Page 85 of More Than Chemical
I tried to relax. “No.”
“Why?”
But me trying to stay calm was difficult. “You know why.”
“If you’re worried about missing classes, you know I’d take good notes for you, and the chemistry test later this week is early in the morning and won’t last more than an hour.”
I stared at him and sighed. “I don’t want anyone to know who I am. And if I go, I could be found out.”
Jay slowed his pace. “But he’s your dad. The only dad you’re ever going to get.”
An ache swelled in the back of my throat.Ugh.
“Besides,” I said, “if I went, Priya and Emma would wonder where I was going every day.”
He halted. “Wait, are you saying that you haven’t told Priya and Emma who your dad is yet?”
I shrugged. “You should have seen Priya’s reaction the other day when she saw my dad on the news.”
He moaned, loud and hard. “It’s official. I don’t get girls at all.”
“Even if I thought I could unload all of my baggage on them like that”—I sucked in my cheeks—“their perception of me would be forever changed.”
“You claim them to be your best friends, but when it comes down to it, you’ve never shared with them anything that’s really important about yourself. Including the one thing they should know.”
We arrived at the entrance to the building that held our calculus class. Jay ascended the concrete stairs, and I followed behind.
He started into the lecture hall, and I grabbed him by the elbow. “Obviously, you never noticed how my high school friends stopped talking to me after they found out about my dad. I never want that to happen again. Ever.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“You don’t count. We weren’t friends in high school. We were classmates, but we didn’t socialize outside of that.”
His brows drew together.
“The summer after graduation, the girls I used to hang out with stopped talking to me.”
“Even your best friend, Sarah?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That sucks.” His lanky posture stooped. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. We all went off to different colleges, and we would have grown apart a little anyway, but still. They just cut me off.”
“Those girls,” he said. “If they abandoned you, they were never your friends to begin with. Priya and Emma, they wouldn’t do that.”
We sat down in class, and I thought back to the fall of my senior year, when my friends and I had toilet-papered another girl’s house—a girl who’d had the audacity not to invite us over for a gathering, so Sarah had decided we’d play a practical joke on her. It wasn’t a moment I was proud of. It also should have been the moment I realized that Sarah wasn’t a kindhearted person.
Jay was right. Priya and Emma wouldn’t abandon me.
That afternoon, I met them at the rec center to run the indoor track. We changed, stretched, and started jogging. Me inserted between them, keeping pace all together.
Two laps in, my heart pounded, my legs were weak, and I was dizzy enough that I kept thinking I might fall flat on my face.
On the third lap, I took a deep breath and said, “Do you remember the other night…when the news came on…and they mentioned Coach David Bianchini?”
“The night we watched my zombie show with Dallas?” Priya asked.
