Page 32 of 10 Things I Hate About Prom
The words are like an ice bath.
“I…I didn’t sabotage anything,” I stammer, the cold giving way to a warmth that spreads from my cheeks down to my toes. Sweat beads across my forehead as I give her my best casual shrug. “I was in a rush, and they’re both black Priuses.”
Her dark brown eyes narrow to slits. She pinches the soft skin of my inner arm.
“Ow! What the hell?!” I rub my reddened skin.
“Did you expect me to believe that?” she snaps. “I amoffended.” She makes sure to enunciate each syllable for emphasis.
“I’m serious!” I reply with an indignant pout. “I really didn’t know it was Coach Mills’s car.”
Technically, that’s the truth. Nonetheless, she sees right through me. Friends are overrated; you can’t even lie to them.
Anna sighs, giving up on glaring at me in favor of trading books out of her locker. “Be in denial if you want. But seriously, don’t get yourself any more detention.”
“I’m not in denial because there’s nothing to be in denial about!” I lean up against the locker beside hers. Except, y’know, that I’m in love with my best friend. But she doesn’t need to know that. “You said yourself that Joaquin going to prom with Tessa would be a terrible idea.”
“Yeah, because it is.” She slams her locker door shut, turning on her heel and heading toward the parking lot. “But I didn’t tell you to go set up all his promposals for disaster. You could, oh I don’t know, have an actual conversation about why he shouldn’t go with her?”
I hate when she’s right.
Talking to Joaquin would save me a whole lot of effort but still leaves the very relevant problem that just the thought of talking to him about this makes me want to hurl. Telling Joaquin he can’t ask Tessa out means unraveling the feelings that are sitting in the pit of my stomach like the cafeteria’s questionable lunch special. Yes, Tessa’s the worst. Yes, I don’t want to lose my best friend to someone like her. But there’s so much more to this than what’s on the surface.
And I’m terrified of telling him the truth.
Touching that locked part of me means opening a Pandora’s box of emotions I’m definitely not equipped to handle right now. Not when I barely have enough time to breathe, let alone “process my emotions” like a well-adjusted Almost Adult.
“It’s complicated,” I mumble, more to myself than to Anna while I trail behind her.
“Wow, never heard that one before.” She stops in her tracks so abruptly I almost walk into her.
When she faces me, her eyes soften. “I get it, okay? The whole ‘things are getting complicated with my best friend, and I don’t know what to do about it’ thing,” she says, almost a whisper. There’s a sadness to her words, something I almost never get to see glimpses of behind the tough exterior she puts up for the world. This place wasn’t kind to her in the aftermath of her fallout with Tessa. No one knows what happened besides them, but Anna’s still seen as the villain. God forbid she express any type of anger, or else they’ll just decide their assumptions about her are true. That she’s mean and spiteful when we both know that’s galaxies away from the truth. I’ve never met anyone more loyal and caring. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be for her. And it’s just another reason why Joaquin and Tessa shouldn’t be together—she let one of her oldest friends fall. Hard.
“What was it like? Losing your best friend?” I ask, taking a chance on prying a bit at the mystery shrouding her and Tessa’s relationship. Not because I’m some nosey small-town teenager sniffing out the latest gossip. Deep down, I do want to know. To prepare myself, maybe, for what’s inevitably going to come.
“I didn’t lose her. I walked away from her,” she clarifies, not meeting my eyes. “Everybody else decided they knew our story when we barely understood it ourselves. And I still don’t know how I feel about it. Or her.”
“It seems like you hate her.”
“I don’t hate her.” Her reply is quick, sharp. I’m taken aback by it, and the sincerity in her eyes. She tugs at the chain of her bracelet, the star charm twinkling in the light. I always thoughtAnna was past whatever she and Tessa had before. “I’ll never be able to hate her…”
Anna takes her time finishing that thought, clearly weighing the words in her head before she finally says, “Try to be honest with Joaquin. It’ll save you a lot of trouble.”
Before I can reply, she heads to the parking lot and I’m left with a couple minutes to get to detention and a whole lot to process.
Detention is the perfect place to panic.
Today’s riveting Thursday afternoon crowd is just me, one of the stoners from Chris Pavlenko’s band of goons, the poor guy who landed himself detention through the rest of the year for whacking a lunch lady in the head with one of theMisty will you go to prom with meT-shirts he was shooting out of a homemade cannon this morning, and Mr.Cline, resident sex ed teacher and detention monitor.
As always, Mr.Cline plugs in his headphones and is fast asleep within a record three and a half minutes of sitting at his desk. Which leaves me with plenty of time to stare at the empty notebook in front of me and overthink what I’m about to do.
Anna’s voice rattles in my ears, possessing me like a demon and forcing me to open a notebook and write down everything I can’t say out loud so I can finally exorcise myself of the guilt that’s been eating at me. The caffeine from my Raspberry Unicorn keeps me so on edge my teeth start to chatter.
Be honest.
Easier said than done,I tell the specter of Anna that now haunts my brain. Coming clean is my best move, especially if I’m not as discreet as I thought I’d been about my plans for Joaquin’s third promposal attempt.
At least it seems like my plan did the trick. Three whole days have gone by since The Incident, and Joaquin hasn’t come up with any new convoluted plans to ask Tessa to prom. He’s listening to the universe. And yet, victory doesn’t taste as sweet as I hoped it would.
