Chapter One #2
“What?” I lean into her space and rip the paper from her hands. Oops. Probably shouldn’t have done that. The corner tore off, but that’s not important. “Let me see!”
There it is.
ENG 231-101: American Literature.
MWF 8:00 a.m.
I barely resist the urge to jump up and down in the middle of everything. That would be extremely out of character, but not uncalled for.
“But wait,” I ask, calming down. “Something’s actually wrong. You weren’t just messing with me.” I’m not great with emotions—others’ or my own—but Esha’s, I understand.
“Yeah. You got it, but I didn’t.” Her eyes roll up, past her bangs, and she throws her head back like she wants to scream.
She didn’t even really want the class, but she wanted to take it with me.
“It gets worse. Your classes are all in the morning. Mine are all in the afternoon. We don’t have a single one together. ”
“So we’ll never see each other,” I whisper.
She nods.
Okay. This is fine. It’s totally okay that I’m starting my senior year alone. It’s totally okay that I got the class I wanted but had to sacrifice my other half for it. It means next to nothing if I’m doing it all alone. Nothing I need is worth that.
Maybe I can change my schedule. I know I begged for this class, bothering our college liaison in her office for weeks so she wouldn’t forget that I desperately wanted it, but maybe she’d let me switch. Maybe she’d let me shift something around, so I have some time with Esha.
“No,” Esha says. Her eyes aren’t downturned anymore—they’re extremely determined and a little pissed off. “I can see what you’re thinking, and no, absolutely not.”
Esha is a person who always gets her way. I don’t really know what that’s like. I do know I won’t win in an argument.
She pulls on my arm again, guiding me toward the tiny closet where they keep the books.
There’s a short line, and she plants us at the end and turns to face me.
“I know this sucks. No, I know it does. But we have to spread our wings eventually, right?” She points to the floor we’re standing on, where the horrible eagle logo is painted on the hardwood.
She chuckles, but my heart falls somewhere near my feet.
She’s not wrong. This was bound to happen.
Esha pursuing her own interests, me pursuing mine.
I wasn’t going to follow her into her advanced anatomy lab or anything.
But I’d hoped we’d at least have this together … and maybe, like, gym.
“Hi, Mrs. Hefner!” I hear Esha say, in her overly cheery talking-to-adults voice. She’s very diplomatic with them.
“Hi girls! Ready for your books?”
We finally step into the tiny closet. Even though it feels like I’m dying, there’s that delicious old-book smell—the smell of dozens and dozens of well-loved Dover Classics and beaten-up textbooks—and that’s something.
Esha hands over her schedule, and Mrs. Hefner, the school’s completely overworked secretary, roams around to find her books among the stacks.
“Very ambitious schedule, with both chemistry and advanced calc,” she mutters as she hands Esha book after heavy book. “Are you interested in medicine, dear? This schedule screams pre-med.”
“Yes,” Esha says with a smile as she’s loaded down with an armful of textbooks. She doesn’t elaborate. A vet is what she wants to be, not a human doctor.
Mrs. Hefner looks at me expectantly, and I realize this is the part where I’m supposed to hand her my schedule. I’m actively holding up her line by standing here staring into the void. (God forbid the new freshmen don’t get their keyboarding workbooks on time.)
I surrender it. Mrs. Hefner takes the paper and goes back to her roaming, returning with fewer books, all thinner than even one of Esha’s science-y books.
But there it is, right on top. One of those perfect, purple Norton anthologies I’ve been salivating over for years.
That one’s mine. It seems as old as paper itself, worn and torn and nearly destroyed.
The edges are basically brown. It’s undoubtedly covered in highlights and doodles, and someone’s probably drawn a dick in the margins.
I don’t care. I’m going to read it cover to cover.
Last year, I volunteered to help Mrs. Hefner hand out books in this stuffy, windowless room just to look at the Nortons.
Just to hold one and to thumb through it so I could see what I was in for next year.
To see what I’m in for now. I mean, these anthologies are what lit majors read, right? I’ve basically made it.
“You’re good to go, dear,” Mrs. Hefner says, covering the purple cover with my schedule.
Oh, right. There are other things to do today. I can’t stay in this closet forever. Today wasn’t about this one book, anyway. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t.
