Chapter 2 Then
Then
“You still studying?” Mom asked, tying her robe as she walked down the stairs.
“Not still. Again,” I said, flipping to the next flash card. “I did not stay up all night.” Maybe I should’ve.
“Good, because rest is important too,” she said, kissing the top of my head as she walked by where I sat at the kitchen table.
“Speaking of rest,” I teased, “you slept late.” It was nearly eight. My ride was going to be here in five minutes. Mom usually woke up at seven. She was a registered nurse at the hospital and her shift started the same time school did.
“I know. I’m running a little late. Did you get something to eat? I can make you some eggs really quick.”
“I already ate. Thanks.” I flipped to the next card, repeating the definition of mitochondria in my head.
Mom came out of the pantry with a protein bar. She placed it on top of my backpack, which was sitting on the table. “For later.”
“Thanks, Mums,” I said in a terrible British accent.
“No problem.”
That’s when my dad came down the stairs. I was surprised. Dad was normally long gone by now. Had he overslept as well? He had his cell pressed to his ear and was dressed in a suit and tie. Maybe he was in court today. He rarely went all out if he was only going into the office.
“He’s still here?” I asked.
Mom gave a short nod.
Dad held the phone away from his ear for a second and said good morning to me. “Have a good day at school.” Then he was back on his phone. He grabbed the protein bar off my backpack, kissed my mom on the cheek, and left out the garage door.
Mom sighed and got me another bar.
“Is he late too?” I asked.
“No, just dealing with some drama.”
“What drama?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Confidential kinda drama?” I asked. Sometimes, due to the nature of his job, Dad really couldn’t talk about it.
“Yes,” she said, pouring coffee from the pot I had started earlier into a travel mug.
“Oh!” I said. “Speaking of drama, my printer is out of ink. Can I use the one in Dad’s office?”
“What does that have to do with drama?” she asked.
“My printer. It’s a drama queen,” I said in a duh voice.
She laughed. “Yes, go use his printer.”
I shoved my flash cards into my backpack and rushed to his office, mad at myself for nearly forgetting to print out this homework assignment.
That wasn’t like me. But when my printer had just produced blank pages last night, I told myself I’d do it this morning.
I pulled up Google Docs on my phone and tapped print on my latest essay. The printer hummed to life.
My phone buzzed with a text: here
Give me two minutes, I texted back.
The printer finished and I scooped up the papers, shoved them into my backpack, and spun toward the door. In the process, my backpack swept a stack of papers off the desk and my foot slammed into the shredder, knocking it over and spreading even more paper across the floor.
“Stupid,” I muttered to myself, picking up both stacks and putting them back into their respective piles. I turned a circle to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, then left the office.
“Ava’s here!” I called toward the kitchen. “See you later, Mom!”
“Good luck on your test!”
“I don’t need luck. I have brains.”
“Yes! You do!”
I pulled the door closed behind me and walked the pathway to my best friend’s car. I was last on the pickup route, so I always got the back seat on the way to school. I climbed in. “Sorry, everyone. Had to print out the AP Lit essay.”
“Ugh,” Caroline said.
“That thing was the worst!” Ava agreed.
Beau was in the back with me, like he always was. Our carpool placement actually represented our friendship dynamic well. We were all close, but Ava and Caroline were close and Beau and I were even closer. The best friends in our group of best friends.
I shoved his shoulder for no reason at all except that I thought it was funny.
He Frisbeed a flash card in my direction and it hit my arm.
I was wearing a jean jacket today—October was finally starting to feel like fall—so his card did zero damage.
I picked it up from where it had landed on the seat between us.
It was a cell diagram. He was studying too. Of course he was.
“It’s Friday!” Ava said. “Time to contribute to the gas cup.” She held up an empty 7-Eleven Slurpee cup and I dug a ten out of my bag and dropped it into the little hole at the top.
“And?” she prompted.
“Thank you, our benevolent ruler, for driving,” I said with an eye roll, knowing everyone else in this car had already said this today.
Ava had straight dark hair, and the way she raised one black eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror made her look regal, like she really could be the leader of our little group.
She pulled onto the road. “You’re welcome.”
My eyes skimmed over the drawing of the cell on the flash card.
“Are you both studying?” Caroline asked, looking back. She had strawberry-blond hair that was naturally wavy and big brown eyes.
“I don’t know how much more we can possibly smash into our brains,” Ava said.
“Have to maintain my class rank,” Beau said with a smirk.
He acted like he was kidding, but I knew there was truth to his statement.
He was number four in our class, one tiny spot ahead of me, and he wanted to be number one.
I didn’t necessarily care about beating him; I just wanted to stay top ten by the time we graduated.
I knew it would help with college and scholarship applications.
Okay, maybe beating him would give me a little satisfaction as well.
Only because it would bother him so much.
I tucked the card back into his stack and he offered me a distracted smile.
Beau was cute. Big blue eyes, thick brown hair, a crooked smile.
Annoyingly my heart fluttered. It did that sometimes around Beau.
I always chalked it up to the fact that I cared about him a lot.
He was my best friend. The four of us had been friends since seventh grade, when our parents connected through some rideshare app that organized carpools by proximity.
Before we got our licenses, our moms did the driving.
Now Ava did because she didn’t like Beau’s car and because Caroline and I didn’t have cars yet.
My parents told me when I could save a thousand dollars, they’d help me buy one. Something about appreciating something more when you had to sacrifice for it. I thought I’d appreciate a car regardless of my sacrifice, but I’d managed to save six hundred so far.
