me a furtive glance, but I’m not sure if that means something is up, or if Ava is just being Ava.
“It’s the first time I’ve gone in awhile.” I admit.
“I just texted Poppy,” she says, turning to look back in the direction of Branford. “She’s coming.”
That’s all it was. Why am I so paranoid?
“Were you two waiting for me?”
“What?” Ava looks indignant. “Full of yourself much? No. I was with Poppy literally 60 seconds ago. We were saying we should take you to lunch. And then I saw you. Don’t be so paranoid.”
“Sorry, it’s been a bad couple weeks.” The beauty of Ava—if there is one—is that you don’t have to worry about her feelings. She has none. It’s all surface, all the time. The ugliness is that she won’t consider yours, at all. It’s a trade-off.
“Poppy said something about trouble with Sterling,” Ava says, already distracted by a couple of hot guys she noticed checking her out, “but she wouldn’t spill the tea.”
“You have no idea,” I say. There’s no way I’m telling her about the video. I’ve known her a long time, but sometimes I wonder if there’s something broken in her. I can almost imagine her liking the idea of having a sex tape. And I can definitely imagine her gossiping about mine.
“Hey you two!” Poppy calls, driving by slowly but waving frantically. “Get in.”
Ava hooks my elbow and starts dragging me towards Poppy’s Audi. “Coming!”
A couple of the cars behind Poppy honk when she stops in the middle of the road so Ava and I can get in, and at that moment students begin pouring out of Branford, trapping all the cars like flies in amber.
“Noodles?” Poppy asks, flashing me a smile in the rearview mirror. It doesn’t quite match the maternal concern in her eyes.
“Ugh. Carbs,” Ava says reflexively.
“Works for me,” I say. Carbs and I are old friends.
“Don’t worry, Ava, I’m sure they have diet soda and salad,” Poppy says like this is a viable meal option.
It takes another couple of minutes for us to break free of the campus bottlenecks, and Poppy finds the posh shopping center she’s looking for not long after. I can’t help noticing how many nervous looks she shoots me in the rearview mirror, though. There’s something on Poppy’s mind. She hands her keys to a valet, and we settle into sidewalk seating in front of the restaurant. A waiter comes over and asks for drink orders, and Ava disappears to use the restroom.
“Why am I here?” I ask Poppy, placing my hand on her menu and gently forcing her to lower it.
“What do you mean?” Poppy tries to sound casual, but it’s too high pitched and she’s lousy at hiding how she feels—at least from me.
“I know when I’m being kidnapped. You didn’t tell Ava—”
“No! Adair, I would not tell Ava without clearing it with you. I just said I wanted us to go to lunch. That’s all.” She returns her attention to the menu with the focus of a doctor about to perform brain surgery.
I’m no longer hungry, no longer craving the sweet comfort of carbohydrates. If this isn’t about the sex tape, it’s about something else. “Tell me.”
“What? There’s—”
“You can’t even look me in the eye, Poppy,” I cut her off. “What are you not telling me?”
She finally drops her menu, and it’s written all across her face. It’s the same expression she wore at my mother’s funeral: a sort of grim determination combined with nauseating anxiety.
“It’s Sterling,” she says. Her mouth starts to form five different words, none of which are actually said. Eventually, Poppy settles on the rip-off-the-bandage approach. “He’s gone.”
Gone.
The word echoes inside me, lodging in the center of my chest, and splintering through me. I crack open, and he spills out. Suddenly, I’m not at a cafe with my best friend, I’m in a hospital waiting room, waiting to hear about my mother but staring at Sterling’s perfect, infuriating face. He’s there holding out a bag with clown-size flip-flops I still have tucked in my closet. Then we’re on a picnic blanket together. Then his hands are on me. Then he’s sharing his secrets with me, telling me how he’s too broken to ever be fixed. All of it re-lived in one second. And the last, worst moment is one I can only imagine: he hears me in the shower, calls in to me about clothes. His hands fiddle with his cell phone, setting it on the built-in shelf in his dorm