tell her.
“I figured,” she says, the cap of her eyeliner pencil in
her mouth. Her head towel falls to the floor and her long,
auburn hair unfurls.
“You going to talk to Charlie today?” I bite a hunk off
some cardboard-tasting health bar rip-off, and wrinkle my
nose. Chew it anyway. I’m too nervous to eat but I know
I need something.
“Yep.” She starts working a wide-toothed comb through her hair, and when it sticks, she looks around the kitchen with a scowl until her eyes land on the carafe of olive oil. “Aha,” she says, and puts a few drops into the
palm of her hand and works it into the knot.
“Resourceful,” I say.
Charlie is Rowan’s boyfriend. He lives in New York.
They met at soccer camp, and now they video chat every
day from school during Rowan’s study hall. “So everything
is good with you two?” I look around, unsettled. Anxious.
I got up way too early.
“Yep,” she says again, and then gets a hair dryer, plugs
it in, and turns it on.
I drum my fingers on a stack of crap on the table and
glance at the clock. “Okay, then.”
My stomach flips as I think about school. I don’t want
to be a hero. I don’t want to be noticed by anybody. It’s
embarrassing. And I’m so beyond what happened when
Trey and I barreled into that snowplow to keep it from
hitting Angotti’s Trattoria. Ever since Sawyer told me he’s
been having a vision now too, I haven’t been able to stop
worrying about him, and about what horrible thing he’s
going to be forced to go through.
My chest aches thinking about it. It was the worst time
of my life. I felt so alone. “Poor Sawyer,” I murmur. “Yeah, poor guy. He’s really dreading seeing you,”
Trey says sarcastically from behind me.
Rowan catches sight of her bathroom opportunity,
yanks the hair dryer cord from the outlet, and runs for it. I smirk at Trey. He is so awesome that he actually
believed me when I told him what was happening to me—
after a while, anyway. Like, thirty very important seconds
before the crash happened.
But he doesn’t know about Sawyer.
Three
We all climb into the pizza delivery car since there’s no longer a giant truck o’ balls—I totaled the sucker.
Luckily, har har, the insurance money is going to provide us with a new one. Dad’s having the old balls fixed and mounted. Apparently they snapped off pretty cleanly in the crash and didn’t get banged too hard (dot-com), thanks to the snow.
Trey drives, Rowan’s in the back, and I’m riding shotgun, peering out the windshield as a flurry of snow buzzes around the car. I can’t concentrate on anything, but I stare at a vocab worksheet for a test I’ve been told we’re having today.
I glance up as we pass the infamous billboard, and there’s Jose Cuervo, thank the dogs. I wonder for the millionth time what Sawyer sees.
As we near school, my right leg starts jiggling and I put my vocab paper away. It’s useless to do anything. Trey glances at me as we pull into the parking lot. “You okay?” he asks.
I let out a little huff of breath. “I think so. It’s weird.” “Nervous?”
“I—I guess. I’ve been gone a long time.” The truth is,
I’m nervous because Sawyer and I never talked about what would happen at school. Like, are we a couple? Or are we being secretive so nobody tells our parents? Or . . . am I not cool enough for his friends?
I hate that I just had that last thought. What the crap happened to turn me into an insecure loser? I was doing so well there for a while, back when I accepted the fact that I was a total psycho. Amazing how freeing that was. I take a few deep breaths and find that old crazy confidence as Trey parks and turns off the car, and then I ease out, making sure I move carefully. I don’t want to overdo it or anything, or I’ll get stuck back home again.
“Don’t worry, Jules,” Rowan says, surprising me because I thought she was listening to her music all this time. “We got your back.”
Trey takes my backpack since I’m not allowed to lift more than like twenty pounds for another week or so, and the backpack, with a few weeks worth of work in it, officially weighs forty-seven tons. And then we walk into school. The three of us together in a line, like we’re the friggin’ Avengers, gonna take somebody down.
I stare straight ahead, Trey on my left, Rowan on my right, feeling totally badass despite my nerves. We get a few glances, a few people shrugging in our direction or outright pointing at us. At me. We even get a smattering of applause from some of Rowan’s ninth-grade friends at their lockers, and everybody’s saying hi to Trey and me like it’s opposite day here in Chicagoland. I ease my way up the half-dozen steps to the sophomore hallway, not able to take stairs at full stride quite yet, using the handrail to help. And then we’re nearing my locker and I have to work hard not to strain to look for Sawyer. I want him to look for me. That’s how this is going to go. I just decided.
“That’s good, you guys,” I say, and I hate that I’m a little winded. I think that’s the longest distance I’ve gone in one stretch in a while. “I got this.”
Trey sets my overladen backpack inside my locker and gives me a quick grin as he leaves. “See you at lunch.”