disappeared, and as copresidents, McNair and I had to track it down. Turned out, a little kid had wandered off with it, but it took us the better part of an hour to find it tucked into a stroller.
TODAY
… Oh.
2:49 p.m.
THE ARCADE’S PINBALL machines devour my quarters. Obsessed with Neil McNair—it’s laughable, really. We’ve had nearly all the same extracurriculars, the same classes. That’s not obsession: that’s both of us working toward a singular goal only one of us could ever get.
What would the alternative have been? I had to get inside his head, figure out how to take him down, solve problems only the two of us could. I never fully cracked him, though. That’s the strangest part. All these years without dark secrets or embarrassing confessions. With us, it’s strictly business.
Still, I can’t get my friends’ words out of my mind.
I think you’re a little obsessed with him.
God, even now I’m thinking about McNair instead of my friends, the people I’ve all but abandoned this year.
We’re not allowed to leave the safe zone until three, and pinball is easier than self-reflection. It reminds me of one of my favorite romance-novel first dates. In Lucky in Lust, Annabel and Grayson spend hours in a run-down arcade, drawing a crowd as she grows closer and closer to beating a pinball machine’s high score. The whole time, she’s almost fully focused on the game. She can feel adorable history teacher Grayson’s presence next to her, the heat of his body, the scent of his cologne. And when she claims the high score, he wraps her in this incredible victory hug that she feels down to her toes. I didn’t know hugs could be that hot.
I don’t have Annabel’s luck in lust or in pinball. After I lose a few more dollars in quarters, I check the time on my phone. Somehow it’s been only five minutes, but I’m not ready to go back quite yet.
Distantly, I hear someone say my name. I turn my head, but the given way the conversation continues in hushed tones, I’m not sure anyone was actually calling me. I’m not being beckoned—I’m being talked about. The arcade is on the top floor, above the lanes, and it’s tough to make out the conversation amid the sounds of pins clattering and people talking, laughing. I’m alone in here, probably because everything looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in the last twenty years, including the carpet, which is the saddest shade of greige.
But then I hear my name again, and this time I’m sure it’s coming from the food court across from the arcade.
There’s no door separating the arcade from the hall or the food court—but there’s a potted plant at the arcade’s entrance that’s roughly my height.
What I’m doing is ridiculous. I’m aware of that. And yet here I am, creeping toward the plant, hoping its leaves can hide most of my body. When I peek between them, I spot about a dozen Westviewers huddled in the food court, the kind that serves plastic pizza and one-dollar sodas. Savannah Bell is at the head of the table, and she looks about as thrilled as I did when I learned the votes for student council president were split right down the middle.
“Aren’t you sick of Rowan and Neil winning everything?” she’s saying, waving a cup for emphasis. “Every test, every competition, it’s Neil and Rowan, Rowan and Neil. If I never hear their names together again, it’ll be too soon.”
You and me both.
“It’s the last day of school, Sav,” says Trang Chau, Savannah’s boyfriend. “Why does it matter?”
“Because if one of them wins today,” Savannah continues, her earrings trembling with the indignity of it all, “then they win high school. They get to go off to college all smug, thinking they’re better than the rest of us. Think how satisfying it would be to take them down a peg. Valedictorian and salutatorian, beaten at their very last game.”
This conversation feels sinister, somehow. McNair and I earned every accolade, every win.
“I always assumed they were hooking up,” says Iris Zhou, and I fight the urge to gag myself with a plant leaf.
“No. No way,” Brady Becker says. Bless him. “I did a group project with them last year, and they nearly killed each other. It was fucking brutal.”
“I don’t know.” Meg Lazarski taps her chin. “Amelia Yoon said she saw them go into the supply closet together during leadership last month, and when they came out, Neil’s hair was