his weirdness I have no desire to publicly humiliate him—he’s nice and we were childhood friends and all that—but I could never, ever, ever date him, not in a million lifetimes. Not in my lifetime, anyway: the one I want back, where yesterdays are followed by todays and then tomorrows. The bowler hat alone makes it impossible.
“Listen.” Kent shoots me a look out of the corner of his eye. “My parents are going away this weekend, and I’m having some people over tonight….”
“Uh-huh.” Up ahead I see Rob loping toward the cafeteria. At any second he’ll spot me. I can’t handle seeing him right now. My stomach clenches and I leap in front of Kent, turning my back to the cafeteria. “Um…where’s your house again?”
Kent looks at me strangely. I did basically just set myself up like a human barricade. “Off Route Nine. You don’t remember?” I don’t respond and he looks away, shrugging. “I guess you wouldn’t, really. You were only there a few times. We moved just before middle school. From Terrace Place. You remember my old house on Terrace Place, right?” The smile is back. It’s true: his eyes are exactly the color of grass. “You used to hang out in the kitchen and steal all the good cookies. And I chased you around these huge maple trees in the front yard. Remember?”
As soon as he mentions the maple trees a memory rises up, expanding, like something breaking the surface of water and rippling outward. We were sitting in this little space in between two enormous roots that curved out of the ground like animal spines. I remember that he split two maple-wing seeds and stuck one on his nose and one on mine, telling me that this way everyone would know we were in love. I was probably only five or six.
“I—I…” The last thing I need is for him to remind me of the good old days, when I was all knees and nose and glasses, and he was the only boy who would come near me. “Maybe. Trees kinda all look the same to me, you know?”
He laughs even though I wasn’t trying to be funny. “So you think you’ll come tonight? To my party?”
This brings me back to reality. The party. I shake my head and start backing away. “No. I don’t think so.”
His smile falters a little. “It’ll be fun. Big. Senior memories. Best time of our lives and all that crap.”
“Right,” I say sarcastically. “High school heaven.”
I turn around and start walking away from him. The cafeteria is packed, and as I approach the double doors—one of which is propped open with an old tennis shoe—the noise of the students greets me with a roar.
“You’ll come,” he calls after me. “I know you will.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” I call back, and I almost add, It’s better this way.
THE RULES OF SURVIVAL
“What do you mean you can’t go out?”
Ally’s looking at me like I just said I wanted to go to prom with Ben Farsky (or Fart-sky, as we’ve been calling him since fourth grade).
I sigh. “I just don’t feel like it, okay?” I switch tactics and try again. “We go out every weekend. I just—I don’t know. I want to stay in, like we used to.”
“We used to stay in because we couldn’t get into any senior parties,” Ally says.
“Speak for yourself,” Lindsay says.
This is harder than I thought it would be.
I flash on my mom asking if I’d had a fight with Rob and before I can think too much about it I blurt out, “It’s Rob, okay? We…we’re having issues.”
I flip open my phone, checking for texts for the millionth time. When I first came into the cafeteria Rob was standing behind the registers, loading his fries with ketchup and barbecue sauce (his favorite). I couldn’t bring myself to go up to him, so instead I hurried to our table in the senior section and sent him a text: We have 2 talk.
He texted back right away. Bout?
2nite, I wrote back, and since then my phone’s been silent. Across the cafeteria, Rob is leaning against the vending machines talking to Adam Marshall. He has his hat twisted sideways on his head. He thinks it makes him look older.
I used to love collecting all these little facts about him, storing them together and holding them close inside of me, like if I gathered up all the details and remembered them—the fact that he likes barbecue sauce but not mustard, that