I held up my hands to stop him. “Wait. You’ve been spending time with Naomi Brewer? How did I not know that?”
Fadil offered up a shrug. “There hasn’t been much to tell so far.”
As much as I wanted to dive into the romantic entanglements of my best friend, I thought it best to hold off. “Let’s table the Naomi Brewer discussion for later—though you will tell me all the details even if I have to tickle them out of you—and get back to why I should talk to Javi about David.”
“So, Naomi told me that a few of the guys from the baseball team pulled a prank on him at the start of the school year.”
“And?”
Fadil talked with his mouth full, which annoyed me, but I let it slide to keep from getting off track again. “If Javi was in on it, talking to him is a decent place to start. Besides,” he added, “we have no other leads.”
I’d managed to avoid speaking to Javi since we’d broken up and I wasn’t eager to end my winning streak, but Fadil and the girl on the tampon box had a point. I only wished it didn’t involve my narcissistic ex.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Good.” Fadil chewed and swallowed the last of his lunch, wiped the crumbs onto the floor, and tossed his lunchbox into his bag. “Gotta run. See you after last period.”
Fadil took off for Dhuhr prayers, leaving me alone at our lunch table. Okay, I wasn’t exactly alone. There were some freshmen at the other end of the table, but they pretended to ignore me the way everyone else did. There hadn’t been any more anonymous graffiti drawn on my locker, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. Like I said, my classmates were eager for life to return to normal, which meant pretending the girl who’d practically raised someone from the dead was nothing more than a typical social outcast.
Speaking of social outcasts, though definitely of the nontypical sort, Freddie was eating her lunch alone instead of with her friends. I couldn’t figure her out. She seemed as determined not to return to her normal life as everyone else seemed to do the opposite.
Try though I might, I couldn’t ignore that Freddie was also part of the puzzle. Why Freddie had been at Starbucks at that moment was as important as figuring out the whys and whats of David Combs. Of course, it was easier to investigate someone who wasn’t around than it was the girl I had a crush on and who’d suggested she would have been happier if I hadn’t saved her life. But I might not get a better opportunity to talk to her.
I dumped the rest of my fries into the trash, carrying only my bottled water, and walked to Freddie’s table. She’d changed her hair, shaving it on one side and braiding the other, though it was still my favorite shade of blue. The style looked good on her, but I never would have guessed she’d change her hair so drastically.
“Mind if I sit?” I asked, and then sat across from her without waiting for an answer.
Freddie looked up, her lips set in a scowl, and pulled an earbud out of her ear. “What?”
Where she’d said “what,” I’d heard “what the hell do you think you’re doing here, freak?” Not exactly the welcome I’d hoped for.
“How come you’re not with your friends?” I motioned to the table where Corinne Spieler and Tori Thrash and Wendy Nguyen were sitting.
Freddie crinkled her nose and sniffed loudly. “They’re not my friends.”
“Since when?”
“Since I decided they weren’t,” Freddie said. “What do you want?”
This was not going well. Winifred Petrine and I weren’t friends, and during our previous conversation I’d learned she’d hadn’t thought of me at all or even known my name.
“To talk?” I said. “You seem different since—”
“Some loser asshole tried to shoot me?” she said. “Like you care. Besides, I’m not the one who’s different.”
“What does that mean?”
Freddie sucked in a long breath and blew it out through her nose. “Nothing.”
The conversation stalled. I fought to reconcile this Freddie with the girl I’d had a crush on. She was the same girl who’d fought against racist lunch posters and had given a speech in eighth grade about her desire to travel the world with the Peace Corps, and being near her turned my brain to oatmeal, but she was also not that girl. Like someone had cut out the parts of her brain that made her remember how to smile and encased her in metal.
“Look, what I said the other day.” Freddie clenched her jaw. “I’m not depressed or suicidal or whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Everything is weird.”
I thought my inability to form coherent sentences was a liability, but the less I spoke, the more Freddie kept talking.
“I was already having a bad day and then this random kid shoots me. And for a second, one fucking second, I think I’m okay with it. I can die and go on to whatever is next and I’m totally fine with that. Then a girl I’ve been calling the wrong name for years heals me—which is totally fucking abnormal, by the way—and suddenly, depending on who you ask, I’m either the girl who was saved by an angel or the accomplice in a ridiculous hoax.”
Since the shooting, I’d been so worried about my own problems that I hadn’t considered how it had affected Freddie. All I’d heard were the insults and jokes directed at me, but it made sense that she’d become a target too, and I felt like an idiot for not realizing it.
“And the cherry on the shit pie is that everything is off somehow. My mom and my so-called friends, they’re all the same, but different. Out of focus or something, and I can’t stand to be around them.”
“You went through a traumatic experience,” I said. “It’s normal for things to feel strange.”
“You sound like my therapist.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“She’s mostly okay, but I’m convinced she sleeps with her eyes open while I’m talking.”
