Chapter Two
“About how fast do you think I could get myself expelled?”
Christina glances up from the bed on her side of our dorm, which is—and believe me when I say this is a charitable description—a disaster. To be fair, we only moved in two days ago. To be less fair, when that move-in happened, her parents diligently helped her organize her entire side of the room so there were designated spaces for studying, sleeping, and snacking out of the minifridge they stocked up with Yoo-hoo bottles and her mom’s delicious kaju katli in all its cashew melt-in-your-mouth glory.
Now there is just a designated space for chaos, and Christina in the middle of it, somehow managing to stream Succession on her laptop despite lying on her back with her legs kicked all the way up resting parallel to the wall.
“Depends,” Christina says, closing the laptop and interrupting the scene of a grown man lawlessly chucking water bottles at a tall cowering man. She yanks at her long dark hair in its messy bun to retighten it as she rights herself into a sitting position. “How many fire alarms do you think you can pull in under a minute?”
“Asks the cross-country star.”
“You know I’d help. But let’s table it for now because my entire plan for surviving the season hinges on stealing your snacks.”
Thanks to the number of miles she runs, Christina is, in fact, a human furnace and burns through food about as fast as she eats it. She also burns through whichever neural pathways were supposed to remind her to pack extra snacks, so I’ve been tucking away chip bags and energy bars in her backpacks since she and I met at summer day camp when we were eight. A task that’s more imperative than ever now that she’s here on a full-ride cross-country scholarship.
I walk over to Christina’s perch to better show off the full extent of the fruit massacre on my dress. She tugs on a lock of my hair, which is, sure enough, crusted with goop.
“Do I even want to know?” she asks.
“No. Saying it out loud will make it real.”
I take a few steps to flop back on my own bed, which has the same pastel strawberry duvet cover I’ve had for years. My side of the dorm is pretty much just a capsule version of my room at home: same photos of my sisters and friends hanging from the fairy lights on the wall, same stack of darkly funny memoirs on the nightstand, same crusty Bluebeary on the bed, who now looks less like a teddy bear and more like something Blorbo the rat ate and regurgitated.
“By ‘it’ do you mean Seb? I try not to eavesdrop but I was a smidge concerned when our call ended with some colorful swearing. Some of it sure sounded like him.”
Christina would know, because by virtue of being my best friend, she’s attended enough gatherings and celebrations to know Seb as well as she knows the rest of my family. So also by virtue of being my best friend, she is the only person on Earth who knows that Seb and I are secretly mortal enemies in a ruthless, perpetual competition of our own design—the only person who’s ever seen us in our third mode and lived to tell the tale.
I turn my head so my voice is muffled by my pillow. “He got off the waitlist. He’s going for the same staff writing position I want. My life is a joke and Seb is the punch line.”
“Huh,” says Christina, in a tone more thoughtful than sympathetic.
I tilt my head toward her indignantly. “Huh?”
She shrugs. “Just trying to decide if it’s worth it for me to keep paying for all these streaming services when I’m about to have the world’s most ridiculous ‘will they, won’t they, dear god, just kiss already’ show playing out right in front of my eyes.”
I throw Bluebeary at her. She does not even attempt to catch him.
“Feel sorry for me,” I demand.
“Why should I? You’re already ticking boxes off our bucket list and the semester hasn’t even started yet.”
I peer past the crime scene of Christina’s side of the dorm to the poster she has shamelessly taped to the wall, titled CHRISTINA AND SADIE MAKE MAPLE RIDE THEIR BITCH!! in shimmery purple ink. Christina’s side of the list is admittedly larger than mine, including things like SCORE AN INVITE TO THE ALPHABET PARTY , CHECK OUT THE HINDU STUDENT UNION , brEAK 5K PR , and KISS MULTIPLE HOT (PREFERABLY NERDY! WITH A HEART OF GOLD! AND ACCESS TO A CAR!) BOYS .
My side may be smaller, but that’s because I only came here with one real goal in mind: Newsbag, end of list.
“I’ve actively unticked a box. Everyone’s already got giant heart eyes for Seb and his stupid Instagram account and I just—panicked,” I admit. “I didn’t even sign up.”
Christina’s eyebrows lift. “But you’re still going to compete for the spot.”
I hesitate. Christina chucks Bluebeary back at me.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she demands. “After everything you did to get here, you’re gonna wimp out over a meme lord?”
