What to Say Next(20)

“Hey, guys,” I say, and move my lips in the way I think approximates a smile. It requires complicated muscle coordination. More exhausting than that time Violet made me try Pilates.

I look over and Violet jumps out of the booth, runs over to me. Annie gives me a Brownie salute, which is one of our inside jokes, and I see I’ve won her over just by showing up. That makes me smile for real, and then the smiling makes me tear up, so I stop doing it.

“You came!” Violet says.

“I can’t stay long.” As soon as the words slip out, I realize they are true. After dropping David off, being alone in the car felt unbearable, and the Pizza Palace was closer than home. Since the accident, my mom has been making me drive at every opportunity. She claims she doesn’t want me to develop a lifelong phobia, and I guess her plan is mostly working. Still, when I’m alone in the car, I flinch at passing SUVs, and I’m way too aware of how fast all the other traffic is going, how thin the line is between us, how easily one mistake can kill us all.

Cars are terrible, powerful, destructive machines. Maybe sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to drive them. Maybe no one should.

Now, here with everyone, I feel no better than I did on the ride over. I’m sweaty around my friends lately, like socializing is a form of cardio but without the postexercise endorphins or smugness. I need to beg my body to push through this.

“Can’t believe you ditched newspaper yesterday,” Annie says. “After all that work, you’re just going to throw away the chance at editor in chief?”

I shrug, and Gabriel uses that as an opportunity to start massaging my shoulders.

“You look tight,” he says. For about five minutes last year, Gabriel and I were together. One of those stupid things that happen because you find yourselves in the corner of a room at a party where everyone is drunk. He kissed me suddenly, like a bird swooping to pick garbage from a can, and after I recovered from the surprise attack, I kissed him back. That Monday, he held my hand in the hallway at school, and then we made out again later in the 7-Eleven parking lot in between taking sips of our Slurpees. Two weeks later, he broke it off, said something about us being better off as friends, which was fine by me. I wasn’t particularly into Gabriel, but it was fun having someone to kiss and hold hands with. Having, for just a little while, a pleasant distraction.

Now, though, I’d really like him to stop touching my shoulders. In fact, I wish there were a way to transfer his hands to Annie, who for the past few months has had a secret unexplainable crush on him. She’s never said it out loud, but Violet and I know she’s hoping he’ll ask her to prom. There’s nothing wrong with Gabriel on paper, but there isn’t really much there there. Annie’s not the type of girl who should have to settle for pleasant distractions. She’s too cool for that.

Jessica, Willow, and Abby burst through the door in a loud explosion of giggles and then stop at the counter to get their Diet Cokes before heading to the back to join us. I don’t really like these girls—I have never liked these girls—and yet somehow they are on the periphery of our friend group. Okay, fine, we are actually on the periphery of their friend group, since as a trio, Jessica, Willow, and Abby are by far the most popular girls in the junior class. I have no idea how they’ve managed to swing it—popularity is an undefinable thing at Mapleview, which as best I can tell involves a whole lot of unearned, effortless confidence and the ability to get other people to look at you for no reason at all.

Jessica is a blonde, Willow is a brunette, and Abby is a redhead, just like every teen friend group on television (except, in this case, sans a sassy black sidekick). Boom! Best friends for life. I assume there’s more to their friendship than hair-color optics and an affinity for thong underwear. That taken individually there is the distant possibility they might actually be interesting people. I doubt I will ever know, though, since they travel as a pack.

The reason I don’t like them is not because they’re walking clichés and therefore like to dabble in being quintessential mean girls, but because their conversations are boring. We live in a small and privileged bubble in Mapleview, and I’ve never understood their desire to make it seem even smaller.

“Boys,” Abby says by way of hello, and the way it rolls off her tongue makes it sound like she is both belittling them and flirting with them at the same time. I practice her intonation in my head, boys, file it away for use far, far in the future. Like college. No, that’s just a year and a half away. Maybe it will come in handy if I go to graduate school. “And ladies.”

The guys act differently when the three of them are around. More nervous, even louder. Gabriel mercifully stops his massage. Justin smiles goofily. He and Jessica used to hook up, but last I heard, she broke it off with him because she’s been hanging out with a freshman from NYU. In the world of social climbing, college boy beats high school boy every time. Rumor has it that Justin is still devastated.

“So what’s the deal with you and David Drucker?” Willow asks me, and for no good reason I feel my hands curl into fists. Guess I am moving through the five stages of grief after all. Making my designated pit stop at number two: anger.

“Nothing’s up. We’re friends,” I say.

“Come on, you’re not really friends with David Drucker,” Abby says, and sighs dramatically. Like everything I have to say is frustrating. “Sitting at someone’s lunch table doesn’t make you besties.”