by Katie Henry
Dedication
For Rob, who makes me laugh so much,
all the time, and every day
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Katie Henry
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
HIGH SCHOOL MIGHT be a total joke, but that doesn’t mean everything is.
Some stuff just isn’t funny. Like plane crashes. Or the Black Death. Or William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—not that Jack Brawer, varsity lacrosse captain and officially the world’s worst scene partner, isn’t doing his best to turn it into a comedy routine.
“‘My lord,’” I say, staring down at my script so I don’t have to look at Jack. “‘I have remembrances of yours, that I have longed long to re-deliver; I pray you, now receive them.’”
I reach into my cardigan pocket for the—oh, shit. The prop letters are still on my desk. I mime handing something toward him, still not looking up, just willing him to do the damn scene, Hamlet.
“Wait, whaaaaaat?” Jack says, high-pitched and mock-surprised. I close my eyes. “I didn’t give you shit, Ophelia. Have you been getting into the meth again?”
Laughter, then Ms. Waldman’s voice: “Jack, that’s not the line.”
“You’re always telling us about the intent, that’s the intent of the line.”
“William Shakespeare did not intend to say anything about meth.”
“It’s a modern twist.”
“‘My honor’d lord, you know right well you did,’” I say, louder than both of them, because it’s bad enough being up here in front of everyone, it’s bad enough Jack is messing up the scene on purpose. “‘And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed—’”
Jack snatches the script out of my hands.
I think: How can a person be this big of a dick?
I think: Alas, poor Jack. I knew him well, Horatio, until I had him assassinated for pulling this shit.
I say: Nothing.
But I do grab it back.
“So are you honest?” Jack asks, vaguely close to his real line this time. “And by ‘honest,’ Hamlet means, ‘Are you a total whore?’”
More laughter, mostly from the corner of the room where Jack’s friends sit, their arms sprawled over the backs of their chairs, their pelvises spread so wide it looks like they’re about ready to give birth.
I don’t understand why Ms. Waldman makes us do these scenes. The class is called Shakespeare Seminar, not Shakespeare Performance. If I’d known I’d have to talk this much, I would have just taken American Lit with all the other juniors, instead of petitioning my way into a senior class.
More importantly, I don’t understand why Jack couldn’t have warned me he was going to do this, the half-dozen times we practiced the scene in the hallway. At least then I’d have been prepared, at least I’d be in on the joke—
And then I do understand. I am the joke.
“Jack, if you can’t respect Isabel as your scene partner, you’re going to fail this assignment,” Ms. Waldman warns. That’s an empty threat. Jack doesn’t care about failing this assignment. He’s already been accepted to Cornell, early decision, a legacy kid. Come September, he’ll be hundreds of miles from here, probably being hazed by his equally terrible frat brothers. The thought comforts me.
I make the executive decision to skip ahead in the scene. “‘Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?’”
Jack makes the executive decision to go straight for the kill. “Get thee to a nunnery! And by ‘nunnery,’ I mean brothel or something, even though they aren’t the same thing at all. Except I guess in porn.”
“Okay, you’re done.” Ms. Waldman waves her hand.
“Remember that for the final, everybody, Shakespeare was into nun porn.”
Ms. Waldman gets up from her seat in the back, heels scraping against the floor. Jack nudges me. “What about you? You into that?”
I think: Well, I’m not into ruining someone’s day for fun.
I think: I’m not into so obviously peaking in high school. How about you?
I say: Nothing.
But I feel my face burn.
“Oh, she’s blushing!” Jack says. “Confirmed, Shakespeare and Isabel—”
“That’s enough.” Ms. Waldman gets in between us just as the bell rings. She and Jack immediately start talking over each other. Jack with words like “just a joke” and “lighten up” and her with words like “unacceptable,” “ridiculous,” and “textually unsupported.”
Ducking out of both their conversation and their space, I hurry to my desk in the second-to-last row. Jack and Ms. Waldman have moved on to arguing over whether the behavior referral she’s giving him is “fair.” I think “fair” would be letting me follow him around his next lacrosse game screaming out-of-context Shakespeare quotes, but no one’s asking me.
Jack leaves in a cloud of Axe body spray and unjustified ego, but before I can escape out the door, too, Ms. Waldman’s voice jerks me back.
“Isabel, hold on a second, okay?”
I stop, reluctantly. She returns the referral pad back to her desk drawer and motions me over. I go, even more reluctantly. She’s the kind of teacher who starts the school year by making a big deal about how she’s “always around” if anyone “ever needs to talk.” The kind of person who thinks you should automatically trust her because she’s young, and wears blouses with cats on them, and rolls her eyes at the school song.
“I’m really sorry that happened,” she says.
I shrug. Smile.
“I just want you to know, it’s not going to affect your grade. I can tell you’d practiced.”
Then she waits, expectantly.
“Oh. Um. Thank you,” I say.
She waits some more, but I’m out of ideas. She tilts her head. “Are you worried about your grade, at all?”
