Page 8

*invisible lunching with strangers*

“W HERE’S A LLIE?” I ASKED.

Kennedy and I looked around the lunchroom, trying to do it in that sly way where no one could tell you were nervously trying to figure out where you would be consuming your food and who with.

But the thing about the cafeteria was that the longer you stood in one place, looking around, the more obvious it became that you didn’t fit in anywhere. That you didn’t know where you belonged. Add my stupid shirt and bulbous nose to that stressful awareness, and I was starting to panic in our search for Allie.

“Ooh—there she is!”

I looked in the direction where Kennedy was pointing and couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Allie was sitting next to Ashley Baker. THE Ashley Baker, the Ashley Baker who’d been revered and admired since the day she did a backflip off the top of the slide in second grade and landed on her feet.

Ashley was one of those people who seemed to be good at everything while also looking cool (she had leather pants and didn’t look stupid in them) and doing all the right things.

All the time.

I mean, she’d twirled fire batons in the sixth-grade talent show and hadn’t burned down the gym. It didn’t get much cooler than that.

The other four girls at the table were Ashley Baker’s closest friends.

It was a GOOD table if you were going to rank tables by social importance.

So what the heck was Allie doing there?

Had she been there first and they accidentally formed an eating circle around her? Was she so hungry that she hadn’t noticed whose table she was sitting at in her race to shove handfuls of food down her empty gullet?

“Wait,” I said, grabbing Kennedy’s sleeve as she started to head in Allie’s direction. “I’m not sure we should go over there.”

Especially when I look like this.

It would be terrifying enough approaching that table on a good day.

But on a day where I’d been ball-smacked in the face and was wearing the discarded shirt of a glow-in-the-dark nerd, it had catastrophic potential.

At that moment, Allie looked up and saw us.

She smiled ( sort of ) and waved us over.

Oh-kay. Apparently we were doing it. Kennedy and I walked over to the popular table, and as I watched Allie, I realized it didn’t appear—from a distance—to be a mistake at all.

Allie looked like she fit in.

Her bouncy hair was having lunch with five other bouncy-haired heads. Her makeup’d face was having lunch with five other makeup’d faces. Her not-in-grade-school-anymore body was having lunch with five other not-in-grade-school-anymore bodies.

It checked out.

And now… here we were.

“Hey,” Kennedy said, grabbing a chair from an empty table and sliding it over with a loud screeeech so she was sitting beside Allie. I watched the girl on the other side of Allie scooch down, and I felt like the biggest nerd as I also grabbed a chair ( screech ) and made her scooch down even farther.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and her lips turned up in a fake-polite “it’s okay” smile while her eyes dropped down to my glowing-in-the-dark-and-in-the-light-so-obnoxiously bright shirt.

“I had a bloody nose,” I blurted out, which made her look queasy and actually explained nothing. I opened my mouth to keep going, but she looked away.

That’s right—save yourself.

“So I had PE first hour,” Kennedy said, looking at Allie and ignoring the rest of the table. “And Mr. Barnes said we’re going to have a week of swimming this semester, where we get bused to the high school.”

“Noooooo,” Allie said, lifting a piece of pizza to her mouth. “They can’t make us swim .”

Ashley scowled and shook her perfect head. “My mom is definitely calling me out of that.”

“Do you think your mom would, though?” asked Heather Hines, Ashley’s best friend. Heather had been going out with her boyfriend, Lucas, since fourth grade, so I seriously questioned her brain. Like, who did that? I was pretty sure I still ate paste in fourth grade, so I definitely didn’t want to kiss anyone who’d once considered nine-year-old me a good catch. Heather said, “She’s kind of hard-core.”

“I could talk her into it,” Ashley proclaimed, and she was so confident that I totally believed her.

“My mom would never,” Kennedy said. Her words were barely out of her mouth before Kirsten, one of the other girls, said, “My mom would never .”

And everyone chimed in to discuss this with Kirsten as if Kennedy hadn’t even spoken.

