Page 57 of The Last Love Song
Then again, why should she?
She needed to complete her work. If Bailey hated her so much, she could come up with the excuse.
“Here you go, ladies. Follow me.” Ms. Leister waved them toward a lab table off to one side of the room. “I left out a few sets of the beakers and cylinders for student makeups today. Just find the instructions in the book for the density lab. If you work quickly, you should be able to finish before the period ends.”
Any moment, Bailey would think of somewhere else she needed to be. Beg off for one reason or another. Yet when Ms. Leister walked away, Megan’s former friend didn’t speak.
Megan flipped open a spare textbook. Each turned page made a snapping sound that echoed her annoyance.
“You know, you don’thaveto do the experiment with me.” Bailey withdrew a bookmark from the page she’d already flagged in her text. Columns neatly drawn, she had the paper all prepped for the work.
Megan rolled her eyes. She might steal boyfriends and lie to her friends, but the girl was seriously organized.
“And let you get the A while I take an F for not completing an assignment? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Since when do I root for people to fail?” Bailey frowned at the text, one manicured hand smoothing over the bookmark with glossy ultrapink nails.
Megan recognized the bookmark and the book it advertised—a romantic trilogy with a hot hero from an alien planet. They’d both read the series in between the Ann Radcliffe stuff last summer when they’d been friends.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe ever since you started stealing boyfriends and trash-talking your friends behind their backs.” Keeping her voice low, Megan yanked graph paper and a ruler from her bag.
She didn’t know what had gotten into her this week—this need to confront people. Maybe it had been eating away her insides for so long that the toxic poison was starting to leak out.
“That’s bullshit,” Bailey whispered furiously. “I never trash-talked you.”
Bailey walked to the sink and measured the necessary water so they could start taking their mass and volume measurements. Megan opened the isopropyl alcohol and filled another cylinder, two steps ahead so they could finish faster and get the hell away from each other.
“So you’ll admit to stealing J.D.—not that he was any great loss—but you won’t admit you tried turning the whole school against me?” Megan noticed Ms. Leister looking their way, so she made an effort to pull her mouth into a smile that felt more like baring her teeth.
“Girls,” Ms. Leister called. “Do we remember the first law of thermodynamics?”
Bailey straightened from her work on her graph. “The total energy of an isolated system is constant despite internal changes,” she retorted, never missing a beat.
“Show-off,” Megan muttered between her teeth.
“Exactly!” Ms. Leister beamed. “And if you add heat to a system, there are only two things that can be done—change the internal energy of the system or cause the system to do work to use that energy.” She peered at them over her glasses. “And since you have quite a bit of heated energy over there, let’s use it formore workinstead of distracting chatter. Okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” both of them answered at once.
For the next thirty minutes, Megan worked next to Bailey in silence, the lab going faster and—she had to admit—better than it would have with Jennie, her usual lab partner. She and Bailey had been friends once, after all. Despite everything that had happened between them and Bailey’s decision to be a backstabbing liar, they still had some things in common. Intelligence, for one thing. No surprise Bailey had known her thermodynamic laws.
Commitment to good grades was another.
Megan knew plenty of smart kids at Crestwood, but not all of them bothered to—as her father would say—“apply themselves.”
Bailey did.
That was probably why Wade had discounted her as the sender of the mean texts. Wade hadn’t believed that a smart girl with her eye on the future would be involved in the kind of bullying Megan was experiencing. And considering how fast Bailey had denied the trash-talking accusation, it made Megan wonder about it, too. What if Bailey wasn’t the reason behind all the evil at school?
What if she hadn’t sent the texts? And if J.D. hadn’t, either… Yes, that amounted to a lot of ifs. But she felt less sure about what the hell was going on. And as much as she hated the idea that Bailey and J.D.—or their friends—were harassing her, it freaked her out even more to think that a total stranger had targeted her.
“Time to finish working,” Ms. Leister announced, glancing around the room at the few people still using lab equipment. “Let’s get things packed up and put away before the bell.”
Crap. They really hadn’t worked fast enough, because Megan hadn’t gotten all the data written down for Bailey’s portion of the lab. Normally, they would have had a double period to work on their measurements and copy all the notes.
“Switch notebooks?” Bailey thrust her composition book full of neatly written columns in front of her. “We can take pictures on our phones. Ms. Leister won’t care. I’ve done it before.”
Megan glanced toward the front desk, where the teacher worked on her laptop.
