I hear Oliver’s horn outside as I’m shoving my feet into boots. “Hold on!” I yell in his direction, even though he can’t hear me through the door.
When I make it out to the porch, I find him standing right there, waiting for me. “Hello?” I say it like a question and am shocked when the answer comes in the form of a giant hug that lifts me off the ground. “What are you doing?” I squeal as he sets me down and then bounds toward the behemoth.
“Picking you up!” he yells back. “Get it? Picking you up.”
“That’s terrible.” I follow him across the driveway, not acknowledging the way something inside me lit up when he held me. “It’s not a pun. It’s not even a joke.” I reach the car and climb inside. “I can’t believe you get this excited about school.”
“I am a man of high emotion.”
“You are a boy of great ridiculousness,” I tell him as we pull onto Callaway Lane.
The thing I’m dreading doesn’t come up until we’re halfway to school.
“How was the rest of break?” Oliver asks me. “Did you see Itch?”
“Fine. We got together yesterday.”
I can’t put my finger on exactly why I’m not ready to tell Oliver about breaking up with Itch, although I know it’s at least partially because I’m ashamed. I feel bad that I made Itch angry, and I hate how he shined a giant glaring light on the ugliest parts of me.
But that’s not all of it.
The idea of talking to Oliver about Itch—of letting him know I’m single—something about it makes me feel…nervous. It’s too intimate. It exposes me. Leaves me raw and open. It makes me available.
It makes me an option.
So instead, I change the subject. “Do you guys have a new terrible plan for the stupid senior prank?”
“Well, since you asked so sweetly, yes we do,” says Oliver. “The day before spring break starts, we’re going to cover the teachers’ cars with birdseed.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you don’t understand.” Oliver switches to a slower, more pronounced method of speaking. “We’ll put the seed out in the morning, and by the time the last bell rings, all their cars will be covered in poo.”
“Oh, I understood fine,” I assure him. “It’s still awful.”
“Theo thinks it’s genius,” Oliver argues.
“We’ve already established what I think of Theo.” I point a finger at him. “That amount of bird poo will wreak havoc with the paint on the cars. Do you comprehend how little teachers make?”
“I can’t win with you.” Oliver gives a rueful laugh. “You know that, right, Rafferty?”
I come out of the environmental sciences classroom and automatically turn in the direction of the stairwell, but I take only a couple steps before I remember that I don’t go there anymore.
It’s weird and also a little sad.
I know Oliver is probably still in family sciences and I could say hello or hang with him during the break, but instead, I walk past Mrs. Alhambra’s room quickly, with my head down.
I could go to physics early, but then I’d be sitting in my seat when Oliver and Ainsley came in, and the thought of trying to make conversation while avoiding any mention of Itch makes me feel tired. So this time I do go to the stairwell, because I figure that’s the last place my ex-boyfriend will be. There I edge my back into a corner and I ignore all the students bustling past me in an effort to get upstairs or downstairs. I don’t want to see Itch and I don’t want to see Oliver. I don’t even want to see Shaun, because he’ll ask how it went, and then I’ll have to relive the breakup by telling the story of it. There’s only one guy I want to talk to right now, but he’s on a very different schedule from me. I send a text anyway, just in case—
hey, are you there?
—and he answers right away.
yep, on way to work. what’s up?
itch & i broke up.
u ok?
I pause before writing back but decide to go with the truth.
i’m sad
There’s a pause before his message appears on my screen:
sorry, hon. he’s a fool if he can’t see how beautiful you are. best girl in the world. hands down.
I could clarify. I could explain that I’m the one who did the breaking up, that I’m only sad because it’s the end of something, because change is hard, because change is scary. My heart doesn’t have to be broken to ache.
But all that is too complicated, so I just type back two words:
thx, dad
I eat lunch in the library. We’re not supposed to have food in here, because they think we’ll drop a pizza in the books or something, but I huddle in a study desk and hide my sandwich behind a magazine.
No one bothers me.
When Darbs enters Spanish class, she makes a beeline for my chair and pokes me in the shoulder. “First day back and you’re already sitting with the pom-poms?”
“No,” I tell her. “I ate in the library.”
“We’re not allowed to eat in the library.”
“Since when do you follow the rules?”
