“How do you know what my room looks like?”
“Hidden cameras. Everywhere.”
He snorts. I crane my neck to see what he’s writing next to “reason for tardiness.”
Attempted to dye her dress brown. Failed spectacularly.
“Is that really necessary?” I ask, pulling my cardigan tight across my dress and the latte stain that shouts here’s where my boobs are! “I was stuck in traffic. All the lights in my neighborhood were out.” I don’t tell him about the fender bender.
He checks the box marked UNEXCUSED and tears the pass from the pad—ripping it down the middle. “Oops,” he says in a tone that suggests he doesn’t feel bad at all. “Guess I have to write another one.”
“Cool. I don’t have anywhere to be.”
“Artoo, it’s our last day,” he says, holding a hand to his heart. “We should cherish these precious moments we have together. In fact”—he reaches inside his jacket pocket for a fancy pen—“this would be a great time to practice my calligraphy.”
“You’re not serious.”
Unblinking, he peers at me over the top of his thin oval glasses. “Like Ben Solo, I never joke about calligraphy.”
Surely this is my villain origin story. He presses the pen’s tip to the paper and begins forming the letters of my name again, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. McNair’s Concentration Face is half hilarious, half terrifying: teeth gritted and jaw tight, mouth scrunched slightly to one side. The suit makes him look so rigid, so stiff, like an accountant or an insurance salesman or a low-level manager at a company that makes software for other companies. I’ve never seen him at a party. I can’t imagine him relaxing enough to watch a movie. Not even Star Wars.
“Really impressive. Great job.” I say it sarcastically, but my name actually does look good in that delicate black ink. I could picture it on a book cover.
He passes the slip to me but holds it tight, preventing me from escaping. “Wait a second. I want to show you something.”
He lets go of the slip so suddenly that I stumble backward, then hops off his chair and heads out of the office. I’m annoyed but curious, so I follow him. He stops in front of the school trophy case, gives it a theatrical wave of his arm.
“I’ve been here for four years, so I have, in fact, seen this trophy case before,” I say.
But he’s pointing at one particular plaque, engraved with names and graduation dates. With his index finger, he taps the glass. “Donna Wilson, 1986. Westview’s first valedictorian. Do you know what she ended up doing?”
“Saved herself four years of agony by graduating three decades before you enrolled here?”
“Close. She became the US ambassador to Thailand.”
“How is that close?”
He waves his hand. “Steven Padilla, 1991. Won a Nobel Prize for physics. Swati Joshi, 2006. Olympic gold medalist for pole vault.”
“If you’re trying to impress me with your knowledge of past valedictorians, it’s working.” I step closer to him, batting my lashes. “I am so turned on right now.”
It’s over the top, I know, but this has always been the easiest way to ruffle this seemingly unruffle-able guy. He and his last girlfriend, Bailey, didn’t even acknowledge each other at school, and I wondered what they were like outside of it. When I thought about him shedding his stony exterior long enough for a make-out session, I felt a strange little tremor in my belly. That was how horrific I found the idea of someone kissing Neil McNair.
Just as I hoped, he blushes. His skin is so fair beneath his freckles that he’s never able to hide how he really feels.
“What I’m trying to say,” he says after clearing his throat, “is Westview High has a history of successful valedictorians. What would it say for you—Rowan Roth, romance-novel critic? It’s not quite at the same level as the others, is it?”
I’ve told Kirby and Mara I don’t really read them anymore, but McNair brings up my romance novels whenever he can. His derogatory tone is the reason I keep them to myself these days.
“Or maybe you’d graduate to writing one of your own,” he continues. “More romance novels—exactly what the world needs.”
His words push me backward until his freckles blur together. I don’t want him to know how much this infuriates me. Even if I get to the point where “romance author” is attached to my name, people like McNair won’t hesitate to tear me down. To laugh at the thing I love.
“It must be sad,” I say, “to despise romance so much that the thought of someone else finding joy in it is so repulsive to you.”
