cancer a few months after you left. They caught it pretty early and everything, but he went through some brutal treatments. I spent months learning to write computer programs because he was too sick to do his job. He was in rough shape for a while.”
I laid my hand on my chest as guilt and panic coursed through me. “Oh my God. No, no one told me. Is he . . . ?” I struggled to find the right words. “Is he okay?”
“His last scan was all clear. So far so good.” He gave me another dubious look. “You really didn’t know?”
“I swear I didn’t. Why would you think I did?”
David leaned back in his seat and fiddled with his pencil. “Because of the huge basket of stuff your parents sent.”
“Wait—what? When was this?”
“Months ago. I thought you would’ve called.”
I sank in my chair, feeling small and god-awful. The real meaning of his words came through loud and clear: I thought you’d be there for me when I needed you.
But I hadn’t been.
The unmistakable bitterness in his words sat heavy in my stomach. Prickles of heat spread over my body, and for a second I thought I might really be sick. My mind refused to digest what he’d told me. Instead of thinking his father’s cancer might have brought David and me back together, my own parents had thought I wouldn’t care?
My hand moved toward him and my lips parted, but to say what, I didn’t know.
I didn’t get a chance to say anything at all, because Violet bounded into the classroom at that moment. She spotted David, froze, and threw a frantic glance from him to me and back again. I stood up and removed my bag from her chair. “David,” I said. “This is Violet. Violet, David.”
“Hi!” Violet thrust her hand out with an enthusiasm only the quintessential cheerleader could muster. Which she was. Take short, cute, bouncy, and blond, inject them with caffeinated lattes and dress them in a purple and yellow flowered sundress, and behold Violet Kensing. “You weren’t here yesterday! Did you switch so you could be in Kelsey’s class? I heard you two were friends!”
Way to up the awkward factor, Vi.
David flashed his most swoonworthy grin as he shook her hand. “Nah. My schedule was all screwed up. I spent my whole lunch in the office yesterday trying to straighten it out. They had me in Pruitt’s class, but it was full. I have a feeling I’ll like it better here anyway.”
Violet giggled. “I think this might be my favorite class now.”
Oh, for the love. That hadn’t taken long at all. Girls had always thrown themselves at David. Some things never changed.
And some things did.
A bubble of something hot and sour rose up in my chest, something I either couldn’t or didn’t want to identify. Whatever it was, it made me want to take the hair Violet kept tossing flirtatiously over her shoulder and yank it out of her head.
My concentration drifted for the rest of class. Especially once Violet slipped me a note. It said, “I’m inviting him to my party.”
I wrote back, “What party?”
“The party I decided to have five minutes ago. MUST GET HIM ALONE! P.S.: Is he a good kisser? P.P.S.: You don’t mind, do you?”
A good kisser? Why would she say that?
She’d drawn a deranged-looking smiley face in the corner, and I wondered if it was to distract me from the fact that she was asking permission to treat my best friend as her shiny object du jour. Former best friend. Why was I gripping my pen so tightly?
I sent the note back with, “I don’t know. He’s all yours.”
A smirk appeared on Violet’s face when she read my response, and a moment later the note landed back on my desk. She’d drawn an arrow pointing to the words “I don’t know” and written “LIAR!” in big block letters. Another arrow pointed to “He’s all yours,” which she’d boxed off so heavy-handedly that she’d almost gone through the paper. Next to it, with equal vigor, she’d spelled out “I HAVE IT IN WRITING! HE IS MINE!”
My fingers twitched as I fought the urge to write Until you get bored with him. Instead I forced a smile and passed the paper back to her. This was a good thing, after all. If David had his hands full with Violet, he wouldn’t be thinking about me, or the things we’d said and done, or not said and done, last year. We