The Cheerleaders(27)

I’m pretty sure she’s a cokehead. It was an awfully heavy accusation to be flinging around.

“I don’t have a problem with her,” Jen said.

“Whatever.” Juliana brushed past her, into Mr. Ward’s room.

Jen stood in the doorway for a moment, stricken. Juliana had whatever-ed her. Whatever was a door slamming in your face; it meant I am annoyed but I don’t care enough to fight with you. In a lot of ways it was the worst thing you could say to a friend.

Juliana didn’t look back at Jen as she strode up to Mr. Ward and flashed him a pass for her vocal lesson in the choir room. Mr. Ward sighed, pointed at the whiteboard where the page numbers for tonight’s assigned reading were listed. Jules copied it down into her planner and was out the door by the bell.

Jen’s eyes pricked, her lungs compressing with that panicked feeling she got over crying in public. The last time she’d cried in class was after a math test in the seventh grade—the only test she’d ever failed. The boys who sat behind her made fun of her all day; crying in class felt like her body’s way of betraying her. She kept her head bowed while Mr. Ward battled with the girls sitting on the ledge by the window, sunning like turtles on a rock.

“Pleeeeeease can we open the window?” Hailey Rosenfield fanned herself with a marble notebook.

“Have a seat,” Mr. Ward pleaded.

“We are sitting.” Hailey nudged her shoulder into her friend’s. The girls giggled, whined about how they just came from gym. Poor Mr. Ward looked like he was barely out of college.

Jen tuned them out, looking up from her notebook only to copy the journal prompt on the whiteboard. Discuss the setting and how it contributes to the mood of the story. She couldn’t think, couldn’t even remember what she’d read of Wuthering Heights last night.

Juliana was pissed at her. Jen couldn’t think of a time when she’d honestly made Jules mad. It was hard to do, which only made it worse that this stupid argument was over Carly Amato, a girl Juliana had only known a couple of months.

I’m not okay. Jen didn’t realize that it was all she’d written in her notebook until Mr. Ward asked if everyone was done writing, if anyone wanted to share their response with the class.

When the bell rang, Jen tore the page out of her notebook. Crushed it and tossed it into Mr. Ward’s wastebasket.

By the time she got to her locker, she was crying. She buried her head.

A soft tap on her shoulder. Jen found herself face to face with Ethan McCready.

She’d known Ethan since they were kids; she hated that people called him Ethan McCreepy, and she flinched every time one of the soccer guys smacked the back of his head whenever they passed by his seat on the bus.

But if she was being honest with herself, Jen knew that Ethan wasn’t making it easy to defend him. In middle school he’d stopped talking to everyone but two of his friends—computer club boys plagued by ill-fitting jeans and cafeteria pizza breath. It was rare to see Ethan not hunched over a desk, the hood of his sweatshirt up and his earbuds in, no matter how many times teachers told him to take them out.

Most damning of all, though, was that Ethan could, in fact, be extremely creepy. The first time Jen saw him, he’d been watching her.

She was in the woods behind her house, scouring the creek for water-polished rocks, when she heard twigs snapping. She stayed crouched, motionless, hoping to see a deer when she looked up. Instead, it was a boy with a bad haircut in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

“Hi,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Jen held out her palm. Ethan came closer, inspected the rock, which was as smooth and white as a pearl.

After that day, he showed up sometimes. After Jen told him she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, Ethan brought a book from the library filled with glossy pictures of reptiles and amphibians. If they were lucky, they caught toads in plastic beach buckets, but Jen always made him put them back.

Jen thought about inviting Ethan over for dinner, like she did with Susan all the time, but she was too embarrassed to ask her mother. She hated when her mother asked her about boys, and the last thing she wanted to do was admit that she’d been spending time alone with one.

And then Ethan ruined everything.

The summer between fourth and fifth grade, they’d been catching tadpoles. Jen saw a cluster of them, wiggling beside the rock where she and Ethan were crouched.

She cupped her hands and scooped them through the water. “I got some!”

Ethan put his hands over hers to stop the tadpoles from escaping. When Jen looked up, he was watching her, and her gut told her exactly what was going to happen.

His mouth landed on her upper lip, and she thought maybe he’d missed. Before she could blink, his lips found hers. When he pulled away, she tasted Sour Patch Kids.

“I’m sorry,” he said. And Jen ran back to her house, leaving her pail behind.

She’d lied to Juliana and Susan about her first kiss. Said it was with Joe Halpern in the dark of a movie theater in the seventh grade. By then she hadn’t spoken to Ethan in years—she hadn’t gone back to the creek after the tadpole day. She sat far away from him on the bus and avoided his eyes when they were assigned to the same table in art class.

When she noticed the hair that had started cropping up on his upper lip, she got a funny feeling in her stomach.

“You dropped this,” Ethan muttered, and then he was gone.