“I thought you and Sugiyama broke up.”
“I—what?”
“The joy you find in romance. I assumed that was Spencer Sugiyama.”
I feel my face heat up. That is… not where I thought this was going.
“No. Not Spencer.” Then I go for a low blow: “You look different today, McNair. Did your freckles multiply overnight?”
“You’re the one with the hidden cameras.”
“Alas, they’re not HD.” I refrain from making a dirty joke I really, really want to make. I flash the green slip in front of his face. “Since you were kind enough to write me a late pass, I should probably, you know, use it.”
Last homeroom. I hope the walk to class is enough to get my blood flowing normally again. My adrenaline always works overtime when I’m talking to McNair. The stress he’s caused me has probably sliced a half-decade off my life span.
With a nod, he says, “End of an era. You and me, I mean.” He wags his index finger between the two of us, his voice softer than it was ten seconds ago.
I’m quiet for a moment, wondering if today carries the same sense of finality for him that it does for me. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess so.”
Then he makes a shooing motion with one hand, snapping me out of my nostalgia and replacing it with the contempt that’s been both a warm blanket and a bed of nails. A comfort and a curse.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
OVERDUE NOTICE
Westview High School Library
to [email protected]
June 10, 2:04 p.m.
This is an automated message from the WESTVIEW HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY.
Library records show the following item(s) are overdue. Please either renew them or return them to the library immediately to avoid accruing a fine.
- Your Guide to a 5: AP Calculus / Griffin, Rhoda
- Conquering the AP Government Exam / Wagner, Carlyn
- Love Notes: Romance Novels through the Ages / Smith, Sonia, and Tilley, Annette
- Analyzing Austen / Ramirez, Marisa
- What Now: Life After Senior Year / Holbrook, Tara
8:02 a.m.
FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH him, and I already feel a McMigraine coming on. I rub the space between my eyes as I hurry to homeroom.
“Our future valedictorian,” Mrs. Kozlowski says with a smile when I hand her my late pass, and I hope she’s right.
Our homerooms are mixed to foster camaraderie between the grades. McNair proposed it two years ago in student council, and the principal ate it up. It wasn’t the worst idea, I guess, if you ignored every single one of our other, more pressing issues: rampant plagiarism among the freshman class, the need for an expanded cafeteria menu to accommodate dietary restrictions, reducing our carbon footprint.
Before I make my way to Kirby and Mara, a trio of junior girls pounces on me.
“Hi, Rowan!” says Olivia Sweeney.
“We were worried you weren’t going to be here!” says her friend Harper Chen.
“Well… I’m here,” I say.
“Thank God,” Nisha Deshpande says, and the three of them giggle.
We’re all in student council, where they’ve unanimously thrown their support to me instead of McNair, which I’ve always been grateful for. They compliment my clothes and worked on my campaigns and brought me cupcakes when I got into Eme
rson. Kirby and Mara call them my fan club. Truly, they’re very sweet, if a little overeager.
“Is everything ready for Howl?” I ask.
The three of them exchange wicked grins.
“We’ve been ready for weeks,” Nisha says. “I don’t want to say it’s going to be the best Howl the school has ever seen, but it just might be.”
“We’re not giving you any hints,” Harper adds.
“As much as we might want to.” Olivia reaches down to tug up one of her knee socks, which are eerily similar to the pair I’m wearing.
“No hints,” I agree. McNair and I organized the game last year, but none of the previous year’s locations can be reused.
“Will you sign our yearbooks?” Nisha asks. “Since it’s your last day?”
Three arms thrust Sharpies in my direction. I sign all of them with slightly different messages, and after a chorus of thank-yous, I turn toward Kirby and Mara, who are waving at me from a corner of the room. My mom was right; all we’re doing is signing yearbooks. We have an extended homeroom, then the assembly, and then shortened classes for everyone who still goes here.
“There you are,” Kirby says. Her black hair is braided in a crown around her head. The three of us spent hours teaching ourselves how to Dutch braid last year, but Kirby is the only one who mastered it. “What happened this morning?”
