“I don’t see him,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leo said. “Nobody has.”
That made me feel a tiny bit more nervous. And if Leo hadn’t been standing right there, I might have told Venice about the pops I’d sent Hayes while she was sleeping. But I just didn’t feel comfortable talking about my personal life in front of Leo. Maybe when he went to the bathroom I’d tell Venice. Or maybe I’d pop her about it later.
I looked out onto the skating rink and saw a really tall guy Rollerblading like a fiend. He was wearing a helmet, so I couldn’t tell who it was, but based on the well-defined biceps it sort of looked like Victor, Venice’s brother. He centered himself on the ramp and launched his whole body several feet into the air.
“Wow,” I said. “I’d break my neck if I tried that.”
“Victor is very talented,” Leo said. “He’s good at everything.”
Before I could agree, I saw Anya skate by with Sabrina and Sailor. They looked like they were having such a good time. I wondered what they were all thinking about. Didn’t they have any stress in their lives? They sure didn’t seem to. Maybe when they put on roller skates, it all melted away.
I took my skates to a bench and slipped off my shoes. Instead of rolling onto the rink, Venice took a seat next to me on the bench. Tragically, Leo stood beside her.
“So Leo and I want to talk to you about something,” Venice said.
I felt myself breathe a little faster. Were they about to lay some bad news on me? It sure sounded like that. Which seemed double awful, because there were two of them and one of me.
“What is it?” I asked. I tried to breathe normally.
“We think we’ve figured out our group costume,” Venice said, reaching down and squeezing my hand. “And it’s something super amazing.”
“What?” I said. Because I thought I should be involved in the planning stage and not just have the costume sprung on me.
“Curious George and the Man with the Yellow Hat won’t work for three people,” Venice said.
“Right,” I said. Not only that, but it was a terrible idea for a costume anyway.
“Mr. Falconer gives extra credit if you go as something Idaho-themed,” Leo said. His eyes looked wide and happy, like he thought his ideas were amazing.
“Don’t worry,” Venice said. “We’ve already ruled out Lewis and Clark. It’s a two-person costume. But what if we went as miners?”
“What?” I asked. Because it sounded like Venice had said “miners.”
Leo shoved his phone in my face. “Like these guys. They already look like they’re wearing costumes.”
“And no fur!” Venice said. “Isn’t it the perfect costume idea? Leo thought of it last night in his sleep. He woke up and boom. There it was.”
Leo was smiling huge, like he was the smartest person to ever wear skates and stand beside a bench.
“I don’t want to dress up like a dude,” I said. “Even for extra credit.”
Venice seemed shocked to hear this. “Getting extra credit would take some of the pressure off our report.”
I stood my ground. “Do you know how hot we’d get wearing mining hats all day? We’d probably all get headaches.”
And because Venice understood that I would never in a million years dress up as a miner, she said, “Okay. Fine. Do you have any ideas?”
I tried really hard to think of something clever. “Piper and a couple of friends wore giant cardboard squares around their heads and went as selfies.”
Leo looked disappointed by that suggestion. “That was hot two years ago. It would be stale to do it now.”
I couldn’t believe Leo called my suggestion stale. It was like he was daring me to hate him.
“We could go as a BLT sandwich,” Leo said.
“Gross,” I said. “My sister is a vegan. I refuse to dress like a meat product.”
“You could go as the L or the T,” Leo said in a snarky way.
“Not happening,” I said. I started to lace up my skates. I felt like it was suddenly my job to come up with an idea for the perfect three-person costume. It was so much pressure.
“Robots would work,” Leo said.
That idea sounded difficult. I needed full use of my arms and peripheral vision. I tried to think of a kind way to turn that idea down. “Wearing a box to school would suck.”
“Three-person costumes are so hard,” Venice said.
“Well, we don’t have to think of it right now,” Leo said. “We could skate.”
And before we could all agree with that, Victor came speeding up and brilliantly pivoted and stopped right in front of us.
