Page 114 of Daydream

I wish I’d stayed at Henry’s house. At least if I had I could have avoided this conversation. “Why am I the only person you wouldn’t put first?”

It’s the softest he’s sounded, and yet it makes my blood boil beneath my skin. “What are you even talking about? I put you first witheverything! I didn’t cut my hair whenIwanted to. I planned my schedule around you and hockey. I spenthoursin the car drivingto see you. I worked my ass off trying to be nice to your friends so they’d like me! If I didn’t put you first in everything then we wouldn’t even be friends in the first place!”

“Whoa, that’s not true or fair! I was your friend when you had zero. Maybe you don’t remember that now that you have the Maple Hills friends you always wanted.”

There’s a sliver of hurt in his voice, and that’s what tells me something deep down I’ve always known: he has no idea the type of friend he is. “Will, if we weren’t neighbors or our parents weren’t best friends, and I didn’t overcommit myself for other people’s benefit, we would have stopped being friends when we were, like, I don’t know, twelve? Thirteen?”

“That’s not true, Hals.”

“If I didn’t practically do your homework for you for eight years, let you copy my test answers, be your designated driver, or give you an alibi because your parents thought if you were with me then you definitely wouldn’t be getting into trouble… we would not be friends.”

“Halle…”

“If I didn’t help you with every single college application, we would not be friends. If I didn’t babysit your siblings with mine so you could go out, you and I would not be friends.”

“Halle, stop.”

“I can keep going. I have a long list of things that I’ve done for you over the past decade because I didn’t know how to say no. If you were my friend, you would have stopped me. You’d have shaken me and told me that I didn’t need to do things for you to keep you. You’d have told me to stop letting everyone use me like a doormat.

“If you were my real friend, Will, you would have told me to make myself my number-one priority. You’d have told me to say no to people. You think youknowme because you’ve known me the longest, when really all you’ve known is the person I’ve conformed to to make everyone else’s life easier.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Halle.”

“Tell me something you like about me then! Tell me something that isn’t directly related to me doing something for you, or someone else, and maybe I’ll believe that I’m wrong.”

He doesn’t have anything, and the irritation is written all over his face. “I don’t know what you’ve been dreaming up, but these new friends of yours, they’re going to drop you as soon as Henry Turner gets bored of you.”

The problem with knowing someone so long is that they know exactly what to say to get beneath your skin. “I’m not listening to this. Go to your hotel and avoid me until you fuck off back to San Diego. We are not friends. We’re not going to be friends again.”

“You might want to rethink that, because they’re not your friends, Hals, and I’ve heard he has a reputation with women for a reason. Why would he want to keep you when he’s got what he wants from you already? I mean, props to him for getting you to fuck him when I tried for a year and couldn’t get you to do it.”

“I fucking hate you.”

“You don’t. You’re too nice for hatred. I’ll let you be mad at me for a bit because the truth does hurt, but when you realize I’m right, I’ll forgive you, because that’s what real friends do. And during spring break, I’m going to show you that I am your real friend and things can go back to normal.”

“Leave, Will. Now.”

This time, he does what I ask and heads down the stairs. I stand frozen in the same spot, rigid as I try to listen to his voice downstairs. When I hear the front door open and close I head into my bedroom. I want to cry, but nothing will come out. Shock, maybe? That certainly wasn’t a conversation I expected to have today.

My first instinct is to call Henry, but I know he should be getting into the right headspace for the game tomorrow. I pull my phone out of my pocket and pull up my chat with the girls, but the idea oftelling them what he just said makes me feel nauseous. Not because I think they’ll judge me for being friends with Will for as long as I was, but because what if he’s right?

If I tell them what he said, and they call him a liar, if they drop me, does that mean it’ll hurt twice as much? Is it easier to live in ignorance and hope you know the people you call friends?

When I feel ready to fake my way through the rest of the evening, I head back downstairs to the living room. To my utter dismay, Will’s parents are still here with mine. Now that the initial shock of them visiting has worn off, it makes me realize that only my mom and stepdad are here.

“You okay, honey?” Mom asks as I reenter the room. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

“Sorry, I’ve been sick all month. I just needed a little break. Hey, Mom. Where’s Maisie and Gianna?”

“Oh, they’re at Sylvia’s,” she says, referencing Paul’s mother. “We decided to have a mini break and do some sightseeing, and we couldn’t take them out of school.”

“Oh, I was looking forward to seeing them.”

“Well maybe you could try coming home and you would get to see them,” she says, smiling over her wineglass. “You’ll see them in a couple of weeks, Hals.”

“Wait, so you’re having a long weekend. Where are you staying?”

She looks at me like I just asked her for the nuclear codes as I take a seat in the chair opposite her. “Here, obviously.”

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