I recount the day so far, from the power outage to my Spencer bender. “And then I was McNaired in the front office,” I finish. “So yeah, it’s been a day and a half, and it’s only eight o’clock.”
Mara places a hand on my arm. She’s quieter, gentler than Kirby, rarely the first to speak in a group conversation. The only time she steps into the spotlight is when she’s dancing a solo onstage. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. McNair was just being his usual troll self. Can you believe he wrote my late pass in calligraphy? It was like last fall when he downloaded all those dog videos in the library to mess with the internet when I was researching my Jane Austen paper. He’ll do anything to slow me down.”
She arcs a pale eyebrow. “I meant the accident.”
“Oh. Right. A little shaken up, but I’m okay. I’ve never hit anyone before.” I’m not sure why my mind went immediately to McNair when the accident was clearly the more traumatic event.
“Mara,” Kirby says, pointing to a yearbook photo of the two of them dancing in the winter talent show earlier this year. “Look how cute we are.”
Kirby Taing and I became friends first, when we were grouped together for a fourth-grade rite of passage: the volcano experiment. Kirby wanted to add more baking soda, create a bigger eruption. We made a mess. We got a B. She met Mara Pompetti in a ballet class a couple years later, though Mara’s always been the more serious dancer.
We wound up at the same middle school and have been a unit ever since, and while I love them both, for years I felt a tiny bit closer to Kirby. She got me through my grandpa’s funeral in seventh grade, and I was the first person she came out to in ninth grade, when she said she’d only ever liked girls. The following year, Mara told both of us that she was bisexual and wanted to start using that label for herself. For a while, she and Kirby used me as a go-between, trying to figure out how each felt about the other. They went to homecoming together last year, which has cemented them as a couple.
They laugh at an unfortunate hair situation in someone’s senior photo while I flip through the book, though as editor in chief, I’ve seen each page hundreds of times. For the senior superlatives, the photo editor made McNair and me pose with our backs pressed up against each other, our arms crossed. Above us are the words MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED. In the photo and in real life, we are exactly the same height: five-five. After the photo was taken, he sprang away from me, as though the back of his shirt touching the back of mine was too much physical contact for rivals to have.
“Pleeeease can we leave the classroom?” star quarterback Brady Becker is begging Mrs. Kozlowski. Brady Becker is the kind of guy who got Bs because teachers loved it when our football team was good, and they couldn’t be good if Brady Becker got Ds. “All the other homerooms are.”
Mrs. Kozlowski holds up her hands. “Okay, okay. Go ahead. Just be sure to make your way over to the auditorium after—”
We’re already out the door.
* * *
Mara and I lean against the bank of lockers we claimed back in freshman year, sharing a cheesy pretzel and a bag of chips from the student store. The combinations will be changed next week, after we’re gone. We were supposed to clean out our lockers earlier this week. Kirby is doing it now, which is kind of Kirby in a nutshell.
“Should I keep this?” She holds up her WHS gym T-shirt. We had to stage an intervention to get her to wash it sophomore year because she kept forgetting to bring it home.
“No!” Mara and I say in unison. Mara aims her phone at Kirby, who poses as though she’s waltzing with the T-shirt.
“Sophomore gym was a special kind of torture,” I say. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t let us waive it.”
“You wanted to waive it,” Kirby corrects. “I for one enjoyed discovering my hidden talent for badminton.”
Oh. Huh. I must have assumed because I remember hating it, that they did too. But I guess it was only McNair and me making a case to the counselor about changing our schedules.
If I used to be better friends with Kirby, it’s faded a little since she and Mara became a couple. But that’s natural. While they spend plenty of time alone, for the most part, we’re just as close as we were in middle school.