The strange thing is, the “everything” I did to get here has been behind the scenes. In some ways the whole “Sadie secretly wants to work in comedy” thing was inevitable. My parents were always pretty fast and loose with things like bedtimes and media consumption. As a result I was up late watching SNL and checking out Tina Fey’s and Mindy Kaling’s memoirs from the library while scribbling badly drawn comics about my family’s antics before I even hit double digits.
I didn’t think of it in terms of a potential career, because back then it was less a hobby and more of a survival strategy. My family is—well, for lack of a better word, dramatic. My parents love us to pieces but constantly talk and bicker at a volume more appropriate for a full-stadium Taylor Swift concert than, say, my elementary-school dance recitals. My older sister Marley has made it her personal mission to aggravate them by doing pretty much the opposite of anything they ask her to do, and my younger sister Hadley is so sensitive that she starts bawling at the drop of a hat.
I love them. It’s just—a lot. Especially being smack-dab in the middle, where I was always anticipating the next squabble / meltdown / miscellaneous shenanigan, and how to mitigate before people noticed “ that family” getting into it again. So I peace-kept in the outside world and made little jokes in my inside world.
That was how the shift started. The more peacekeeping I did, the more I became “responsible Sadie,” “quiet Sadie,” “dependable Sadie” in the real world, and the more I pushed down any desire to do comedy, because that wasn’t what anyone needed from me. Making a little quip about the situation or pointing out the absurdity of it was only ever going to make matters worse.
And, yeah. By fourteen I was self-aware enough to be like, wow, this is going to come up a lot in future therapy if I don’t take the reins of my own life and do something about this. So I did—or at least, I tried. When I got to high school I signed up for the school paper, which at the time was run by my older sister Marley’s friend Anna. The paper wasn’t Newsbag by a long shot, but it did have a few voice-y writers on staff, and it was the closest I could get at that age.
The issue was Anna expected me to be the same old “responsible Sadie.” I turned in the pieces she assigned me on the cafeteria-menu changes and Parents’ Night, and she told me bluntly, “I can’t run these. You’re editorializing way too much. I gave these to you because you’d take them seriously, not goof around.”
Which was why the first semester kicked off with Seb’s replacement piece about the cafeteria on the front page of the paper, where instead of making jokes like I did, he interviewed students and staff—less of a humor piece and more a compelling piece of journalism. I didn’t manage to even get a piece published for three months, because that was how long it took to beat the urge to “editorialize” out of me. Apparently I did too good a job, because by the time I was a junior, I was the new Anna, in charge of the operation and guiding the staff on their pieces.
Save for one part of the paper that accidentally—blissfully—was entirely mine.
“I didn’t take you for a chickenshit, Jerry, ” says Christina, narrowing her dark eyes at me.
I slide off the bed, miserably picking up Bluebeary from his perch on the ground to hug his mangled limbs to my chest. “Jerry’s dead.”
Christina sharply shakes her head. “Jerry is alive and well and about to get a sharp kick in the metaphorical pants.”
“Jerry,” to be clear, is a figment of my high school’s imagination. It was an inconsistent anonymous column that popped up in the school paper whenever someone had entertaining grievances to air about our school but didn’t want to go on the record about it.
And boy, did “Jerry” have a good run my senior year. Jerry came up with a list of increasingly more ridiculous Halloween costumes to wear to school to avoid breaking the school’s new strict dress codes. Jerry ranked every hallway in our ancient building from most to least haunted, with absurd backstories explaining each one. Jerry even had a stint as a water-fountain sommelier, detailing the tasting notes of the various questionable ones installed throughout the school.
Jerry was my comedy playground, but by graduation Jerry was more than that. Jerry had become an icon. A collective best friend. One that finally made me proud of my writing and gave me that extra push I needed in the finish line to give my application to Maple Ride everything I had.
The trouble is I can’t exactly put Jerry on a résumé. Nobody aside from Christina, who went to the high school across town, ever knew it was me.
Unlike Seb, who has always been loudly talented and beloved. The Instagram he started junior year almost felt like a cosmic joke when it blew up. Everything Seb touches turns to gold.
“It doesn’t matter.” I pull up the Adams’ Apple account on my phone, flashing the screen at her. It has nearly a hundred thousand followers. “How am I supposed to compete with that?”
Christina barely acknowledges it. “Easy. Seduce him to distract him.”