“Is this the chatting bench?” he asked. “Is this where everybody goes to talk?”
“Hi, Victor,” I said. “I like your moves.”
“I’m trying,” Victor said, flashing me an awesome smile.
“We’re getting ready to go skate now,” I said.
“We were trying to figure out our Halloween costumes,” Venice said. “We’re trying to think of something for the three of us.”
“That’s easy,” Victor said. “A three-humped camel.”
Venice frowned. “We don’t want to be attached. We have different classes.”
“Okay,” Victor said. “There are a trillion ideas. Pirates, fairies, zombies, the Beastie Boys.”
“Perry won’t dress like a dude,” Venice said in a really judgmental way.
“That’s cool,” Victor said. “You gotta do what feels right.”
I watched as he weaved through the crowd and then wiggled and fishtailed. He was so athletic. It blew my mind.
“I don’t want to go as fairies. I’m allergic to glitter,” Leo said.
“I don’t want to go as a pirate or a zombie,” Venice said.
“Who are the Beastie Boys?” I asked.
Leo shrugged. “Hey, do you wanna get snacks?”
“Totally,” Venice said, grabbing his hand.
“Okay,” I said, standing up onto my skates and catching my balance, and moving toward the snack line. “I wonder if Hayes is working at the counter.” Because sometimes he helped make the nachos.
“Oh,” a voice said behind me. “He’s not coming.”
I turned to see who was talking. Anya. I should have known. I turned back around and lost my balance a little. I had to grab on to a metal pole or I would’ve hit the floor.
“Is he doing homework?” Leo asked.
“Nope,” Anya said. “He told me somebody sent him some crappy pops and he wasn’t coming.”
I kept holding on to the pole so I didn’t fall down. Everything felt very unsteady all of a sudden.
“Who would send Hayes crappy pops?” Venice asked. “That’s awful.”
“He didn’t say,” Anya said. “But it’s lame. Hayes is totally nice.”
I couldn’t believe that Anya was judging me, even though she didn’t know she was judging me. It sucked.
“What can I get you guys?” the counter clerk asked. He was young and had acne and had scabby elbows just like Hayes. I stayed silent while Venice and Leo ordered a smorgasbord of snacks. “And for you?” the clerk asked.
I felt so terrible. I stood and stared at the menu items. Then I ordered what I felt I deserved. “I’ll just take a cup of ice.”
“Ooh, too bad, so sad, but the ice machine is broken,” the clerk said.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need anything.”
I looked around and realized I didn’t see Drea either. Maybe my pops had been tougher than I’d meant them to be.
“You can share what we got,” Venice said. “You need to eat something.”
But I didn’t think that was true. I felt really guilty. And it didn’t feel right to be using Hayes’s gifts anymore.
“I’m not feeling so hot,” I said. “I’m going to send my mom a pop.”
“Wait,” Venice said.
But I didn’t wait. I skated back toward the bench with my shoes. I couldn’t stay
here. I didn’t deserve to be at a roller rink having fun. Besides, I needed to work anyway. I couldn’t remember what specific tasks I had to do to get ready for class portraits, but I knew I had a bunch of them. And they weren’t going to complete themselves.
Before the day even started, I knew it was going to be weird. Because for Venice and me to take class portraits, we had to spend all day in the back corner of the cafeteria taking photos. We wouldn’t be going to our classes. And it was our job to tell everybody what to do. I had mixed feelings about this.
As I walked to school, Venice popped me a photo of Chet Baez. I sent her a return pop.
It seemed weird to send me a random photo from the bus. I suspected there was some extra meaning that I was missing.
That made me feel a little bit relieved. Chet wore feathers all the time. And for him, a feather-free photo was the first step in taking a portrait that looked decent. I smiled. I really did want everybody’s portrait to turn out. I felt like it was the least I could do for all the kids at my school, especially the geeky ones. My phone buzzed again and it was a pop from Leo. Gag.