Across the hall is that trophy case with the plaque of valedictorian names. It says something about our school that this is what’s front and center—not the football or basketball trophies, but our academic achievements. At Westview, it’s frowned upon if you don’t take at least one AP, and not Music Theory, since everyone knows Mr. Davidson uses it as an excuse to play his shitty jam band’s records. He offers extra credit for going to one of his shows. Kirby and I went sophomore year when she took the class, and let me just say I could have gone my entire life without seeing a middle-aged teacher rip off his sweaty T-shirt onstage and fling it into the audience.
Mara turns the phone on me, and I hug my sweater as tightly as I can. “This boob stain doesn’t need to be immortalized on Instagram.”
Kirby waves the T-shirt at me. “Hello, perfectly good T-shirt right here. I won a lot of games of badminton in this shirt.”
“You can barely see the stain.” Mara says it so sweetly, it almost doesn’t sound like a lie. Then her jaw falls open. “Kirby Kunthea Taing. Is that a condom?”
“From health class last year!” she says, holding up what is definitely a condom. “They were giving them out, and I didn’t want to be rude.…”
Mara hides a laugh behind a curtain of wavy blond hair. “I’m pretty sure neither of us needs it.”
“You want it?” Kirby asks me. “It has spermicide.”
“No, Kirby, I don’t want your old health-class condom.” If I need one anytime soon, I keep a box in my dresser, tucked behind my period underwear. “Besides, it’s probably expired.”
She peers at it. “Not until September.” She unzips my backpack and drops it inside, patting the backpack once she zips it up again. “You’ve got three months to find a worthy suitor.”
With a roll of my eyes, I offer Mara the last chip in the bag, but she shakes her head. Kirby tosses her gym shirt and some other tchotchkes into a nearby trash can. Every so often, a group races down the hall and shouts, “SENIORS!” and we whoop back at them. We trade fist bumps with Lily Gulati, high fives with Derek Price, and whistles with the Kristens (Tanaka and Williams, best friends since the first day of freshman year and virtually inseparable ever since).
Even Luke Barrows stops by with his girlfriend, Anna Ocampo—ranked number one on girls’ varsity tennis—so we can swap yearbooks.
“I’ve been counting down the days until they let us out o
f here,” Luke says.
“Since freshman year?” Anna volleys back. Turning to me, she says, “I’ll miss your Wednesday-morning announcements. You and Neil always cracked me up.”
“Glad to have provided some entertainment.”
They both got tennis scholarships to Division I schools, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I hope they can make it work long-distance.
“Kirby, oh my God,” Anna says, muffling a laugh when a pile of papers tumbles out of Kirby’s locker.
“I know,” she says with a small moan.
Yearbooks are returned to their owners, and Luke crushes me into a hug with arms made muscular from a killer backhand. “Good luck,” he says, and why can’t all breakups be like this? Drama-free, no lingering awkwardness.
While Mara uploads an Instagram video of Kirby extricating an eight-foot-long scarf from her locker, complete with creepy horror-movie soundtrack, I reach into my backpack for my journal. But my fingers skim something else: the envelope I shoved in there this morning.
I know what it is—or at least, I have a general idea. But I don’t remember the exact details, and that makes me a little twitchy. Carefully, I run my finger along the envelope flap and pull out the sheet of folded paper.
Rowan Roth’s Guide to High School Success, it says across the top, followed by ten numbered items, and the words drag me back to the summer before high school. I added number ten a month into freshman year. Naturally, I’d been inspired by something I read in a book. I’d been so excited about high school, half in love with the person I imagined I’d be by the end of it. Really, it’s more a list of goals than an actual guide.
I’ve accomplished none of them.
“What about this?” Kirby asks. “One hundred percent. On a math test!”
“Recycling, Kirby.” But Mara takes a photo of it anyway.
“Our little paparazzo,” Kirby says.
I’m still in the world of the success guide—particularly, item number seven. Go to prom with boyfriend and Kirby and Mara. Since Spencer and I broke up right before, prom didn’t happen. I would have gone without a date, but I worried I’d end up being Kirby and Mara’s third wheel, and I didn’t want to ruin the night for them.
Today Tonight Tomorrow Page 3
