The Best Laid Plans(81)

“Hey, slow down!” She reaches an arm out to me. I stop suddenly and she almost collides into my back. “He’s not trying to play you. Andrew would never do that to you.” She puts a hand on my shoulder and I whip away from her.

“How do you know?”

“Because he loves you.”

The words make it even harder to breathe. “Stop.”

I can’t handle any of this right now. A wave of nausea rolls from my stomach up through my chest and I clench my teeth together until it passes. She continues on.

“Come on, Keely.” Her voice is soft. I feel bad that she’s comforting me when just a few minutes ago she was the one in tears. “That boy would do anything for you.”

I know I have to tell her about the Plan, why everything is so messed up. Then she’ll know why she’s wrong.

There’s a sliver of light on the horizon and the sky around us is hazy and blue, almost morning. There’s a bird chirping somewhere, but I can’t tell what kind it is. I’ve forgotten all of the birdcalls we learned in kindergarten. I wonder how long it will take me to forget everything else.

I sigh and turn to Hannah. “This wasn’t the first time, okay?”

“I know,” she says. Not what I was expecting.

“What?”

“You’re my best friends and you guys have been acting so weird around each other lately. It’s not like I haven’t noticed. You can barely be in the same room together. Of course something is going on.”

“I lied to Dean, remember? About being a virgin?” I feel a sharp pain in my head and I reach a hand up and press it against my forehead, wishing for the millionth time I didn’t drink 20,000 margaritas. I can feel the tequila churning in my stomach.

“Of course I remember,” she says. “Keely, did you sleep with Andrew?”

“It was that thing you said at lunch that day,” I say, the words spilling out of me. “That Andrew was such an expert, that he knew what he was doing. He could help me practice—”

“So you’ve been practicing with him?” she asks, and I can’t help but notice Hannah seems a little excited, her eyes glittering.

“Hannah, stop,” I say. “This isn’t good news.”

“No, this is great news!” Now she’s full-on smiling.

“No, we’re not friends anymore, okay?” It feels freeing to finally say it to someone. I didn’t realize how much I needed to talk about this with her, how heartbroken I’ve been to lose him. “He never wanted to . . . practice . . . with me in the first place. We didn’t even go all the way, because he couldn’t do it. He just . . . left.”

We turn off Danielle’s street and into town, past the EVmU campus and onto Main Street. I’m struck by the sudden fear that we’ll run into Dean, that he’s stopped playing Mario Kart and has decided to come into town to go to the bars. I can’t see him right now. Not when I’m feeling like this.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she says. “That’s not what was supposed to happen.”

“You can’t just meddle in other people’s lives, okay?” I say, harsher than I intended, and her face goes white. Her mouth turns down and she shuts her eyes for a second and I can tell that I’ve hurt her.

“I didn’t realize all of this was my fault.” Her eyes narrow.

“You’ve been trying to get us together for years,” I say. “If you had just stayed out of it, then none of this would have happened.”

We walk by Jan’s, the windows still dark. It hurts that I’ll never have a pancake breakfast with Andrew here again. The smell of something baking wafts in the air around us and it makes me sick.

“I didn’t force you to do anything,” Hannah says.

“Yeah, but look how happy you were that I did!”

“I was joking, okay?” she says with a humorless laugh. “When I told you to practice with Andrew. I never thought you’d take it seriously.”

“You weren’t joking!” I say, my voice gaining volume. “You can’t backtrack on that just because it didn’t go how you planned.”

“I wasn’t planning anything,” she says, but the catch in her voice says otherwise.

“You wanted us to fall in love and instead it ruined us. And so now you’re saying it was all a joke. Well, sorry your plan didn’t work out. Some of us know better than to fall in love with players. This isn’t like you and Charlie.”

Her face goes bright red, like I’ve slapped her, and I sort of have. Hannah turns to me and her voice is venom. “If you don’t think you’re in love with Andrew, you’re delusional.”

“He’s my best friend,” I say, my usual line, the line that used to come so naturally but now always feels like a lie.

“Yeah, so?” she says. “He’s your best friend and you’re in love with him and it’s destroying you. If you just tell him, everything can go back to normal. What are you so scared of?”

“I have to go,” I say, speeding up my walk and hoping she won’t follow. I need to get away from her. I need to be alone.

“Go where?” she asks, but she’s not running after me.

The truth is I am scared. I’m scared of tomorrow night, of the future, of who will be there and who will disappear with high school, like those birdcalls we learned in kindergarten. But mostly, I’m scared Hannah is right. Because if I’m in love with Andrew, if I’m in love with Andrew, it means I’m completely screwed. Because even if I’m in love with Andrew, he’s still in love with Danielle.