But Jess was a warrior. She never let them see her falter, keeping her face stoic at school, holding her head high in the hallway just like I’d encouraged her to. She ate lunch with me and the guys, pretending it didn’t bother her that even the most unpopular of girls wouldn’t go near her. But after school, after we’d make it back to my house and the safety of my room, she’d collapse into tears and bury her head into my pillows, letting out animal screams. It wasn’t until she met these new girls, Anna and Lizzie and their wind-up bimbo friends, that she started to smile again.
After all of that, all that she’d been through, how could I have treated her like I had? I not only didn’t deserve to get out of bed and see the sunlight and stand here and smoke with the most beautiful guy I’d ever seen, I didn’t deserve to breathe.
I stared at Connor, a very beautiful, very cocky new kid, this kid who hadn’t even been here for a full four months and suddenly had all the intel. “How do you know all of this? How do you even know these people?”
He just shrugged. “What happened between you and Jess?”
“Nothing happened. Hand me that.”
He held it out of reach, then finished it off and stomped the roach out on the pavement. “Bullshit, something always happens or no one would say anything. Especially not with Jess. Isn’t she like, your best friend?”
I watched the homeless woman—or was she a vagabond?—accept a dollar from a homeless man from across the street. A businessman yapping into his phone passed her by without a second glance. “I…I don’t know. I was really drunk, and Toby and Max wouldn’t shut up, and I don’t know why I did that. I don’t even know who I was in that moment.”
“That’s very existential of you, Jack,” Connor said. He sidled up closer to me. “It’s alright. You guys just need to talk it out. And anyway, it was a really terrible party.”
I said nothing.
“Look,” he said. “It wasn’t cool what you did to Jess, but you should talk to her, clear things up. Tell her about Toby and Max and why you were acting like such a dick that night.” He leaned in, and I could smell his cologne, feel the heat of his body. The steel drumming in my head moved down to my chest. “Now can we just go back to being friends or bros or whatever?” His fingers were on my neck, a danger zone.
“Knock it off,” I said, pushing his hand away, fighting a smile. “We’re in public.”
“We don’t have a very captive audience, if you haven’t noticed.”
It was true. Aside from the vagabond woman and the homeless man, there was only the occasional pedestrian absorbed in their own lives.
And he smelled too good, way too good. It should be illegal to smell that good.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“How you smell,” I answered, way too honestly. Nice, Jack. “I mean, your cologne. It smells nice.”
“You smell nice,” he countered. Now his fingers were in my hair. Shit. He was practically purring in my ear. “You always smell nice.” Mayday.
He tasted like peppermint and pot when his lips touched mine. The world around me dissolved for a moment, and I all I could taste was his mouth, but then I remembered kissing Jess and had to pull away.
I was pond scum. I was lower than pond scum.
But Connor didn’t seem to mind, let alone notice. My stomach growled so loudly I thought passersby might hear it.
“Want to go get lunch?”
I shrugged. “Can’t. I’m broke.”
“I’m buying,” he said. “Seeing as though I deprived you of those last few hits of pot, I figure I owe you.”
“Okay. I just have one question.” I inhaled him again as he leaned in closer to hear it. “What the hell does existential mean?”
24.
“Is security outside?”
“Nope, we’re good.”
“Then let’s go,” I said.
We drove off-campus in the middle of the day, something that could get you suspended at Burro Hills High, but we needed our fast-food runs. The best lunch deals were always at White Crest Plaza, just a mile up the road. Usually it was just one of us who went and grabbed food for everyone—it was safer that way, less risk of getting caught—but it was so nice out that morning that we all decided to just fuck it and go as a group. Connor was doing his pay-for-tutoring thing that period and raking in some mad cash for almost no work on his part. He’d hired some bored brainiac kids to secure test answers beforehand and sell them out. Connor was like the Don of the group; you had to visit him, pay upfront, and then your answers would be distributed to you at a designated time and place.
“See, I don’t give them all the right answers, at least not their first time. That would make it too obvious,” Connor had explained to us that morning before school. “Teachers would get suspicious. Things would go under really quick. You give ’em like seventy to eighty percent correct, and suddenly kids who are flunking Algebra are doing fairly well, little by little, and who do they thank? Me. Me and the guys in the tutoring room while we get paid under the table.”
“That’s fucking awesome, man!” Max had said.
“But what if they snitched?” Toby asked. He rolled his eyes in my direction.
“Why would they?” Connor
