Chapter Nine
A homemade chocolate cupcake with espresso frosting appears in front of my face. I drop my textbook into my locker, then turn.
“So, I was a super doof yesterday,” Kristen says, handing me the delicious delicacy. “I know you aren’t into smoking and it’s my bad for putting you in that situation.”
“It’s okay,” I reply, glad that she at least acknowledges that the situation was awkward.
“I wanted to hang out with you, but Vincent and I already had plans. I thought we could all just hang out together—I want us all to hang out together, for you to really get to know him. But that wasn’t the right way to go about it.”
Aside from Vincent calling me a prude, I do want to like him, for Kristen’s sake. I just don’t see what we have in common, and—realistically—I’m not sure how many forced interactions I can endure.
When I take an unnecessarily huge bite of the cupcake to stall on responding, Kristen adds, “Smoking isn’t the only thing we do, you know.”
“I knooow,” I tell her through a mound of mushy chocolate goodness.
“Okay…” She draws out the word. “I just—I don’t want me having a boyfriend to stop us from being able to spend time together.
And obviously we will have our alone time, but I don’t want to always have to choose between you guys.
You’re my two favorite people.” She looks down for a moment to hide the red hues seeping into her cheeks.
“Which is why I was thinking the three of us could go to the football game next Friday?”
First bell rings and students start hustling to get to homeroom. For a moment, we’re caught up watching the chaos.
“Today, after school,” Kristen says, pulling me back in. “Meet me at the photography room, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, and we both take off down the hall.
I stroll into the photography room and immediately relax.
Even though I’m not artistic and therefore haven’t had any classes in the art wing since mandatory Art 1 freshman year, the photography room is a familiar haven.
It’s Kristen’s woman cave, which often made it one of my hang out and wait for one of my parents to pick me up after school spots.
Following my morning chat with Kristen, I managed to avoid Hannah in the hallway. No awkward and seemingly obvious stares, no cornering me at my locker to talk more.
I’m still surprised that she didn’t press at all yesterday after I turned her down. I figure if we don’t talk about it again, she can’t suddenly change her mind, which made running off to the photography room all the more appealing.
“Long time no see,” I kid, since Kristen and I were just in history together.
“Ready?” She finishes signing her name, declaring the Nikon hers until tomorrow, and we set off.
Kristen usually doesn’t tell me where we’re going for shoots, but after I became her muse freshman year, I learned to stay ready.
We wind down some residential back roads and pass the mansion that looks like a barn.
The landmark tells me where we’re going.
Clearmeadow Park is one of our favorite places to do photoshoots because it has a stunning crape myrtle tree.
Kristen parks the car. With the afternoon sunshine cascading down through the bright pink flowers, it’s the perfect backdrop.
She sets her equipment down on a nearby picnic table, and I stand by the tree.
“You should let your hair down,” she says while adjusting the camera settings.
I pull out my twin French braids and run my fingers through my hair. The back of my neck feels warm with my curls down around my shoulders, and I can already tell the argan oil I combed through them this morning is going to glisten under the sunlight.
Kristen holds the viewfinder up to her eye, and without instruction, I start walking around the tree.
She prefers the shots to be candid or to feel candid, so I move on my own, occasionally reminding myself to smile.
When I reach up for a flower, I hear the camera shutter snap rapidly, which makes me laugh.
“Since I have you in a good mood,” Kristen says, peeking out from behind the viewfinder. “Next week? Friday night football?”
“I hate football,” I groan. The shutter clicks.
“It’s not about football. The next time you attend the first Friday night football game at Ridgeway High, you won’t be a high schooler. You’ll be one of those old college kids that all the high schoolers treat like a leper because they can’t imagine why you’d want to come back here.”
“But that’s the thing,” I counter, toeing some of the fallen petals at the base of the tree. “I’m not going to come back, at least not for a football game—”
“You’re still missing the point,” Kristen sighs, cutting me off.
“How about this: I want you to go to the football game because I’m your best friend and you love me and next year, when you’re off at some fancy college far, far away, I’ll bet you one hundred dollars you’re gonna wish you’d gone to this game. ”
Well, how the heck am I supposed to say no to that?