I shrug again. Smile again.
“You haven’t participated in the class discussion at all this week,” she says, and it’s almost apologetic. As if it’s her fault, not mine. “Or last week.”
I haven’t read the Geneva Code, but if the concept of participation points isn’t listed as a war crime, then it’s bullshit.
“It’s only January,” she continues. “There’s lots of time to turn it around. Your first essay was fantastic.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You know, some people just have a harder time talking in public. I totally get that.” Ms. Waldman leans a bit closer. “But . . . sometimes people are quiet because something’s going on. You know?”
Something grips my stomach and twists. “Not really.”
“I’m not saying there is,” she adds quickly. “But if there were, my door is always—”
“Open,” I say, edging my way toward that exact door. “I know.”
She sighs. “Jus
t make an effort, please. Say something once a week. Okay?”
I’d rather feed my fingers to a Venus flytrap, I think.
“Okay,” I say.
Jack is waiting for me outside. Though I do my best to avoid his eyes and make a break for Alex’s physics classroom, Jack plants himself right in my path.
“Hey, about that . . .” He jerks his head back to the classroom. “We’re cool, right?”
What does he expect me to say? If we weren’t, if I said we weren’t, it wouldn’t mean he wasn’t funny. It would mean I was a joyless bitch. Either way, he wins, and I lose.
“I didn’t know you were going to do that,” I say, as if stating the obvious will cause him to spontaneously grow empathy.
Jack runs his hand through his hair. “Yeah, I meant to give you a heads-up, but then I was late, so.”
A rock-solid defense. First Cornell, then Yale Law, then representing oil companies that suffocate baby ducks. It’s written in the stars.
“The guys on the team dared me,” he says. “So, you know, I had to do it.”
I think: A dare?
I think: What are you, five?
I say: Nothing.
He punches me in the arm, softly, but harder than he thinks. Then he grins, toothy and secure. “I knew you’d be chill.”
And that’s when I do the worst thing. Or maybe the third worst thing, after murder and arson. I smile back.
It can’t look like a real smile, I think as Jack turns to go. It doesn’t feel like a real smile. It feels forced and vaguely sinister, like the antique porcelain doll in my grandmother’s parlor. And though I suspect that doll is the veteran of several Satanic rituals, at least she has an excuse. At least she didn’t paint that smile on herself.
I slump against the lockers, close my eyes, and resist the urge to brain myself on the cool metal behind me.
“Isabel.” Five fingers are curling into my shoulder. “Hey.”
When I open my eyes, there’s Alex, standing in front of me, looking concerned. He also looks like he just stepped off a photoshoot for a Ralph Lauren ad, but he always does. I didn’t start dating him because his hair is shiny and artfully disheveled and you can see his upper arm muscles under his uniform button-down shirt. I started dating him because he shared new things with me, like all the black-and-white movies he loves, and he remembered the things I loved, too.
It isn’t anything like the three-day not-dating I did at sleepaway camp in middle school, where a boy would say he liked you, maybe grab your hand with his clammy fish palm, but then mostly ignore you. Alex asked me to be his girlfriend before the first date was even over. “From now on, it’s just you and me.” And I thought that was just a line, but whenever we’re alone together, that’s how it feels. Like there’s nothing else in the universe but the two of us.
I’m not going to pretend like the whole Kennedy-cousin look isn’t a bonus, though.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” I push myself off the lockers. “I’m fine.”
He nods and interlocks his hand in mine. I’m not a huge fan of public displays of affection, not to mention they aren’t allowed at school. But even though we’ve been dating for four months, Alex still always wants to hold my hand in the hallway. Which is sweet. And kind of performative. But still sweet.
“You weren’t waiting for me outside physics,” Alex says as we walk toward the cafeteria. He’s almost pouting, as I’m his mom, late to pick him up from preschool. Though I doubt she’s ever picked him up from anything. His parents are a little weird—he has a seventy-year-old dad with the equivalent net worth of a small developing nation, and a fortysomething mom with the personality of a wolverine that only flies first class.
In the end, Alex was raised by a series of nannies, a no-limits credit card, and an internet router with zero parental controls. So I understand why he’s clingy sometimes, and I try to be nice about it. Even when he isn’t.
“Sorry,” I say, squeezing his hand. “Ms. Waldman needed to talk to me.”
“God, she’s such a bitch,” he mutters under his breath, and I prickle, because that’s not fair. He wouldn’t call her that if he knew she was just trying to help me. But before I can tell him, he’s reaching over to smooth down a loose strand of my braid. “I like your hair this way. You should do it that way all the time.”
Only if I didn’t value my sleep. The chipper vlogger with effortless pastel beach waves might have 130K subscribers, but she’s kidding herself to call this look “quick and easy.”
“Not all the time,” I laugh. “It takes forever.”
He frowns. “But I like it.”
Alex’s phone vibrates in his pocket, and he lets go of my hand to fish it out.
