day pretending everything was fine. Every day, another tiny shard of my heart broke away. If we kept going on like this, I’d never be able to piece it all together again. Will had my heart, and it would never belong to anyone else, but if he didn’t take care of every little piece of it that broke away, then it might be lost to us both forever. I couldn’t let him forget that. If I forgot it, if we both did, then my heart would never be whole again.
“I know,” he said, and left my car without another word.
My friends noticed how quiet I was the next day. Kate especially. She’d been my best friend since elementary school, so she knew if anything was on my mind. In third-period civics, I felt the vibration of my cell and slipped it out. Kate had sent a text from her desk in the row next to mine.
Why are u moping?
Instinctively I touched the winged pendant around my neck for support. I frowned and stared at the sentence for a moment before I typed one word in response.
Will.
I watched the teacher, Mr. Johansson, until he turned his back to scrawl more definitions on the dry-erase board. The whiny squeaking of his markers was utterly maddening. In my peripheral vision, I watched Kate chew on her lip as she held her cell underneath her desk and texted back to me.
Cant be friends?
Well, that wasn’t the problem, of course. What would I write back? What should I write? The truth? Maybe a little of it.
Still in love with him.
No chance of getting back together?
This was where I’d have to lie.
Different places in our lives. College keeps him busy and he doesnt think itll work out.
LAME.
I know. Tell u more at lu—
My phone was snatched out of my hand so fast, I bounced in my seat and my heart stopped. I jerked around and saw Mr. Johansson had come out of nowhere and now held my phone in his clammy hand. When had he started doing rounds through the aisles? I should have been paying attention. Getting detention was not going to look good to my mom when I was already on thin ice. My pulse pounded in my head, and I exchanged looks with Kate. Her face was completely calm, as if she had nothing to do with it and feared no consequences.
Mr. Johansson tsked as his watery eyes and index finger scrolled through my text conversation. He smelled like a moldy old sweater in one of those antique shops my nana dragged me to on rainy Saturdays when I stayed with her. His hands were stained from the dry-erase markers he used all day, and I could just imagine the kind of grubby fingerprints he was leaving on my phone’s touch screen. “Sounds scandalous, ladies. Still in love with him, huh, Miss Monroe?”
Mortified, I turned away from him and stared at my notebook in front of me. I heard my classmates’ laughter and whispers, and I felt all their eyes on me. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I thought teachers only read notes to the whole class in stupid teen movies. This was not happening. Not happening.
“Detention, for both of you, after school today,” Johansson barked, his voice lilting proudly like he thought he was awesome for catching two girls texting each other. “You’ll have plenty of time then to copy down my notes from class instead of sending your own. You can have your phones back after that.”
He grabbed Kate’s phone from her hand and sauntered up to the front of the room. I made a deliberate attempt not to hear another word he said for the rest of the hour.
Kate stabbed her salad with her fork like she was trying to kill the cucumbers before she devoured them. She swore loudly enough to make her mother faint. “We should kill him.”
“We so should.”
“I can’t believe he read the texts out loud and gave us detention.”
“Seriously.” Why couldn’t a reaper have eaten him instead of Mr. Meyer?
“Babes!” Landon greeted us as he slid into the seat beside Kate and blew a raspberry on her cheek. She scowled and swatted at him, and then explained what had happened with Mr. Johansson.
“Don’t sweat. Detention is only like an hour. You’ll have plenty of time to get ready for tonight.” Landon said it with a smile, but he failed to make either of us feel better.
“Yeah, but it’s Friday,” Kate whined.
“At least it’s not