Page 10

seven

I swore the library stacks got bigger every time I came in here. The shelves dwarfed me on all sides, lit only by the natural light coming in from the skylight above my head as I wandered through the aisles, running my hands along the spines of the books.

“I’m not sure where to start,” I told Ainsley, who was walking along behind me. She was snapping her gum, which sounded especially loud in the quiet of the library, and seemed just as disinterested in this assignment as I was.

“I don’t either,” Ainsley said. “I bet we can find a lot of sources online, but I don’t see how the library can help with arguments on dress code.”

When we walked into our first period this morning—Public Speaking, aka hell in the form of a high school class—Mrs. Jefferson announced that we would be getting partnered up to perform a persuasive argument speech as our first major assignment.

She made the pairs for the speeches by using a random generator, but I was sure it must have been somehow rigged for me to end up with the only Novak in my class.

Not by Mrs. Jefferson, who I was sure couldn’t care less what was going on in my personal life, but by fate or the universe or whatever else controlled these things.

We’d already been assigned the topic for our speech: whether uniforms should be mandated in all schools.

The topic was laughable when I looked at Ainsley, who had adapted her uniform so much that I wasn’t sure how she didn’t get dress-coded every day.

The skirt was obviously hemmed as high as it was allowed to be, then rolled up at the waist to make it even shorter.

Instead of tucking her shirt in, she’d tied the front into a knot, showing off a strip of her toned stomach, and she left one too many buttons undone at the top.

And even though she was wearing the blazer, she’d covered the front of it in a variety of pins and buttons.

Although we were technically allowed to have pins, the spirit of the rule had been for us to have one or two, not to cover everything but the school logo.

I was pretty sure I already knew where her views on a school uniform were going to land.

“Do you think she’ll ask us for what books we took out?” Ainsley asked. “Or could we get away with not doing anything?”

“No, she’ll definitely ask us.”

Mrs. Jefferson was a very hands-on teacher.

It was the same reason that she made us talk to her every day when we came into class.

The same reason that I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get out of doing this stupid speech.

At least I would have Ainsley up there with me.

It was better than having to perform alone, although only marginally .

I raked my fingers through my hair as I continued walking down the aisle.

This class was going to be the death of me.

I wasn’t sure why anyone would willingly pick to be in it.

But then I glanced at Ainsley again, who was trailing behind and looking like she also wanted to be anywhere else in the world, and wondered how she could have ended up here if she wasn’t being forced like me.

“Why did you choose this class?” I asked her curiously.

She didn’t strike me as a big public speaker.

I hardly ever heard her speak, other than when she was talking to Imogen, her twin sister.

The two of them were basically attached at the hip and, although they never struck me as being malicious in doing it, rarely spent time with anyone but each other.

It was why it had been such a shock when Ainsley joined the swim team without Imogen last year.

“I was just placed in it,” Ainsley said.

She shrugged but the movement was awkward and stiff, like she wanted to be nonchalant but wasn’t sure how.

I saw it on my mom so much that it was easy to identify, but I wasn’t sure why Ainsley would be doing it.

Was she really that uncomfortable talking to someone outside of her family?

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Was there a problem with your schedule?”

Course registration was open for all students, so I couldn’t see why they would just place her in public speaking.

The only way that I could see somebody getting placed in the wrong class was if they had a bunch of scheduling conflicts, but even then, I would have thought she would switch out of it into something more interesting.

She paused like she was thinking about it for a second. “You know how course registration was mid-August?” She ran her hands along her skirt, like she was nervous. “Well, August was a pretty bad month for me.”

She stared at me, waiting for the information to click in my brain.

And it took me a second until I realized what she meant.

Her dad left near the end of July, which meant August was the first month that they all had to be there without him.

Course registration was probably the last thing on her mind when her family was busy dealing with her dad’s departure and learning how to exist as a family without him there.

“I told the guidance counselor to put me in whatever classes he wanted,” she continued. Then she laughed softly, but it didn’t sound humorous. “Didn’t seem all that important at the time. Kind of regretting that now.”

We stood in an awkward silence for a few seconds as I wondered what I should say.

The usual “I’m sorry that happened to you” or “my condolences” weren’t exactly fitting since he wasn’t dead, and I didn’t see how they would help anyway.

But the silence was stretching out and Ainsley probably felt even less comfortable at this moment than I did, so I had to fill it with something.

The next thing I knew, I was blurting out, “My parents forced me to take the class.”

Ainsley’s eyes flitted to mine, and I realized that I probably sounded like I was bragging with the emphasis on my parents and the way that they were together. So I continued on before she thought that I was just being the most insensitive jerk in the world.

“I didn’t want to be in this class. I know I probably made that pretty obvious with the parents forcing me to, but what I mean is…

” I shook my head, trying to get my th oughts in order.

I hadn’t told anybody about how my mom basically chose all my classes for me and how she’d immediately pointed to public speaking and said it would be perfect for me.

“They think it’s embarrassing that their daughter is so shy and never speaks up in conversations. ”

I wasn’t sure if it was something that Ainsley could relate to, but I had a feeling it probably was.

Maybe not the embarrassment part—I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Novak ever being embarrassed about her kids—but the shyness and the feeling that everyone around you wished you could just speak up more instead of shutting down.

“So they forced me to take it,” I said. “They said I need to get over my shyness, as if being forced to speak in front of a bunch of strangers is going to do that.”

Ainsley was silent for a long few moments, and I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing and then trumped over her issues with my own, acting like I didn’t care about them at all. But then she said, “I always thought your family was perfect.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the words. All this time, the way my mom had been so careful in how she presented us to the world, I was sure it was making no difference. I guess she’d been right in her methods, even if I still didn’t understand why she cared so much.

“Do me a favor,” I said, “tell my mom about that next time you see her. She’ll be flying on that cloud for a week.”

“She cares a lot about it, huh?”

“It’s all she cares about,” I said, without thinking.

I quickly clamped my mouth shut before I accidentally shared more than I meant to.

I never talked about this stuff with anyone but Dean, so I wasn’t used to having to filter what I was saying.

But even if Ainsley seemed sweet and I felt like we were opening up a little now, I wasn’t ready to share everything that went on in my house with her right now.

“We’ll pass this class,” Ainsley said in a confident tone. She held her chin up in the air, which was an unusual pose for her. Normally, she kept her chin tucked in a way that made her face stay hidden by her curtain bangs. “We’ll make sure that your parents get the best report card possible.”

“I think you overestimate my ability to be able to speak in front of a crowd.”

“Eh, don’t worry. If all else fails, I’m really good at forging report cards.”

I wish I had something to offer her, some way to reassure her that it was okay.

That everything was going to be okay in her family too.

But what could I offer her? I couldn’t bring her dad back—and at this point, I wasn’t sure if any of them even wanted him around—and there was nothing I could do to convince her that it was going to be okay.

“Come to the soccer game with me,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“There’s a soccer game Wednesday night,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me? We’re all going to cheer on Sebastian.”

I stared at her, trying to understand the trick in the words.

Five years I’d lived next to Ainsley Novak, and before now we’d never had a conversation that went past “Hey, how’s it going?

” or “you did really well in that race.” But now, here she was inviting me to hang out with her outside of school.

And any fear that it was a trick or a joke disappeared when I looked at her and saw how hopeful she seemed.

Even though I’d always known Ainsley to be shy, I’d never thought of her as being like me—a girl who just desperately wanted a friend but didn’t know how to get one.

So even though I knew absolutely nothing about soccer and wasn’t sure if watching Sebastian play soccer (aka at his maximum hotness) was a good idea for me and my plan to move on from the kiss, I said yes.