I looked at Ken and quietly said, “My mom would.”

Kennedy grinned and we had a quiet moment as the popular girls all launched into the conversation that she’d started, shutting her out as if she were invisible.

“Gosh, I don’t think my dad would let me skip,” Allie said, which started another discussion about everyone’s fathers. When Allie spoke, everyone seemed to listen.

As if she’d always been a part of their friend group.

“Hey, Holford.” Tyler Andrews, sitting at the table to our left, was leaning back in his chair and yelling to Kennedy. The guys at his table were all looking over, and I knew this couldn’t be good. I loved Kennedy, but she tended to overshare and speak without thinking first. So if that kid—fairly popular and a bit of a jerk—was trying to get her attention, she must’ve done something that he wanted to mock.

“Yeah?” She glanced over, unconcerned. That was one of my favorite things about her; Kennedy didn’t really worry about stuff. I could spend hours stressing because a random person gave me a weird look in the hall, but unless someone was screaming mean things directly in her face, she was unfazed.

“What time are you streaming tonight?” he asked.

“Eight,” she said, shoveling a bite of salad into her mouth. “A lot of my subscribers are on Pacific time, so I have to go late.”

A lot of my subscribers are on Pacific time?

How did she already seem so comfortable with her brand-new gaming celebrity? Did that come with the wish, the ability to handle it smoothly?

“Please tell me you’re going to hit the Welverionite level. I’m almost there, so I need you to—”

“Go before you and die so you learn how not to do it?” she interrupted.

“Yes,” he said around a laugh. “Exactly.”

But I realized when he laughed he wasn’t the only one laughing. Every dude at his table was listening to Kennedy, and they were all smiling. They all laughed at her joke.

What is happening?

She was so confident as she talked about the game that even I , someone who’d never really played video games aside from Animal Crossing , was interested.

She was making Battle of Borgledoush sound fascinating.

The guys at the table kept peppering her with questions, so between that and the court that Beautiful Allie was holding with her fellow princesses, I was pretty much alone in a crowd. I ate and tried to look interested in either of the conversations going on around me, but it was difficult when my brain kept pointing out that I didn’t fit into either one.

While also pointing out that it felt good to be sitting at the popular table.

Even knowing I was only there because of my friends didn’t change the fact that we were there .

I didn’t have to worry that the important people were mocking us because they were talking to us, and everyone in the cafeteria was now categorizing us as part of their group.

Even if I didn’t technically belong, hundreds of students were now thinking that I did.

I was drinking the last of my milk when I noticed that Jackson Matthews was at the table on the other side of us. He was close enough to poke, but his back was to me, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t noticed me.

Thank God .

He was talking to that kid who’d broken the track record last year—Ethan Something—and I accidentally eavesdropped. Okay—it wasn’t an accident. But I was bored and he was close, so I tuned my ears into his conversation.

“—and I’m dead serious, man. I literally grew six inches over the summer. Overnight, really.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ethan said, “but you can’t tell me you haven’t been going nuts in the gym. You were skinnier than me last year, and now you’re jacked.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Jackson said, and he sounded a little… confused. “I was trying to get lean over the summer for cross-country. I didn’t go to the gym at all because bulk slows you down. I ran every day, and I did push-ups, but I never lifted.”

“I call BS.” I could hear the teasing laugh in Ethan’s voice as he said, “You don’t get a chest like that from push-ups. You’re like a solid B-cup, dude, and I refuse to believe that Mother Nature gifted you pecs like the tooth fairy dropping dimes under a pillow. No way.”

I gritted my teeth, and the urge to tackle Jackson was back, because this felt a lot like theft.

“Let’s go,” I heard Allie say, and when I turned my attention back to my table, everyone was standing and a couple girls were already walking away. Even Kennedy was talking to one of the popular girls and walking toward the trash can to dump her tray.

I knew it was only the first day, but nothing felt right.

At all.

This felt wrong and different and uncomfortable.

Ten out of ten would not recommend.