“Something really weird happened in Shakespeare Seminar today,” I say, then pause for him to ask what. He doesn’t look up from his phone. “Remember how I was telling you I had to do a scene? From Hamlet. In front of the class.” I wait again.
“Uh-huh,” he says, texting someone.
“And my scene partner was Jack Brawer—”
“Oh, cool,” Alex says.
“Yeah, he’s . . . so cool,” I say, and my performance as Girl Who Thinks Jack Brawer Is Cool is even worse than my performance as Ophelia. “We’d practiced the scene a bunch, but then when we got up to do it—”
Alex sticks his phone under my nose. “Check out what Kyle sent me.”
It’s a GIF of a small child being chased by a pack of aggressive-looking geese. One eventually tackles him. “Wow. That is . . . disturbing.”
“What?” He sticks his phone in his pocket. “It’s funny.”
“So anyway, when I got up to do the scene with Jack—”
Alex points at me. “See, he’s funny.”
“Yeah, actually, he—”
Alex cups his hands around his mouth. “Kyle!”
Just outside the cafeteria doors, Kyle and his girlfriend, Chloe, turn around. Alex picks up the pace, and I jog to keep up with him. It’s fine. I’ll tell him about Shakespeare Seminar later.
As always, we sit at the table closest to the lemonade dispenser, in the same seats, with the same group of Alex’s friends. They’re all on junior varsity lacrosse, and I’ve never been able to figure out whether they’re all friends because of lacrosse, or they all play lacrosse because they’re friends. I think I was supposed to befriend their girlfriends—Margot and Chloe and whoever is on Luke’s rotating schedule as he strives to have sex with the entire junior class—but it never quite worked out.
Margot catches my eye across the table. “I—your—”
Four words, or maybe five. Definitely about me. But I can never understand people in places this loud.
“Sorry,” I say, leaning closer. “What?”
She repeats it. I mean, I assume she repeats it. I can hear she’s speaking, but I have no idea what she’s saying.
“I, um.” I smile, tight, hoping she’ll get it. “Sorry.”
Her forehead wrinkles, but she tries again, and I try to focus on watching her lips. I can’t ask a third time.
There’s a tap on my shoulder, and when I turn, Alex is holding out his phone, which is open to the notes section.
She likes your necklace.
“Oh!” I swing back around to Margot. “Thanks, it’s new. My mom gave it to me for Christmas.”
“It’s pretty,” she says. I’m 70 percent sure that’s what she says, but Chloe nudges her to ask something, and I’m saved.
“Thank you,” I whisper to Alex.
“Sure,” he says.
Alex isn’t the most sensitive person—there are about 618 adjectives I’d pick before that—but he’s always been great about my hearing. It’s not really my hearing, since my ears are fine. It’s the way sound travels from my ears to my brain. I know when people are talking, I can hear them speaking, but sometimes—especially if the room is loud, or they mumble, or have a different accent than me—my brai
n can’t process what they’re saying.
It’s annoying for me and probably everyone else, too. Alex never acted like it was.
I start to dig back into my salad, but I have the prickly, unsettling feeling like someone’s watching me. I twist around in my seat, looking across the cafeteria, to the corner by the bulletin board. Sure enough, Naomi Weiss is staring back at me. It’s so weird—knowing a person so well for almost ten years, and then not at all for the last four months.
Naomi and I became friends in second grade, more out of convenience than real compatibility, at first. She was quiet; I was quiet. She didn’t have anyone to partner up with in PE; neither did I. But the longer you stick with someone, the more they become a part of how you see the world, even if you both spend most of your time in easy, uncomplicated silence. We spent hours at her dad’s house, Naomi with her herds of pastel ponies, me with legions of plastic dinosaurs. Weekends and winter breaks and hot summer days at my apartment, Naomi on her computer, fixing bugs in her code, me on my bed, thumbing through my dog-eared, broken-spine copy of Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers.
It worked. Until it didn’t.
Without even realizing it, I’m standing up from the lunch bench, starting to disentangle from Alex’s foot, wrapped around mine.
“Where are you going?” Alex asks, craning his head to follow where I’m looking.
“I—” The truth is, I don’t really know. “I was going to get a cookie.”
Alex keeps his eyes toward Naomi’s table, but puts a hand on my shoulder and gently presses down. “I’ll get it. You don’t have to get up.”
I don’t have to sit, either. But I do.
As Alex saunters over to the food line, Margot and Chloe watch him go. They share a look with each other, then turn in unison to me. “He is so sweet,” Chloe says. Or mouths.
She’s right, of course. They can all see it, and if I told them otherwise, they wouldn’t believe it. Not that I would, because it is true, of course it is. He is sweet.
When I look to Naomi’s table again, she’s turned back around.
For the rest of lunch, I nibble at the chocolate chip cookie Alex bought me and listen to conversations I can’t quite hear. I’ve got it down to a science, nodding when everyone else does, laughing at the right moments. Maybe it’s not a science; maybe it’s really an art. Like woodworking. Or taxidermy.