“I’ll take it as a compliment anyway,” I said. “But she might be right. Maybe your perspective’s changed and the things you used to think were important aren’t anymore.” I frowned. “Or maybe we’re all alien imposters and you’re the last human left on Earth.”
It took a second, but Freddie let a smile peek out. It was subtle and small, but it was there, like the first fingers of the cresting sun.
“You’re fucking weird.”
“And you swear a lot,” I said.
“My mom said the same thing the other day.”
I was doing it. I was having a conversation with Freddie and I hadn’t drooled or ended the world. It was a miracle. And then the bell rang. Freddie sighed, shoved her phone in her purse, and stood.
“Hey, wait,” I said. “If you ever want to talk about what happened, I’m around. Or we could hang out and not discuss it. Whatever you want.”
I expected her to sneer and say no, or to tell me that I was the last person on the planet that she’d want to be caught talking to. Instead, she paused and said, “Maybe,” before walking away.
Maybe. I could live with maybe.
FOURTEEN
THE ONLY CLASS I shared with Javi was English, immediately following lunch. The universe was conspiring to give me the finger or make me vomit.
Javi played the role of stupid well, but it was an act carefully designed to keep his friends from learning he had a brain under the veneer of dick jokes and sports statistics. He read voraciously, and his tastes ranged from Harry Potter to Naked Lunch, though he favored medieval and renaissance literature for reasons I failed to understand. Sometimes it felt like two Javier Matos Videntes existed. One who’d spent weeks trying to convince me to sleep with him and one who couldn’t help grinning when he attempted to explain why The Canterbury Tales was the most important book written in the English language. I didn’t mind brainy Javi, but he rarely allowed that version out to play.
I arrived to class early and pulled out my copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I’d done the reading, but I expected Mrs. Czukas to quiz us and I wanted to be prepared. I w
as deep into the chapter when I overheard Roshani and Jason talking behind me.
“And no one knows what happened?” Roshani asked.
“Nope. Strangers all over the world vanished and it’s not on the news or anything.”
“But it’s a hoax like . . . you-know-who saying she healed that other girl?”
Really? I was sitting only a couple of desks away. Did she honestly believe I wouldn’t realize she was talking about me or did she simply not care? The answer was probably a little bit of both.
“Don’t think so. There was a kid in France, some woman outside a bookstore in West Jordan, Utah, a couple of dudes in Fruitland, Idaho. People who saw it said a light shot out of the sky and Hoovered folks into it.”
“Someone recorded it though, right?”
“One guy said he tried, but that his phone recorded literally nothing.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Maybe it’s the end of the world.”
The warning bell rang, cutting off Jason and Roshani’s discussion. Students poured in, rushing to their seats to avoid being marked late. Two seconds before the final bell rang, Javi strolled into class through the front door.
Javi had a Picasso-painting face. Taken individually, the parts shouldn’t have added up to something beautiful, but they did. His ears were wide, his nose was long, and his brown eyes too large. Any one of those things could have doomed him to a life of awkwardness, but together they worked for him. Javi grinned at me and winked as he passed. I resisted the urge to scowl in return.
Mrs. Czukas cleared her throat and sat on the edge of her desk. I was pretty sure she owned the same bland dress in different shades of boring, which she wore every day, and I kind of admired her commitment. If she had any fucks to give about what we thought of her, she hoarded them jealously.
“Settle down,” she said, and then waited for the various conversations to end. “I hope you all had a nice weekend.”
A couple of students mumbled.
“The good news is that we will not be having a quiz today,” Mrs. Czukas said. “The bad news is that we won’t be reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked without thinking. I didn’t love the book, but I assumed it was better than the alternative.
Mrs. Czukas took a deep breath through her nose. “A parent filed a complaint regarding the content, and Principal Gonzalez decided it would be best to pull it from the curriculum for now.” She waited for the talking to die down. “I’m not happy about it either. I fought the decision, but lost. You can drop your books off at my desk at the end of class—”
“That’s so messed up.”
The voice had come from the back. I recognized it instantly and turned around to look.
Javi had his arms crossed over his chest and was wearing a frown I knew well.
“If you want to keep your book, Javier, you’re more than welcome to, but I have my orders. Instead we’ll be covering—”
Javi cut her off again. “How’s that even fair?” he said. “I mean, what? Some kid’s parents have to ruin it for the rest of us because they don’t want him reading stuff they’re too scared to talk about at home?”
“Mr. Vidente,” Mrs. Czukas said. Her voice was hard, but there was sympathy in her eyes.
“Come on, Mrs. C.,” Javi said. “You know it’s dumb. How are they gonna say it’s not okay to read a book with gay stuff or jerking off in it, but they’re cool reading Romeo and Juliet, where a dude in his twenties hooks up with a thirteen-year-old girl and where Benvolio tells Romeo the best way to get over Rosline is to find a girl who’s into backdoor action?”
The class erupted with puerile laughter, but Javi wasn’t laughing. Anyone who didn’t know him well might have believed he’d said it for the attention, but Javi was passionate about four things other than his dick: his family, food, baseball, and literature. I couldn’t help smiling.