Bluebeary is too fragile to survive three chuckings in a row, so I spare him, but just barely. “Wow. Maybe you really do need to stop watching Succession. ”
“Oh, come on. You said you wanted your first kiss to be all fireworks perfect, and the two of you already have enough badly repressed chemistry to light campus on fire. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
Of course I’ve thought about kissing Seb. We’re up in each other’s literal and figurative space way too often not to have had those kinds of thoughts. But I know better than to think that attraction is anything more than a symptom of biology—for one thing, there’s the constant proximity. I paid enough attention in AP Psych to know about the mere-exposure effect, which is to say, familiarity makes a person more attractive to another person. And for another, the adrenaline of constantly trying to tear each other a new one can easily be confused with the heart-pounding, blood-rushing effects of attraction.
Also yes, Seb is objectively hot. Hence the long line of classmates asking me about his relationship status, like I was a bouncer for his club. Seb didn’t date much in high school—a few weeks with Janie, a fellow writer on the paper with us, and a few months with Roger, a guy from Seb’s calculus study group—but that sure didn’t stop everyone from trying. I’d have to be in alarming levels of denial not to acknowledge the appeal of Seb—equal parts affable and cocky, with the broad, infectious kind of grin that sticks with me long after he’s out of sight.
But the absurdity of Christina’s “plan” aside, she’s right. I’ve never actually kissed anyone. It shouldn’t even be that big a deal, except the circumstances made it one. Every attempt I have ever made at kissing or being kissed has ended in unmitigated, preposterous disaster. If I am going to risk yet again experiencing the mortal humiliation that came with the first three encounters, the last person I’m going to chance it with is Seb. It would be like sending the universe a handwritten invitation to wreck my life.
“If I’ve thought about it, it’s just my brain overcorrecting. Friends close, enemies closer, et cetera,” I say dismissively, ignoring the flush of heat in my cheeks. “And I’m not wimping out. It’s just that this feels like backsliding.”
It settles in a different way, then. Not just the shock of Seb being here, but the permanence of it. I lean back against the edge of my mattress, slumping my shoulders.
“How do you figure?” Christina asks.
“Like, I came here to be someone new.” I touch a hand to my hair, relishing the unexpected drop of space where more of it used to be. The lightness of it bouncing on my shoulders. “Separate from my family and from all the stuff I was expected to do in high school and—separate from Seb. And now I’m finally here, and the first thing I have to do is compete with him all over again?”
I’m starting to feel like Sisyphus. Except instead of lugging a boulder up a hill I’ve been trying to shove Seb off a cliff. And now somehow I’m the one back at the bottom of it, farther down than I thought it could go—not just having to prove myself all over again but unprove him in the process.
“Well, the way I see it, you were always going to have to compete for the spot. That’s what we came here to do, isn’t it?” She points back toward the sign. “Make Maple Ride our bitch.”
I let out a sigh of acknowledgment.
“And you were already someone new. That’s what Jerry was, right?” Christina is uncharacteristically serious, meeting my eyes so intently I can’t look away. “But now you’re Sadie again—no hiding, no smoke and mirrors. And if there’s anything Sadie can do well, it’s kick Seb Adams’s ass.”
I press my palms to my cheeks, burying my face in my hands.
“So own it already,” Christina demands. “You didn’t vanquish Seb by getting into Maple Ride over him, because you didn’t do it as yourself. You did it as good little Sadie who did everything she was supposed to do and hid behind a character. But now’s your real chance to beat him, this time with everything you’ve got. So go out there and finish him off once and for all.”
I pull my hands away to blink at her and the effect of her “I was captain of a high school cross-country team that went to nationals” voice in its full force. It’s undeniably effective. I hate that there’s a flame igniting low in my ribs right now—hate how deeply innate it is, that I already know I have no choice but to follow it. That some part of me knew I would the moment I locked eyes with Seb on campus; that an even deeper part of me knows I would have been lost without that flame to follow in the first place.
“Yeah.” I nod to myself once and then a second time toward her. “You’re right. High school was my Avengers. This is my Endgame. ”
She leans back, satisfied. “Go email them and get your name on the list, then change out of that dress. I want to get to the dining hall before everything vaguely edible is gone.”
She flips Succession back on, leaving me to open my own laptop and start typing. Subject line: “Staff Writer Submission—Sadie Brighton.” Email: “Hi! I’m emailing to put my name in for the staff position. Excited to get cracking!”
Unwritten words: Seb Adams, watch your irritatingly hot, talented back.