Then he sent me a photo of a trio of weird-looking bearded dudes wearing backpacks and carrying photography equipment up a mountain. Leo didn’t know me at all. Going to school dressed like a bearded mountain climber was the last thing I wanted to do. So I sent him a pop explaining this.
And then it was like Leo couldn’t stop himself from being annoying, because he sent me another pop.
Leo sent me an old-timey photo of a woman in a weird hat carrying a long pole and standing beside a bunch of trees. I bet we weren’t allowed to bring poles to school, even on Halloween. What was wrong with Leo? I didn’t need extra credit in Idaho History this badly. Seriously. This needed to stop.
Then I made sure that I’d swiped all my incoming pops into my sewer and kept walking to school. When I was a street away I noticed somebody in front of me wearing an orange T-shirt. For four seconds, I stopped breathing. I thought for sure it was Hayes. But then I realized it was just some random seventh grader who’d worn an orange T-shirt to school. It was hard to relax, knowing that Hayes and Drea were out there. And that eventually our paths would cross. Nobody missed portrait day. Nobody.
When I walked through the halls I kept my head down and my eyes glued to my phone. I’d been trying to get some advice from Piper about the pops I’d sent to Drea and Hayes. But she hadn’t returned any of my pops. I was beginning to worry that she’d already gone to Thailand with Bobby. But then I wondered if she had a new PopRat account.
I’d been sending everything to Piperathon, because that was the contact that came up on my phone. But I was pretty sure she’d probably discontinued that username because it didn’t reflect who she was anymore. That was Piper before college. Not now. I was pretty sure Piper had stopped running after she found yoga and Bobby.
When I got to the Yearbook room without having any disastrous run-ins, I felt like I’d reached a safe place. But then I opened the door and found a horde of eighth graders primping with Anya, and my safe place felt suddenly dangerous.
“Don’t interrupt me,” Anya said. “I’m giving Reece cat eyes.”
I did a double take. Because Anya was not giving Reece subtle and attractive cat eyes, she was applying goopy black eyeliner all over her face.
“Have you shown her what it looks like?” I asked. Because it was going to take a ton of water and gentle scrubbing to get that crud off Reece’s face before I took her picture.
“Um, yes,” Anya said in a snotty voice, flipping around. “They look like mine.”
I gasped. Anya’s eyes looked like horrible cartoon eyes. They were rimmed in thick black lines and had weird dark triangles in their corners. Then I gasped again. Because clearly they’d forgotten that today was portrait day and they were practicing Halloween costumes and now their faces didn’t look normal and eighth-grade portraits started in ten minutes.
“Crap!” I yelled. “You’ve forgotten about portraits. You need to get that gunk off your eyes.”
Reece laughed. And so did Sabrina and Sailor. And that was when I heard a boy’s laugh. It was Fletcher Zamora. His eyes looked awful too.
“We’ve done this specifically for portraits,” Anya said. “It’s going to look hilarious and cool.”
I blinked. I agreed that it looked hilarious, but it certainly didn’t look cool.
“I bet Principal Hunt will make you wash it off,” I said. Because it seemed wrong to make yourself look purposely weird for the yearbook. Those books belonged to everybody. I wanted my picture of Anya to look like Anya. Not a lynx with eye funk.
“Wrong. Principal Hunt is cool with it,” Anya said.
“Yeah,” Fletcher said. “Eighth graders always make their mark.”
Ugh. It was disgusting. Anya had figured out a way to hijack the portraits. It really bugged me. It was hard to accept what was happening. I just kept staring at them.
“You should get the camera and head to the cafeteria,” Anya said. “Setup always takes more time than you think.”
It was at this exact moment that I started to wonder if working on the yearbook was worth all this stress. Was it making me happy? Not really. Was it hurting my performance in other classes? Yeah. Was it wrecking my social life? I was pretty sure that it was. But I didn’t have a lot of time to sort out my feelings about it. Because Anya was right: Setups did take a ton of time. I grabbed the camera and headed down the hall. Again, because I felt incredibly nervous about running into Hayes and Drea, I pulled my phone out, and instead of popping, I started straight-up texting Piper.