“Out,” Mrs. Czukas said. “Go to the office and share your concerns with Principal Gonzalez.”
“Don’t be like that, Mrs. C.,” he said. “You know I’m right.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Vidente.”
Javi grabbed his books and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
FIFTEEN
I TOLD MRS. Czukas that I needed to use the restroom in order to chase Javi down the hall and talk to him. I’d considered waiting until the next day and finding him before lunch, but I thought my best chance to get the information I wanted from him was when he was righteously angry about literature.
Javi was loitering in the hall, reading posters stuck to the wall outside the library, clearly in no hurry to reach Principal Gonzalez’s office. He didn’t even notice me walking toward him until I spoke.
“Hey, Javi.”
Javier Matos Vidente turned slowly to look at me. A smile pricked up the corners of his lips. “Elena Mendoza,” he said. “The Miracle Girl. Or the girl in love with David Combs. Depends who you talk to. Were you actually banging that psycho?”
“Seriously?”
“It’s fucked up if you let that guy get on you when you wouldn’t even give me a hand job.”
“And there it is,” I said.
“There what is?”
“The reason I broke up with you.”
Javi rolled his eyes. “I broke up with you.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
He turned to continue walking toward the admin office. I jogged to catch up because I’d already come this far and it would have been a waste to turn back now.
“Wait up, Javi.”
“What do you want?”
Javier, like most boys I knew, was fragile. Oh sure, he fronted a tough exterior, especially when his friends were around or when he was trying to impress a girl, but inside he was a delicate glass ballerina who longed to show the world his pirouette. “I appreciated what you said to Mrs. Czukas. I was actually enjoying The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”
“Whatever. Now we’ll get stuck reading The Great Gatsby or some shit.” He shook his head. “I get that the story’s supposed to show how fucked up the ‘American dream’ is, but there’s nothing familiar to me about those privileged, rich white people. I can’t feel bad losing something I never had.”
This was the Javi I’d enjoyed spending time with. The one who talked books like they were part of his soul. It was a shame he hid this version of himself from his friends. They might not have appreciated it as much as I did, but it would have been honest.
“Maybe you can change Mr. Gonzalez’s mind.”
“You ever talked to Gonzalez?” Javi asked. “If he won’t change his seventies perm, he won’t change his mind about a book. I’m going to get a month of detention unless I say my outburst was because I’m having problems at home or something.”
“You don’t have any problems at home,” I said. “Your parents treat you like a little prince.”
“That’s not how I’ll be selling it to Gonzalez.”
“There’s not a universe where that’s not messed up.”
Javi stopped walking and turned to me. “What do you want, Elena? I know you didn’t come out here to thank me for using Shakespeare’s butt fetish to stop Mrs. C. from banning Perks.”
“No. No I didn’t,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about David Combs.”
“The dude who shot Freddie?”
“I heard some of the guys from the team pranked him last year.”
“And?”
“Were you in on it?”
Another smile cut Javi’s face. “Yeah. It was funny.”
“Maybe not to him?”
“Oh, I get it. Everything’s my fault.”
“I’m not—”
“Anyway,” Javi went on, “I’m not the one who helped him run away.”
This was not going the way I’d intended. I’d put him on the defensive without meaning to and now he’d activated full attack mode. “I didn’t help him do anything.”
> “So you say.” Javi crossed his arms over his chest, his sleeves pulling back to reveal his thick, muscled biceps. I could lie and say they weren’t impressive, but they really were.
“I’m just trying to learn more about David,” I said.
“He could’ve killed you,” Javi said. “I tried calling when I heard, even though you blocked my number, and then I couldn’t sleep all night thinking you might’ve been hurt.”
I faltered. I knew that under the hormones and the act he put on for his friends, Javi had cared for me, but I hadn’t considered he’d been worried. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to call and tell him I wasn’t hurt.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” I said. “And I didn’t block your number. I had to change my number because of all the weirdos.”
Javi gave me one of his emotionless shrugs. “Whatever. Why’re you so interested in Combs, anyway?”
“It’s difficult to explain here in the hallway,” I said. “But it’s important.”
Javi slid seamlessly from pouting to grinning. There was something sinister about his dimples. I felt in a strange way that, even though I’d thought I was the hunter, I’d become the prey. “Let me take you out.”
“Excuse me?”
“On a date? That ritual where one person picks another person up, takes them to a movie or dinner, and then goes home at the end of the night with blue balls or whatever the female equivalent of blue balls is?”
I still wanted information from him, which is why I tried hard to hide the frustration creeping onto my face. “We already broke up once. What makes you think I’d go out with you again?”
“You need information. I got information. Go on one date with me and I’ll tell you what I know.”
Sure, Javi had strong arms and a handsome face and I’d liked him once, but that was a lifetime ago. I’d never regretted our breakup or considered giving him a second chance, and I didn’t see why that should change now. Except that David had been bullied, and Javi knew why and by whom. One night wouldn’t be the end of the world. I hoped.