The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You

by Lily Anderson

  “You won’t be needing it,” Dad said. “I will drop you off at school on my way to work and your mother will drive you home.”

  The translation finally clicked into place. Your mother and I agreed, indicative past tense. A preordained statement. They’d sealed my fate over a bowl of cinnamon rice cereal before I’d even made it out of the library.

  The phrase was strange as it built up on my tongue, like some long-dead language that I’d only ever heard rumors of.

  “I’m grounded?”

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  “Go to bed, Trixie!”

  25

  “My parents installed a firewall,” I said, watching as my breath hung in the fog. “I can’t even read my school email without one of them punching in a password. I could break through it, but that would just prove them right, wouldn’t it?”

  Meg shivered beside me. Her hair had lost some of its shine in the last twenty-four hours. It swung straight and loose in the frigid morning breeze.

  “I knew something was wrong when I didn’t hear from you,” she said, kicking her feet against the planter box. “I begged my parents not to say anything to yours, but they wouldn’t listen. They’re afraid that this is going to turn into some kind of collective hysteria.”

  I hugged my jacket closer to my chest. “Like a War of the Worlds hysteria?”

  “More like the Salem witch trials,” she said. “My mom made me read a bunch of articles on conversion disorder. She’s afraid that our stress is going to start manifesting in physical symptoms.”

  I snorted. “I’ll be sure to let you know if I feel like I’m being pinched by a specter.”

  “I’m really sorry. I know it’s stupid.” She scuffed her heels against the planter again before hazarding a glance up at me. “Your parents didn’t call Harper’s dad, did they?”

  “No.” After I’d surrendered my phone, my parents had tried to make small talk over bowls of crockpot curry, but it was all too little, too late. “They’re pissed at me, but they’re smart enough to know that Harper would be in way more trouble if her dad found out she’d had guests over.”

  “That’s something, at least. I couldn’t stand the idea of us making things worse for her.”

  Thinking of the fight with my parents, it dawned on me that I’d wanted to talk to Meg about more than ratting me out.

  “Why haven’t you ever tested out of high school?”

  She blinked up at me. “Leave the Mess?”

  “Yeah. Harper said that it was a useless holding pattern. Any one of us could take a proficiency test and go off to college.”

  “I’d never want to leave you and Harper. I don’t even like knowing that it’s going to happen next fall.” Her face fell as she remembered that Harper was already gone. She turned to watch the line of people marching their way through the front gate. It was hard to discern one from the next from under the masses of knitwear that everyone was wrapped in.

  “Did you get the suspect notes from your frosh before the firewall went up?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I bit my lip. It wasn’t a lie, but it felt like one. I hadn’t been able to access B’s typed notes, but I did have the hard copy in my binder from my clandestine trip to the library. “I mean, he’s not my frosh. He’s Ben’s frosh. But he actually made a really good point about how the ranking could work as a motive.”

  I searched her face for signs of affectation or chagrin, but she only nodded. Her eyes went glassy as she looked over my shoulder. She sat up straight and waved her arms over her head and called, “Peter!”

  Peter was marching across the grass toward us. The collar of his polo stuck out from the neck of a faded MIT sweatshirt. A black beanie was pulled down over his eyebrows. “What are you guys doing out here? It’s freezing!”

  “Trixie’s grounded,” Meg said, sticking out her lower lip in a calculated pout. “We need to soak up all the quality time we can with her.”

  I forced a smile. “Frostbite is the truest form of friendship.”

  “If you say so,” Peter said. He clapped his hands and rubbed them as though hoping to spark a flame. “What’d you do to get grounded? Your parents seemed really cool when we saw them before winter ball.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said quickly, just in case Meg decided to announce that we’d ditched the day before. Rule breaking was not the way to Peter Donnelly’s heart. “Hey, do you know if Jack kept a copy of the code he gave to Mendoza?”

  Peter’s beanie rose an inch up his forehead. “Probably. He had to submit a copy to Dr. Kapoor for his extra credit.”

  “Do you think I could get a copy?” I asked. “Through my school email. I can’t access my regular account until after finals.”

  Peter looked from me to Meg and back again. “Why?”

  These are your friends, I thought. Peter and Meg were innocent until I proved them otherwise, which meant that I had to tell them exactly as much as I would have if I didn’t know how much they’d gained from Harper getting expelled.

  “Someone put Harper’s IP address into that code,” I said. “I want to see if they left any bread crumbs behind that Jack might have missed.”

  Peter huffed a laugh. It hung in the air and slid toward the front gate on the wind. “You think someone set Harper up to be expelled?”

  I didn’t like how jovial he sounded, but I held my face in a deadpan. “It’s kind of convenient, isn’t it? Jack was about to be expelled and then he happened to stumble onto the code that saved him?”

  That wiped the laugh out of his voice. He tugged his beanie farther down his ears. “So, now, it’s not just that you think that someone set up Harper. You think it was my brother?”

  Meg hopped down off the planter. “No! It’s just not out of the realm of possibility—”

  “Yes, it is. He’s my brother. I think I’d know if he was a criminal mastermind.”

