You Should See Me in a Crown(29)
“You didn’t block my path,” he answers. “You looked bad, so I stopped to make sure you were okay. It’s not like— I was worried about you.”
“You don’t have to be worried about me anymore, Jordan.” My palms are sweating, and even though going to class is the last thing I want to do right now, I don’t know if I can stand in front of him and have this conversation. We may be in a cease-fire, but my nerves are worn too thin to be patient today.
“I’ll always worry about you, Lighty,” he says. “Us not hanging out anymore didn’t change that.”
He smiles, quick and easy. “But hey, you should think about switching volunteer things and coming to letter writing tonight. I got partnered with Rachel yesterday, and I’d take you giving me the cold shoulder again over her talking about her plans for world domination any day.”
I smirk. The other mandatory volunteer activity I could have been assigned to this week was even more useless than normal—writing letters to elderly cats with acid reflux, which would be read to them by their caregivers. I’m so glad I spent my time preparing for Campbell to be overrun by show-tune fanatics rather than spend my night penning missives to gassy cats. Which is saying something.
Jordan leans against the nearest locker and crosses his arms, unconcerned about the fact that the warning bell just rang and the two of us should be heading to our classes.
“I’m convinced she’s only writing these letters so that she can summon the cats to her altar of sacrifice under the next full moon.”
“Hey, J! Let’s go, man!” I turn around and see Jaxon Price waving at Jordan. Jordan waves him off, and Jaxon huffs before leaving him behind.
I put on my best Stone voice. “Pretty sure the spells only work when Venus is in its sixth house.” Jordan shoves off the locker and begins walking in the direction of my AP Chem class with me. I know for a fact that he’s supposed to be headed the other direction, like he was when he stopped me, but I don’t bother mentioning it.
“Besides, aren’t you and Rachel friends?” I can’t help but ask.
The PomBots and the Jacket Jocks all seem to stick together. They go to the same parties, join the same extracurriculars, date one another.
Jordan laughs as he walks backward. People sort of move out of his way as he passes, so he doesn’t even have to worry about running into someone.
“We’re not friends, Lighty. We just know the same people.” He shrugs as he rounds the corner effortlessly. “Let me know if your weird news gets any weirder, okay?”
I just nod as he gives me a quick salute and jogs the rest of the way back to meet Jaxon.
I look down at my phone one more time, hoping that Granny has sent me another text. An update, anything. Even though I know it’s probably not serious. Even though I know he’ll be better tomorrow. Sometimes I worry less, but I never stop worrying altogether.
Jordan gets it. Or he used to get it. But that limbo, the space between the people we used to be and the people we are now, feels like it’s always going to hang in the air between us.
The first time I see Gabi in two days, she’s marching around the corner into the band hallway, phone pressed to her ear and a small cardboard box in her hand.
She waves as she walks toward me, hanging up as she reaches me.
“Hello, my amazing and altruistic best friend.”
“Wait. Are we just not going to address the fact that you dropped off the grid for like”—I check my wrist for a nonexistent watch—“two days straight?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. There were some things I needed to handle during business hours, and school was getting in the way of that.” She smiles, like that’s the end of that discussion. And I guess it is. Gabi is good at only talking about what she wants to talk about at any given moment. “Here. These are for you.”
She places the box in my hands, and I look down. A variety of buttons with my face on them are scattered inside.
“G, this seems—and I really mean no shade, because I recognize that you’re a prom-operative genius—but this seems absurd,” I say. “There’s at least a hundred of these things in here.”
She reaches in and grabs one to pin to her blazer. And then she does the same to my top—some weird, flouncy thing that I never would have selected on my own.
I can’t believe what I’ve reduced myself to in the name of a scholarship.
“You have to trust the process, Lizzie.”
She pats the button where it sits over my heart. I realize that I never actually heard an apology or a retraction from her after the other night. Not even in her voice mails and text messages did she ever say she was wrong. Just different variations of “My therapist tells me that my tone could use some improvement” or “You know I love you for who you are, right?” None of which smooth over the way that conversation made me feel.
G nestles her snakeskin purse into the curve of her elbow.
“Please believe me when I say this is the only way for you to win, okay?” She pulls out her phone, checks the screen, and then frowns. I want to ask her what’s so bad on there that it’s got her wrinkling her forehead so hard, even though wrinkles are her number two biggest fear in life (second only to the robot band at Chuck E. Cheese, obviously). “The numbers aren’t good. We really have the deck stacked against us here.”