That last one caught her attention.
It was such a relief to see that text from Piper, even though it didn’t help me at all. I was still staring at my phone when I felt somebody bump my shoulder. I panicked and dropped my phone. I watched it bounce down the cafeteria steps.
“I’m so sorry!” Venice gushed. “I didn’t mean to bump you that hard.”
I hurried down the stairs and picked up my phone. It had tumbled down three stairs and landed flat on its face on the hard tiled floor. I thought for sure my whole screen had broken into a web of cracks. But when I picked it up and flipped it over it was perfectly fine. When Venice saw this she hugged me.
“I’m crazy sorry,” she said.
And I couldn’t get super mad at her, because I was pretty sure I’d dropped it out of fear. I didn’t think she’d actually bumped it out of my hand.
“Have you seen Hayes?” I asked.
Venice did the most horrible thing ever when I asked her that question. She looked away and mumbled, “Not really.”
That was weird. Because either you’ve seen somebody or you haven’t seen somebody. It wasn’t really possible to “not really” see somebody.
“Why are you acting weird about Hayes?” I asked. Because I strongly suspected that something was up.
“I’m not. Why are you acting weird about Hayes?” she asked.
And that was when I confessed. Because I needed some help. I couldn’t handle this problem on my own. “I sent him mean pops. I’m the one who made him skip skating.”
And then Venice said the worst thing ever: “Yeah. I know.”
“What?” I asked. Because it meant she’d been keeping important information from me.
Venice sighed and pulled out her phone. “Both Drea and Hayes forwarded them to my sewer.”
And I didn’t even know that could happen.
“When?” I asked.
“Last night,” Venice said, scrolling through her phone to show me.
“Don’t. Don’t,” I said, shielding my eyes. “I don’t want to remind myself of what I said.”
I moved one of my fingers so I could look at her. Her face was filled with sympathy. “There’s nothing you can do about it now. They’re out there.”
And the way she said that made it seem like my pops were escaped dogs or something. Running around doing anything they wanted. Venice could te
ll I was totally freaked out, because she slipped off her backpack, unzipped it, and offered me a chocolate bar.
“I brought these for later. To give us extra energy. But maybe you should just eat yours now,” Venice said.
I took the bar and tore off the wrapper. “Do you think they hate me?” I asked. “I don’t want anybody to hate me.”
“They probably don’t hate you,” Venice said.
But she didn’t say it with much confidence.
“Besides, you wanted Hayes to stop crushing on you. And you wanted Drea to back off. Now you’ve pushed them out of your life forever. Problem solved, right?”
“Um, forever?” I said. Because I hadn’t meant to do that.
“Glad to see you’ve got the camera,” Ms. Kenny said as she walked over to us. “Let’s take some test shots in front of the screen.”
Ms. Kenny had a huge projector screen rolled up under her arm. And Principal Hunt was carrying a couple of bags. And Javier popped up out of nowhere, drinking out of a thermos.
“The back corner we used last year worked really well,” Principal Hunt said. “Great light, no shadows, and students can form a line along the wall.”
I followed behind everybody as we made our way to the corner. The strong smell of spicy beef hovered over us.
“Looks like they’re serving walking tacos for lunch,” Javier said.
Javier was always pointing out stuff that either didn’t matter at all or was totally obvious. And it was as if I was the only person who was annoyed by this.
“Do we get to eat lunch?” Venice asked.
I’d just assumed that we would get to eat lunch. There was a chance we might not eat lunch?
“Absolutely,” Ms. Kenny said. “It’s customary for the photography crew to eat pizza with me back in the Yearbook room during lunch while we regroup and prepare for the second round.”
“Does that include Anya?” I asked. I thought I’d only been thinking that question. But then I heard myself saying it.
Totally Crushed Page 12