“I don’t,” Darbs says. “But you do. What’s up?” She slides into the chair beside me, ignoring the huff of annoyance from Zoe Smith, who had been about to sit down.
“Itch and I broke up.”
Darbs nods in a way that I think is supposed to imply infinite wisdom. “Now it all makes sense.”
“Why? Did he say something at lunch?”
“He didn’t show, either. Why’d you do it?”
“Why do you assume I was the dumper and not the dumpee?”
“Come on, June.” Darbs tilts her head at me. “For a one-note guy like Itch, all that poser crap—eating lunch with the jocks and listening to you talk about football games—it was a lot. He was bending over backward to try to make you happy.” I blink at her and she gives me a compassionate smile. “But you checked out a while ago.” I nod and she reaches across the aisle to hug me. “It’s okay, Junie. Having a change of heart doesn’t make you a bad person.”
I feel a lump rise in my throat and I swallow it back. “How are things with you?” I ask so we can stop talking about Itch. “Any news on the Yana front?”
“Nope,” says Darbs. “But I made out with Ethan Erickson over winter break.” I almost choke on my gum. Darbs whacks me on the back, and after a second, my coughing morphs into laughter. “What’s so funny?” she asks when it’s clear I’m not about to die.
“I made out with Ethan Erickson over summer break.”
She stares at me and then she’s cracking up, too. When the bell rings, we’re still laughing so much that Señora Fairchild gives us a stern stare from the front of the room and refuses to start class until we calm down.
“How was your weekend?” Oliver asks once I’m strapped in and we’re heading onto the road.
“Great. I caught this punk band at a warehouse in Ypsilanti. The cover charge included a free download, so fear not: you’ll be hearing them multiple times just as soon as I prove to you yet once again that I am right and you are wrong.”
“Are they loud and screamy?”
“The loudest and the screamiest.”
“Awesome. Who’d you go with? Itch?”
Oh, right. This.
It’s been a full week—one in which Itch has avoided me like the prom, and in which I still haven’t told Oliver that Itch and I broke up. It just doesn’t seem relevant anymore. Or at least, it doesn’t until Oliver mentions him and I remember he still thinks we’re together.
Crap.
“No,” I tell Oliver. “It was a girls’ night. Just Lily and Darbs and me.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Lily likes punk?”
“Lily tolerates punk,” I tell him. “But she loves punk boys.”
“I would not have guessed that,” Oliver says, shaking his head. “People are so interesting.”
“Totally.”
The next day, I decide to take action. At least in one area of my life.
I sprint out of world history when the bell rings, and I somehow make it into the adjoining building and to the second floor just as Itch is coming out of Ms. Jackson’s class.
“Hey,” I say to him.
“Hey.” He doesn’t break his stride. I have to whip around and jog to catch up to him.
“Slow down,” I say. “Please.” Itch does, but not very much, so I grab his sleeve. “Actually, can you stop walking? I just raced here from the main building and I kinda need a second to catch my breath.”
He stops, shaking free from my hold. “What do you want, June?”
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I tell him. “This thing where we avoid each other and make it weird for everyone else.”
“Everyone else is fine.”
“I’m not fine. I miss you.” Itch’s expression doesn’t change, but his shoulders tense and the rest of him goes still. “I miss you as a friend,” I clarify.
A puff of air escapes his mouth and he presses his lips together hard. “The thing is, I already have friends.”
“Really? Because I thought we had the same friends, and apparently they don’t see you, either. All I’m saying is come have lunch with us again. We are all evolved people. We aren’t cretins who can’t handle a shift in our interpersonal dynamics.” I nudge his arm. “Besides, I think maybe they miss you, too.”
Itch looks down at me for a long moment. “Were you lying? The part where you said there’s no one else. Was that a lie?”
“No,” I say immediately. “Not a lie. I am one hundred percent single and I don’t see that changing anytime in the foreseeable future.”
“All right.” Itch starts walking down the hall away from me.
I watch him go for a second before calling after him. “Wait! Itch, hold on.” He doesn’t stop, so yet again, I find myself chasing him down. This time, I fall into stride alongside, although I use the word “stride” loosely, as I’m taking two steps for every one of his. “Where are you going?”
“To the cafeteria. Our friends are probably already there.”
I stop in mid-step and then have to run to catch up with him again. “You’re right. They probably are.”
We walk there together.