it, or if she had, she’d never shown it.
But she shouldn’t have had a problem with it.
Who was she to have a problem if I decided to have girls over late? But that also made another important question arise.
Who was I to hate a guy for partnering up with her?
“Hey!”
Someone whacked me on the side of my head, and I jolted back to that tacky classroom. I had ended up partnering up with another friend of mine, Chase. He had about two and a half brain cells, and I already knew that I was going to be doing this project all by myself.
“Sorry, what?”
“Where are you right now? I was talking about how KJ somehow snatched the smart girl to do everything for him.”
“Her name’s Jahnvi.” I sank down in my chair with a sigh and opened up the rubric. This was going to be a long week.
“Right, right. I forget y’all know each other.” He laughed and slapped my arm. Y’all meant Indians in this context. “Don’t you always find a way to partner up with her?”
“Usually, yeah. KJ beat me to it this time.”
“Everett’s actually going to be doing work this week then, huh?
” He laughed and patted my back. I never understood his need for physical contact.
I mean, he could just as easily make his point without touching me.
The more annoying thing was that he always found a way to make fun of girls for being overly emotional and giving hugs all the time when he couldn’t spend two minutes without touching someone else.
I actually do put my fair share into any project, Chase.
Not that I’d ever say that to his face. Some people just weren’t worth fighting. Chase, as predicted, eventually turned around to horse around with some of the other guys on the baseball team while I kept working away on our group project.
But even before I could really dive into the project, I was rudely interrupted by Chase again.
“Hey, Everett?”
“Hmm?” I hummed, still looking down at my laptop. I didn’t even try to hide my annoyance.
“How do you know Jenny?”
“Jahnvi?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waved my correction off. I suddenly noticed how every single one of his friends was focused on me. What was going on?
“Her dad owns the restaurant across from mine and we’re also neighbors. Why are you asking all of a sudden?”
“She nice?”
“Sure,” I shrugged. “What’s going on?”
One of his other friends nodded behind me. “Look for yourself.”
I swiveled around in my chair to look at Jahnvi, confused. KJ had stolen her pen and she was trying to get it back. She was giggling excessively. And the way KJ was talking to her was...definitely not friendly .
They seemed flirty.
“Dayum,” Chase or one of his friends muttered next to me. “I really don’t get what he sees in her anyway. She’s not that cute.”
“I mean sure she is,” someone else whispered behind me. “In like a nerdy-type way, ya know?”
All of this made my blood rise to a boil. Then, KJ leaned over and tugged on the ribbon in Jahnvi’s hair.
The red ribbon.
My ribbon.
Before I could figure out what was happening, I got out of my desk and walked toward her and the door. When I got close enough, KJ stuck out his hand for a high five. I raised my hand too.
And swiped his orange Gatorade off his desk.
It spilled all over his pants, and he jumped up. “FUCK, Everett! What is wrong with you?”
“I am so, so sorry,” I said, feigning innocence. People, including Jahnvi, jumped up to get tissues. I snaked around him to grab the empty bottle off his soaked seat and whispered quietly enough for only him to hear, “Leave her the fuck alone.”
I knew KJ. I knew KJ very well, so I knew about his anger issues and how everyone tiptoed around him. It seemed to be a sensitive topic. Well, it was time it stopped being that sensitive.
He glared at me. “I talk to whoever I want, psycho.”
“Ironic,” I whispered back. “Calling me crazy when you literally killed birds as a kid? Did they ever find out what you did to your neighbor’s cat—”
He swung.
But I had ducked well before he could make contact.
It all happened in a second. The teacher and a few students held him back, which only made him madder.
He kicked a table so hard it flew sideways, and school security officers rushed into the room while KJ turned a horrible shade of red and screamed all sorts of obscenities.
He vowed to gut me and hang my lifeless corpse off the school’s flagpole.
That won’t go over well with the principal.
I backed up to join the rest of the class, staying innocently silent. Did I feel bad? Not even an ounce.
I muttered to Jahnvi, who was in front of me watching the scene with wide eyes, “Uh-oh, you may need a new partner.”