  “Did you know when he was drinking cough syrup for sport?” I asked. It’d never been a secret that Jack had been caught with recreational dextromethorphan in his backpack. Aragon Prep had a much sunnier approach to rule breaking than the Mess. Our entire eighth-grade class had been stuck in a two-hour-long “feelings circle” where we were all forced to tell Jack how much we cared about him.

  Peter winced like I’d backhanded him. “I don’t believe this. I’m going inside.”

  “Peter,” Meg called as Peter’s loping step fell in with the other people going through the gate. She kicked a hole in the grass as he went through the front doors. “That didn’t go very well at all.”

  I ran my fingers through the end of my ponytail. Trying to get the code from Peter was always going to be a long shot. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Jack’s story lined up with Cornell’s. It was exactly what Harper had said would happen: it was easier for everyone to believe it and move on.

  But hurting Peter’s feelings hadn’t been part of the plan.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Meg as she bent down to scoop up her backpack. “I should have left you out of it. I didn’t mean to ruin your—you know…”

  “My what?” She hoisted her bag onto her back with a laugh of realization. “Oh God. Peter and I are not a couple, Trix. We went to a dance together. We’re just friends. You know, how you two are just friends?”

  Surprise crested on me in waves. I realized that I had never asked Meg if she and Peter were together. After he’d put the corsage on her wrist at the winter ball, my brain had filed them away in a folder labeled COUPLE.

  Truly thinking about it, this assumption seemed grossly antifeminist. Of course they could just be friends. With everything else that was going on, I’d been too distracted to think about it logically.

  �
�Oh,” I blurted. “Sorry. I assumed that he was the treatment group of your thought experiment. You said that Harper and Cornell were your control group—”

  “I really didn’t expect him to take that so poorly.” She frowned and handed me my messenger bag. “He’ll come around eventually. He needs to cool off. He’s under a lot of stress with this student council situation.”

  I looped the messenger bag’s strap over my chest. It wasn’t actually lighter without my cell phone in it, but I could sense the void. I followed Meg’s short stride through the grass. “What student council situation?”

  She stopped short and smacked her forehead. “You didn’t get any of my texts. Cornell resigned from student council.”

  * * *

  Hiding in a storage closet looked a lot easier in movies. I must have looked ridiculous scarpering up and down the hall of the main building, tugging on locked doors. The third door I tried opened into a cramped closet that stunk from the various bottles and tubs that covered the metal shelves and dusty floor. Not wanting to be a choosey beggar, I tossed my messenger bag on top of a cobwebby gallon of floor polish.

  I pressed my eye to the crack I’d left in the door. Everyone was moving slower in the week before finals started, a constant trudge toward the next class. There was no point in hurrying when you were just going to keep reviewing a semester’s worth of work.

  I spotted the back of Cornell’s head gliding past the closet door. Mary-Anne was beside him, her mouth moving in a frantic whisper. Holding my breath, I opened the door a fraction and grabbed the second I saw spikes.

  I pulled, staggered, and skidded hard to the right to keep from slamming into the shelving. The door clicked shut.

  “This is new,” Ben said, glancing up at the bare lightbulb screwed into the ceiling. He adjusted his backpack as he glanced down at me. “Passing period is still only six minutes, right?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “You’re going to have to talk fast.”

  “Talk?” He tilted his head, letting a smile unravel at the corner of his lips. “Do you need help picking a solvent? For windows, you really want something with at least four percent isopropyl—”

  I stretched slightly on the balls of my feet and pressed my hands to the sides of his jaw. The zipper of his backpack clinked against the door as I crushed my lips over his. There wasn’t time for a series of decent kisses. One wallop was going to have to do, no matter what my limbic system said.

  “Good morning,” he said as his eyelids reopened.

  “Good morning.” I retracted my hands and took as much of a step away from him as I could without knocking anything over. “Sorry for the radio silence last night. Quick recap: Meg’s parents squealed on me, so my parents took my phone and my email access. What do you know about Cornell leaving student council?”

  “Whoa.” He started to put his hands up, but seemed to do the math on our limited square footage and let them swing by his sides. “Can you take that from the top? Meg’s parents squealed on you? Are we mobsters now? Because I thought we were doing okay at this gumshoe thing—”

  “Passing period, ticking away. Please focus,” I said, groaning. I could hear people’s footsteps and rolling backpacks moving on the other side of the door. There was still time before the bell rang, but I couldn’t be sure how much. “Cornell left student council? That is a very big deal.”

  “It’s not official,” he said, shifting his shoulders under the weight of his backpack straps. “I’ve been trying to talk him out of it. He’s been less than receptive.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He texted me a bunch of words I didn’t think he knew.” He shrugged. “He might have installed some kind of swearing widget. I think some of it was in Dothraki. It was impressive.”