We leave. Esha’s chatting away: about where her classes are, about buildings on campus she’s never been in before, about how she’s excited for the white coat she gets to wear in chem lab.
She’s talking about goggles and formaldehyde and squid, for some reason, as we walk toward the parking lot.
There are still people everywhere, hanging out in the parking lot and lingering in the crosswalks like that’s not dangerous.
We reach my car door, and Esha nudges her shoulder against mine, because she can’t reach out to hug me without toppling her book tower. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, walking away with a genuine smile.
“Okay. See you tomorrow,” I tell her retreating back.
But will I, though?
Maybe. We still have Beta Club (a national club for anyone who has an A-average equivalent GPA), so that’s something.
I settle my books onto the passenger seat of my car. My arms are exhausted, so they just sort of pour down onto the torn, tan leather. I’m half-tempted to buckle them in, but that seems excessive.
Then I hear a familiar voice behind me.
“Hey, Novella.”
That nickname. Because I’m too short to be a whole novel.
Absolutely not. Not today. Not him. But against my better judgment, I turn around.
Hayes Collins stands right there, Endeavour High lanyard hanging out of the pocket of his jeans.
He’s wearing forest-green Crocs. What a dork.
His dirty-blond curls are overgrown and his white T-shirt is rumpled, which is strange, because Hayes Collins is never anything but perfect.
Even his face is perfect, the lines of his features sharp and immaculate.
That angular nose. That strong jaw. So annoyingly flawless.
He literally wears dress shirts to school. So the messiness is … new.
So new and so disarming that I can’t help but make an ass out of myself.
“Why do you look like that?” I ask, nose scrunched.
“I just woke up. I forgot this was happening today.” He scratches the back of his neck, and the wrinkled neckline of his shirt gets even more wrinkled, and I really need to get out of this conversation, because this bizarro version of him is challenging my view of reality. This is a glitch in the matrix.
“You forgot that orientation was happening today? When it’s always the day before the first day of school?” I feel my brows scrunch up, because this is so weird. “You don’t forget things, Hayes.”
I’m standing in front of an alternate-universe version of Hayes Collins, one who’s never battled me in a student-government race. One who’s never beaten me in a student-government race. One who I’m not actively trying to defeat in the race for the Beta Club presidency.
I know that guy. I hate that guy. This is not him.
“I’m a human being, you know,” he says archly.
“Allegedly.” I cross my arms, leaning against my closed driver-side door. “Good to see you, or whatever, but please go away. I don’t trust you around my car.”
“Oh, come on.” He extends a conciliatory hand in my direction, his eyes suddenly brightening. “That was one time. You’re still mad about that?”
My hands fall to my sides for a brief second. Then annoyance takes over, and I start waving them around in front of my face like we’re in the middle of a Real Housewives fight.
“They had to come get me in the middle of a presentation because you set off my car alarm. Intentionally. Because you were trying to paper my windshield with your own campaign posters!”
My blood starts to burn. I had to leave my bio presentation unfinished and walk across campus with the principal toward the sound of my blaring alarm. That one loud, hazard-light-flashing, final-grade-destroying moment took him from my competitor to my sworn enemy.
“I apologized,” he muttered, nudging a rock with the toe of his awful, nasty, uncool shoe.
“You did not,” I reflexively spit out. “Well, you did. But only because they made you.”
It was the one time I can ever remember Hayes Collins getting in trouble. They called his doctor parents and everything.
I wouldn’t let it go. I still haven’t. In the days after that fiasco, I folded every single one of those campaign flyers he put on my car into paper airplanes and sent them flying in his direction from strategic vantage points whenever I saw him.
I was only trying to get on his nerves, but he started throwing them back, and they banned us both from using the school printers for campaign stuff.
And after all that, he still won.
He won the campaign, and he finished the year with a better GPA. He’ll be valedictorian instead of me, if I’m not careful.
“Yeah. Anyway”—he starts walking past me, toward the stairs and the school—”I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I can feel my face flaming, and my skin is suddenly too tight.
Oh, no. I will not look at his stupidly handsome face unless absolutely necessary. Not today, and not tomorrow.