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Because when cornered, what assumed dumpee wouldn’t want to pre-dump back? “Oh, Sarah, that’s not true—I’m sure she’s just embarrassed is all.”

“She could tell me that. We could talk, maybe, like grown-ups.”

“Maybe she wants to talk in person?” I said, praying that I wasn’t digging Lacey a pit—and all of this was assuming she’d ever forgive me for consorting with Liam yesterday.

“If she never tells me that, how the fuck am I supposed to know?”

I waved my hands between us in surrender. “I’ll talk to her. Just—don’t give up on her yet, okay? Please?”

Sarah harrumphed. “Yeah, fine, whatever. As long as she doesn’t do anything else dumb.”

I laughed nervously, hoping to defuse the tension. “I think we both know I’m way more likely to do something dumb than she is.”

I lurked by our lockers when I could that day. Some enterprising cheerleader had put up aFear Bison Power!poster up above the lockers on the opposite wall, where I’d never seen one before,and I wanted to yank it down. Lacey didn’t show. I wondered what her mother was telling the school, if she had a doctor’s note, and what, if anything, anyone else knew.

That feeling of otherness kept pulsing in me. I felt alone because I was alone, physically, but it was more than that, because there was this whole other world happening that only I could see.

“Hey,” said someone familiar from a great height, in between classes, startling me.

I looked up. It was Darius. “Hey.”

“How’s your day going?”

“I can use my phone now, so there’s that.”

“Still have my number?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. If you ever need to practice again?—”

“Yeah—I mean, I might, you know? It could be useful.” I tried to sound like I didn’t care, even though I did, while searching his expression and bearing for equal and opposite signs of caring-not-caring.

“Precisely,” he said, giving nothing away.

A warning bell rang and I bowed out first, walking away with a strange tickling inside me, like the twitch of a rabbit’s nose.

CHAPTER 20

Iwas still trying to figure out what that was, if it was okay, if I was okay with it, when I was in chemistry class—and in chemistry class, there was Liam.

He jerked his chin at me as I walked in the door and since we sat in the same isle I had to walk right toward him. “Hey, so about tonight—practice finishes around seven. Can I pick you up on my way home?”

I’d known this would be coming up all day, and had alternated between talking myself into and out of it at least a hundred different times. If Lacey didn’t want me to do anything, I shouldn’t, it was her decision. And yet, if there was something I could do, on the off chance she changed her mind later, I should do it, right? Even if that kind-of-sort-of made me a jerk right now?

“Jessie?” Liam prompted.

“Sure thing,” I said, so much sure-er than I felt.

He grinned and pulled out his phone. “What’s your address?”

I told it to him—and for a strange double-vision moment, I could see-feel him typing it in.

“Okay. See you then,” he said, tucking his phone back into his pocket before going to his seat behind me.

I made sure to leave class ahead of him—I was over my RDA of awkward interactions for today—and headed to my locker, only to find that someone had written LOSER on Lacey’s locker with red lipstick.

I sighed, went to the bathroom, got paper towels and water, and came back to try to get it off, managing only to smear it around in great red streaks. It took so long that I almost missed the bus.