“Fiiiiiiiine,” I drone, and throw in an “I hate you, by the way” for good measure.
Satisfied, Kristen goes back into full photographer mode, and we hit a pocket of strict posing and capturing. The quiet is nice.
“So,” I say, looking back at Kristen over my shoulder. “Since I have you in a good mood”—I wait for her to snap my current pose before laying it out there—“Vincent Miller.”
“Yes?”
“When did it start?”
She takes a second to check some of the shots. Without looking up from the camera, she says, “The end of July.”
I think back. The end of July is when Hannah and I were—I guess—kicking things up a notch too.
“How?” I ask, hopping up so that I’m hanging from one of the branches with my feet dangling just off the ground.
“He was at my dad’s woodworking thing.”
Every summer, the community garden hosts classes on starting your own vegetable garden, painting pots, and woodworking. I call it Mr. Haverford’s side hustle.
“Paint me a picture.” When Kristen raises her eyebrows, I explain, “So that I can understand.”
She squints at me, trying to gauge where I’m going with this, but decides to continue.
“Well, he was in my dad’s class. It was the end of July, when I still thought he was a douche. So, I was like, ‘What would a douche want with woodworking?’ I avoided him, even though he was nice to my dad and the old people in the class. He even started coming in early to help me move supplies.
“Toward the end of the week, it was hard to avoid him, since we were the only ones there under fifty.” She smiles to herself, making me wonder if some of my late nights with Hannah were mirroring her early mornings at the garden with Vincent.
“So, I finally came out and asked him,” she continues. “He told me that his granddad used to make furniture and he always tried to teach him, but Vincent was too stubborn to listen. His granddad died back in April, and Vincent was really torn up about it. So, he decided to finally learn.”
I shake a branch, and Kristen hops back into photographer mode, snapping some shots with the pink petals falling around me like snow. I use the action as an opportunity to hide my face while I collect my thoughts.
“Not trying to sound like a jerk,” I warn, “but how does wanting to make furniture because of a dead relative cancel out all the rumors and torment?”
“It doesn’t,” she admits, surprising me. “It means he’s changed and gained some perspective.”
I guess I could say the same for myself.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?” she throws back. She holds the camera away from her face so that she’s looking at me with her eyes instead of through the viewfinder.
“I will make an effort.”
“You already promised to make an effort,” she says with a hand on her hip.
“Well, this is me reinforcing that promise.”
“All right, then.” She smiles, looking more confident than I’ve seen her since she told me the truth about their relationship. Yet her gaze remains on me, and it shifts slightly to that strange look she had at lunch yesterday.
“What?”
“I know you’re totally against me playing matchmaker, but… Clarity, I want you to know what it’s like—to fall in love. Well, maybe not fall in love, but to have someone in your corner—”
“You’re in my corner,” I remind her, not wanting to go down the road of Kristen pairing me up with someone.
“Yes, but I mean romantically. It’s special.
You’ve never had a boyfriend, and I know that’s not a bad thing, and sometimes people don’t start dating until their twenties or whatever.
But, if we could do this together, that would just be so awesome.
Like, you saw me fall into whatever that was with Tyler.
” She laughs. “And, now, with Vincent, it’s different.
Maybe it’s selfish, but a part of me—as your best friend—wants to see you find that feeling… ”
I know that feeling. When you adore someone so much it’s borderline obsessive, where just seeing their face or hearing their name in a conversation they aren’t even a part of turns a light on in your chest. Having someone in my corner romantically…
That’s exactly how Hannah was when the Incident happened.
She didn’t stand by, she stood with me, tried to shield me and take as much of the blow as possible.
She loved me through it.
Love. I know what love is.
And I chose to throw it away.
“All I’m saying,” she adds, “is just keep an open mind. Like, if it happens naturally, if you do meet someone and it turns into something more than a date to the festival, let it turn into that.”
“Okay…”
“You promise?” she asks, holding out her pinky, curved like a hook.
I step down from the roots of the tree and hook my pinky through hers. “I promise.”
Promising to keep an open mind isn’t the same as promising to let it turn into anything, and even though it is an honest promise, it ripples in my stomach like a queasy lie.