upon an online Rapper Name generator.
Mine was Luscious E-Freeze.
Now he uses that name when he wants to think of himself as hard-core.
I shoot him a dubious look. “You told off Mrs. Leach?”
“Yes.” His lips say the words, but his eyes give him away.
“Let the record show that the witness is lying.”
He bows his head again, his voice losing all the bravado it had only a second ago. “Okay, okay. She sent me here for being more than thirty minutes late to class and I didn’t have a pass.”
I bite my lip. “I’m sorry, O.”
He shrugs. “It won’t matter tomorrow, right?”
“Nope. Not in the slightest.”
He rubs anxiously at his chin. I can tell he’s still trying to process what I told him in the car. Make sense of it. Basically the same thing I’ve been doing for the past five days. “So. Let me get this straight. You and”—he won’t say his name; he never says his name—“blondie had a fight yesterday.”
“Sunday. Which was four days ago for me.”
“Right. And today he’s going to break up with you. But yesterday—or yesterday for you—you were able to stop him from breaking up with you because you dressed up like a stripper?”
Okay, when he puts it that way, it does sound kind of ridiculous. “In a nutshell, yes.”
“But today you woke up and it was still the same day.”
I nod. “And I have no idea why.”
“But,” Owen argues, biting his lip, “wouldn’t he have just broken up with you anyway?”
“What? Why?”
“Because that wasn’t you. You were playing a part. You said so yourself. You would never have been able to keep that act up forever and eventually he would have ended it anyway.”
“You don’t know that,” I say quickly.
He shrugs. “No, but…”
“But what?”
“Never mind.”
“No. Finish your statement, counselor.”
I sense another fight coming on and I really really don’t want to argue with Owen again.
“What happened after he didn’t break up with you?”
I have a feeling that’s not what he started to say only a minute ago but I don’t object. “I left the carnival, Tristan went to hang out with the band, and then…”
Tell him, I urge myself. Tell him the truth. We hung out. We had a blast. He hustled a carnival employee at the ring toss game. And then we got into the worst fight of our friendship.
“And then?” he prompts.
“And then … nothing,” I finish.
Why did I say that? Why can’t I just tell him? He deserves to know the truth.
He gets very quiet, staring at his hands. Then finally he says, “Ellie. Can I ask you something?”
I have no idea where this is going, but for some reason I feel a lump form in my stomach.
“Sure” is what I say, but it’s a big fat lie. I’m most certainly not sure about anything anymore. If anything, I’m one hundred percent unsure about everything.
He runs a hand through his hair. It’s not a casual gesture. It’s a conflicted one. He looks like he wants to tug the strands out by the roots. “Do you think you could ever—”
The door to Principal Yates’s office swings open and her large frame fills up the entire doorway. She looks at each of us in turn, seemingly deciding which one she wants to deal with first.
She sighs. “Mr. Reitzman.”
It was a wise choice. Save the most difficult for last.
He stands and follows Principal Yates, but before he disappears into the temple of doom, he catches my eye. I notice something in his gaze. An intensity I’ve never seen before. It stirs up emotions deep in my chest. Emotions I don’t even recognize.
I don’t like it.
I don’t approve of whatever invisible electricity is surging between us right now.
“Behave in there,” I tease with a suggestive raise of my eyebrows. “The pool is only a few steps down the hall, you know.”
We both stifle a laugh as Owen continues into the office and Principal Yates shuts the door behind them.
Just like that, Owen is Owen again. The boy who convinced me to climb a telephone pole at summer camp seven years ago.
And I’m …
Well, the jury is still out on that one.
Hold On! I’m Comin’
9:32 a.m.
Principal Yates gave me detention. She looked all torn up about it, too. Like it pained her to do it. Owen, I discovered from a text message later, skated by with a warning, but since I was late and talked smack to Mr. Briggs, I’m apparently the bigger threat to school security.
When Principal Yates asked me what I had learned from