A truck pulled in front of Ava from a side road. She lay on her horn.
Caroline put her hand to her chest. “Don’t trigger road rage.” Caroline was the kind of person who didn’t like to draw attention to herself or risk offending people.
Ava was the opposite. “I had to let him know that he’s an idiot.”
Beau had his nose back in his flash cards.
“Maybe if you eat those flash cards you’ll assimilate the information better,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “You should write that down as one of your essay answers for the test. See what Ms. Crane thinks of that biological theory.”
“She’d think it was sound.”
This time he shoved my shoulder. I laughed.
“Do I have to separate you two for the drive home?” Ava asked in a spot-on impersonation of her mother.
“That was creepy,” Caroline said.
“Your mom used to hate it when we laughed in the car,” I said.
“She doesn’t like noise, happy or sad,” Ava said.
“Then she had way too many kids,” Beau said. Ava was the second-youngest of five.
“I think her noise intolerance is a result of the kids, not a precursor.” She pulled into the school lot and parked where she always did—underneath the third row of solar-paneled shade structures.
Beau’s girlfriend, Harper, was waiting for us on the grass bordering the asphalt. Well, she was waiting for Beau, but our foursome was often seen as one entity, so sometimes I used collective verbiage to denote both the individual and the group.
For example, We ran a great race today, when Caroline participated in any cross-country meet. We look adorable, when Ava put on pretty much any outfit in her closet. We have an amazing singing voice, when Beau sang along to car songs or participated in a choir performance.
I didn’t really have a thing that the group could collectively claim. I mean, I did. I was smart. That was my only thing. And since it was my only thing, I worked hard at it. Would not let myself slip. But we were all smart, so my friends didn’t need to claim my abilities for that.
We climbed out of the car and Beau scooped Harper up in a hug. She was short, much shorter than my five-foot-nine height. The perfect height to scoop, it seemed. She let out a squeal.
I liked Harper. They’d only been dating a few months, but she was funny and seemed to like Beau a lot, so that was a plus.
“I’m having a Halloween party,” she announced when Beau set her down. “You all have to come.”
“I haven’t celebrated Halloween since I was ten,” I said.
“Not true,” Beau said. “We did that trunk-or-treat thing in seventh grade.”
“Oh yeah,” Ava said. “Remember? My mom decorated our trunk like a graveyard.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“How could you forget about that?” she teased. “It was so memorable.”
Ava pressed the lock button on her key fob and we all headed across the parking lot toward campus.
“Is it a dress-up kind of party?” I asked.
“Yes,” Harper said. “Absolutely. I won’t let you in if you don’t dress up.”
I could respect someone who went all out for their parties.
“We should go as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” Caroline said.
“I call Michelangelo,” Ava said.
“I’m Leonardo,” Beau said.
“How about the Golden Girls instead?” I said, throwing Beau a smile.
“I call Blanche!” Ava said.
“You would pick the ho,” I said.
“Do not slut-shame Blanche,” Ava said.
“Um, hello,” Harper said. “You can’t pick a foursome for my Halloween party. We’re either going as a pair”—she pointed at herself and Beau—“or we’re going as a fivesome.” She used her finger to draw a circle in the air around the group of us.
Oh…right…there were five of us.
“Exactly,” Beau said with a smirk. “What is wrong with you all?”
She smacked him playfully on the shoulder. He picked her up and spun her around saying, “Sorry, babe.”
Caroline scrunched her nose at me and quietly said, “There are no good famous fivesomes. We’ll have to encourage a three and two situation.”
“Agreed,” I said under my breath.
We headed toward the science building and my nerves kicked up again, thinking about the test that awaited us in class. I was getting a 94 percent in biology, but I wanted that to be higher. If being smart was my only thing, making sure my grades proved it was my singular task.
Beau squeezed my arm. I must’ve had my worried face on.
“You’ll do great,” he whispered. “You always do.”
My heart did that stupid flutter again.
A guy on a skateboard brushed by me, nearly knocking me over.
“Watch it!” Beau called after him. The guy just held his middle finger in the air without looking back.
“Feet on the ground!” a teacher called. There was a strict no skating on campus policy.
We went to a charter school, so it wasn’t huge, but I didn’t know everyone. Especially if they weren’t juniors, like we were. And I assumed the guy who had just skated by was a freshman or sophomore until Harper said, “I give him two weeks until he’s expelled again.”
“You know him?” I asked.
“He lives on my street. Cody Pratchett. He’s a senior.”
“Well, if you see him later, you can return the gesture,” I said.
“I think the original gesture was for me,” Beau said.
“Well, the return gesture can be from us, then.”
“I’ll pass on the message,” Harper said.
“I thought he was cute,” Ava said. “Along with the message they’re giving him, tell him I say hi.”
“He nearly knocked me over,” I responded.
“That added points.” She laughed.
“You’re a brat,” I said.
Caroline opened the door to the building. The bell was about to ring, so the halls were packed. Beau reached into his back pocket and pulled out his flash cards.
He passed them over to me. “You might want to eat these, let them assimilate. It’s the only way you’ll score better than me on this test.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and dropped them into the nearest trash can. “The info has already been assimilated. I don’t need extra help to beat you.”
He gave me a teasing smile. When we got our scores back two days later, he’d beaten me by two percentage points. I’d have to study twice as hard next time.