Page 112 of Whatever It Takes

If someone even tries to talk to me, they only ever ask about Loren Hale. I always shut down at the start of those questions. If I discuss my time with Lo and Lily or any of her sisters, I feel like I’m betraying them.

But I finally have a nickname.

Wordless Willow.

Apparently not responding to someone paints a target on you. Though, my whole body was practically painted red before I even arrived at Dalton.

I haven’t exactly told Lo any of this. I also don’t plan to tell him today or tomorrow. Some things, I have to deal with on my own.

My current plan: focus on my classwork and not thepeoplein my classes. I only have one semester after this one ends. I can make it.

“I want you there,” I tell Garrison.I’m not going to know many people besides Lo, Lily, her sisters, and their significant others.“But if you don’t want to go—”

“I do.” He twirls a cigarette in his fingers. He won’t smoke in my room. I’ve never told him, but he’s the only reason school isn’t unbearable. He’s the reason there aren’t more tampons in my locker—or worse. He made sure his old friends left me alone.

I’ve needed him.

If he wasn’t here, I’m not sure I’d have the strength to stay.

Maybe I’d find it somewhere else, but he’s kept me looking forward. At a better future. At a better place.

In our quiet, I hear the front door to the apartment opening, audible from my cracked bedroom door. Voices emanate from the hallway, and I’m sure my roommate (the only other person with a key) has stepped inside the living room.

Seconds later, my door swings further open, until Maya sticks her head inside. She wears a pink wig and plastic body armor. Her costume: Lightning fromFinal Fantasy.

“Hey,” she says. “I’m heading out. You sure you don’t want to come?” A smile creeps on her lips. “Your first college party could be a cosplay Halloween.”

At seventeen, I might be living in an off-campus apartment near the University of Pennsylvania, but I’ve successfully avoided the college parties so far. Thinking about them brings on this whole new wave of anxiety that I didn’t even know existed.

“It’s tempting, but I have to go to Loren’s neighborhood thing.”It’s Lo, Willow.Right.Lo. Lo. Lo.

“Yeah, I heard about that on Yik-Yak.”

Garrison snorts from my rug. “Someone yakked about it?” He returns to the video game, eyes glued to the screen as he plays.

Maya squeezes a little further into my room but stays in the doorway. “I think the yak was something like ‘my dream is to party with Loren Hale on his birthday’—not at all detailed.” She casts sly glances from Garrison to me, back and forth, but she’s not as worried as when I first brought him over.

As the Superheroes & Scones manager, she finds his attitudetroubling. She was worried he’d steal the comics and sell them online.

The fact that I brought him to our apartment—that he’s grown closer to me—made her a bit more protective and apprehensive too. I think she thought maybe this all might be a trick. Get close to the geek for other reasons.

Burn her. Make fun of her. Humiliate her.

Like classic teen movies. He’d try to change me, so that I’d become popular like him. Or he’d pull some cruel prank in the very end.

Neither has happened.

Outside of lacrosse, he spends nearly all his free time with me. He’ll message me on Tumblr first. (We still haven’t exchanged phone numbers.) Sometimes, he’s already in the parking lot before he asks if he can come up. Sometimes I wonder if a tree was outside my apartment complex, if he’d climb it and knock on the window.

I think he would.

Garrison might not be up-to-date on comics like the other Superhero & Scones employees, but he has a geeky side that he’s repressed and hidden from his friends.

He loves computers.

Helovesvideo games. Retro things like Lion King on Sega and Pokémon. We spent three whole days playing Mario Party on N64, and if he asked, I’d waste another three weeks doing the same thing with him.

That doesn’tfeellike someone tricking me.