  I rested my temple against the closest shelf. “But why would he quit? Student council doesn’t have anything to do with Harper or the academic probations.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “But from my prior experience, leaving a club is the quickest way to point out that you aren’t friends with people anymore. It’ll cost him a letter grade, but—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. I was getting light-headed and it wasn’t from the solvents. “What do you mean? Of course Cornell’s still friends with you. I didn’t say anything to him.” Cold sweat started clamming my palms. “Oh, I did piss off Peter this morning. It wasn’t on purpose. But I didn’t do anything to Cornell. No Machiavelli, no Shan Yu—we agreed.”

  “I know you didn’t.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It was my jackassery, not yours. There was a blowup at the student council table yesterday about Harper getting expelled and why the administration wasn’t accepting character witnesses for her. Peter pointed out that Mendoza let me write an affidavit for Brandon and that we could do the same thing for Harper. You know how the student council gets. The lowerclassmen got involved and then everyone was telling Cornell that he let his girlfriend get expelled. It was a full clusterfrak.” He tried to smile again, but this time it shriveled and faded. “I messaged Cornell after I got back from the library. That’s when I got the full brunt of his secret swearing powers.”

  As much as it warmed the cockles of my heart to think about the student council table rallying together to fight for Harper’s honor, I knew what this really meant. Ben had made himself clear to me in the park after the dance. You can’t ask me to give up my only fucking friends for you.

  And he’d lost Cornell anyway.

  “Ben.” My voice was hoarse. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, not quite looking at me. “And, hey, without the class credit we get for leadership, he’ll take a dive in the ranking.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not joking.” He did look up at me then and there was no hint of mockery in his eyes. “Once he resigns, one of us will be valedictorian.”

  * * *

  The student council table was mostly empty. Jack appeared to be trying to make Peter read a catalog of some kind while Brad Hertz tried to chat up the junior officers. Cornell was sitting next to Mike Shepherd and the rest of the role-playing club. From our old table in the far corner of the room, I’d watched as Ben had come through the doors and spotted his two ex–best friends sitting together. He’d left without eating.

  I’d wanted to go after him, but I had no idea what I could say to make him feel better. No combination of homework and comic books and making out in storage closets would fix his friendship with Cornell.

  I sipped soup off the end of my spoon without truly tasting it. The revival of last week’s watery minestrone seemed even worse today. Meg had stacks of her parents’ psychology journals covering the place where Harper’s tray wasn’t. The inside of each magazine had been decorated in a Technicolor array of Post-its. Her fingernails kept riffling through the paper, never quite opening the pages.

  “Have you developed the power of learning through osmosis?” I asked as she stroked another set of Post-it corners.

  Her hand stilled and she hastily took a bite of the sandwich she’d been neglecting. “No. I can’t focus. I have all of these journals and none of them has the answers I want.”

  “Then why did you bring them?”

  “Because I still have hope.”

  A Tupperware container landed on the table next to my tray. A cloud of expensive perfume filled my nose as Mary-Anne sat down beside me. Her hair bounced around her shoulders as she tucked her legs under the bench. Up close, I could see a shimmer of peach powder on her cheeks.

  “So,” she said, as though she often slummed it on our side of the cafeteria and started unprompted conversations with non-student-council members. “Do you guys not sit with us now? Or did you revise your seating schedule again? I cannot be alone with the boys and the babies for another day. It’s total Lord of the Flies over there and the library isn’t any better.”

  A tiny piece of onion slipped out of Meg’s mouth. She stuffed it back in frantically
.

  “I think we probably sit here again,” I said, trying not to look as shocked as Meg. “We only moved so that Harper could spend time with Cornell. Now that she’s been expelled—”

  “Ugh.” Mary-Anne produced a pair of chopsticks from her jacket pocket. She snapped them apart and swirled the inside of the Tupperware. As my nostrils adjusted to the powdery sweet smell of her perfume, I caught a whiff of teriyaki sauce coming off her lunch. “That is such garbage. Harper would never do something that stupid.”

  I drowned a piece of celery with my spoon. “No arguments here.”

  “Cornell doesn’t get it,” Mary-Anne continued, nibbling a piece of rice from the end of her chopsticks. “If Harper really wanted to up him in the ranking, she would never have started dating him. Or anyone. It’s too much of a distraction.”

  Meg groped her psychology journals again. “Maybe she didn’t know how much work it was until she was in over her head.” She flicked through the magazines, producing a worn copy that was laden with sticky notes and flags. She folded it open, displaying a page of tiny font under the headline THE WORTH OF TEEN LOVE. She tapped at a paragraph that had been meticulously highlighted and underlined. “It says here that high school relationships—romantic and platonic—are integral to adult identity development. The mistakes that we make now will inform the choices we make later in life. It’s the basis of my entire thought experiment for this year.”

  Mary-Anne looked up from her teriyaki. “Your what?”

  “Don’t ask,” I warned.

  It was too late. Meg thwacked the journal down on the table. “I think the reason why Harper and Cornell didn’t work was that they had no basis for their relationship outside of a chemical attraction to one another. It’s an understandable mistake. On the surface, it looked like they shared the same ideals. They’re both dedicated to their classes and their friends. But when Harper was removed from campus, she couldn’t contribute to either of those things.”

  “She’s still our friend, even if she doesn’t go here,” I said sharply.