DEDICATION
FOR BRIANNA, THE STRONGEST GIRL I KNOW
CONTENTS
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Lauren Barnholdt
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
To: Aven Shepard (
[email protected])
From: Aven Shepard (
[email protected])
Before graduation, I will . . . tell the truth.
I’ve thought about that email every single day since I sent it. And if I’m being completely honest, it’s kind of been the thing that’s gotten me through the past four years.
I know that’s ridiculous. I mean, how can a stupid email have kept me going for years? An email I sent to myself. An email I hadn’t even received yet. An email that has nothing surprising in it, since, as previously mentioned, I sent it to myself.
But that email has been my own personal reminder—one that lets me know my life won’t be like this forever. That at some point I’ll be able to stop wondering, to stop walking around with a huge secret, to stop living a gigantic lie. And most importantly, to stop feeling like my heart is being broken every single day.
Of course, it’s easy to find comfort in this when you don’t actually have to do anything about your life being a big lie. Which is what I’ve been doing for the past four years. But now the day is here. The day the email is going to be delivered to my in-box. It also happens to be the day of our senior trip to Florida, which is actually kind of perfect.
Because it means I’ll have no choice. I’m going to be with Liam all weekend. Which means there won’t be any excuse not to tell him the truth—that I’ve been in love with him ever since we met four years ago.
“Did you bring enough bathing suits?” Izzy asks me. “Because we’re going to be in the ocean a lot. And you have to rinse them out every time you wear them. You can’t just let your bathing suit sit around in salt water—it wrecks the fabric.”
We’re standing outside the school, waiting for the bus to show up and take us to the airport, where we’re going to board our flight to Siesta Key, Florida. It’s an unseasonably cold morning, and I shiver. “I brought three bathing suits,” I say. “That should be enough.”
“It should be,” Izzy agrees. “We just have to make sure we rinse them out as soon as we get back to our room.” Izzy is very practical. She’s the type who always knows the right thing to do, like last year when Roman Wright almost sliced off his finger using the buzz saw in technology. Everyone else started freaking out and screaming, but Izzy just grabbed a towel out of the back storage closet, wrapped up Roman’s bleeding finger, and walked him to the nurse.
Later she told me that afterward she felt faint and had to crouch down in the hallway with her head between her legs until she felt better. But when it was actually happening, she was as calm as could be.
“Yeah,” I say. I hop back and forth nervously from one foot to the next and glance down at my phone. That email should be here any minute. At least, I’m hoping it will be.
Lyla, Quinn, and I scheduled them to be sent today. The date has been etched into my brain ever since I hit the send button. I thought it might show up at midnight, but it didn’t. I don’t think we scheduled them for a specific time. Actually, I know we didn’t.
Because I would have remembered that.
It’s the most important email I’ve ever sent in my life.
“Are you okay?” Izzy asks. “You keep checking your phone.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” I lie. “Just checking to make sure we didn’t miss the bus.”
“Why would we have missed the bus?” Izzy asks. “We’re early.”
It’s true. We are early. In fact, we were almost the first ones here. Izzy likes to get places early, and I kind of go along with it. Although today I was actually glad for her punctuality. I wanted to get here early. I want to get this trip going.
It’s the trip that’s going to change my life, after all.
Good or bad, after today, things will never be the same.
“Oh, I know we haven’t missed the bus,” I say. “I just meant, like, if they sent out a group text or something. You know, the school. To let us know if the bus is coming.”
Izzy frowns at me. “Since when does our school send texts?”
“Since they implemented an emergency alert system,” I say. I know because I’m on the Student Action Committee. A lot of people think the Student Action Committee is a joke, and if I’m being completely honest, it kind of is. Its main function is to have an official-sounding name so the administration can pretend the students have a say in their own education. Which is a total joke. We have no power. So even though kids come to us with problems, we can’t really do anything about it, because anything we want to do has to be approved by the administration.
The whole thing is totally pointless. But whatever.
I like being on the SAC, because it gives me an extracurricular that has nothing to do with sports, which I’m horrible at, and it’s not like yearbook or working on the school website, where you have to do actual work. The Student Action Committee ends up sitting around the library reading gossip magazines while some of us take turns sneaking into the bathroom to share a joint. I don’t, of course. Drugs aren’t my thing.
“Still,” Izzy says. She reaches down and fiddles with the tag on her carry-on bag. The armful of Alex and Ani bracelets she’s wearing jangle on her wrist. “This isn’t exactly an emergency.”
“True.”
“Aven, are you okay?” she asks, her blue eyes filled with concern. “You’ve been acting really weird all morning.”
“I’m fine!” I exclaim, realizing I sound kind of frantic. Which is strange, because I feel surprisingly calm for someone who might be about to ruin her entire life. But I can’t tell Izzy what’s going on. She doesn’t know I’m in love with Liam. No one does. Except for me. Well, and Lyla and Quinn. But I’m not friends with them anymore, so they don’t count.
“Okay.” Izzy pushes her bangs out of her face. They’re in that in-between stage, the stage where they’re too long to really be bangs, but too short to blend in with her layers or pull back into a ponytail. She frowns and looks like she’s going to say something else, but then she looks up across the parking lot and her face breaks into a smile. “Oh!” she says happily. “Here comes Liam!”
I look up.
There he is.
Liam.
My best friend.
The boy I’ve been in love with for four years.
He walks easily across the parking lot, his black backpack slung over his shoulder, his hair slightly messy, a coffee in one hand. He looks up and spots me and Izzy standing there, and he gives us a wave.
I marvel at how easy he’s walking, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. That’s always been so strange to me—how one person can have been my whole entire world for the past four years, how his every action, his every word has affected me on such a profound level. The things he’s said can either knock me into the stratosphere of happiness, or throw me into the depths of despair.
How can he not know how I feel? How is it that I’ve been so good at hiding the thing that’s been the biggest part of my life for all these years?
“Hey,” he says when he sees us. “How are my two favorite girls?”
“Good,” I say.
“Great
,” Izzy says.
She smiles up at him as he leans down and gives her a kiss.
Which is another huge reason that after this weekend nothing will ever be the same. Because after this weekend, my best friend is going to know I’m in love with her boyfriend.
I’m not a horrible person, I swear.
I never, ever meant it to be this way.
And yeah, I know everyone who does something horrible says that exact same thing, but in my case, it’s true. It’s not like Izzy started dating Liam and then all of a sudden I decided I liked him and we had some torrid affair behind her back.
I saw him first.
And I know that sounds childish, but it’s true.
Liam and I have been friends since eighth grade. I’d like to say that back then he was skinny and short and had acne, but it’s not true. In fact, he was already on his way to being the six feet tall he is now, and his skin was smooth and perfect except for a few freckles around his nose, which did nothing except give his sexiness a tiny bit of adorable.
We met in health class, which was a totally embarrassing class, because not only did we have to learn about the human body (which is weird when you’re with a bunch of eighth-grade boys, and also, let’s face it, a little late), we learned how to put condoms on. And not even on a banana either—on this weird fake thing that I guess was supposed to look like a curved plastic penis.
Health was only for half the year, and so the classes tended to be smaller. There were only fourteen people in the class, and all the other girls were from the popular crowd. They all had boobs and hair extensions, and I still had my braces on. None of them even blinked when our teacher, Mrs. Squire, pulled out the condom to show us how to use it.
Anyway, the whole class was just really bizarre, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. But then, for one of our projects, we were given the task of taking care of a fake baby. We all got fake jobs with fake salaries, and we had to come up with a family budget and also make sure to keep these electronic dolls alive. The dolls were creepy, because they had fixed blank stares that made them look like they might come to life at any moment and kill you.
They’d emit these high-pitched screams every so often, and then you’d have to feed them a bottle, or change them, or play with them. Of course, the whole exercise was supposed to show us that being in charge of a baby was extremely difficult, and so we should make sure to use those condoms they’d told us about. Our grade was going to be based on how well we took care of the baby—the stupid thing had a computer in its back that would keep track of how quickly you responded to its wailing. The faster you responded, the better your grade would be.
Of course, no one else in the class really cared about their health grade. Health was considered a bullshit class, one that no one wanted to put any effort into. The boys decided to make a contest out of who could kill the baby the fastest. (Of course, the baby couldn’t actually die, because it was a doll. But still, if you didn’t take care of it, when you opened the back, the computer would flash “ABUSE” “NEGLECT” or “DEAD” in big green letters. It was actually pretty horrible when you think about it. And I felt really bad for our teacher, because she was a first year who had a degree in English but got stuck teaching health because there were no jobs in the English department. The poor woman just wanted to teach us about all the symbolism in To Kill a Mockingbird, and instead she ended up trying to make sure we kept our babies alive and knew how to put a condom on a fake penis. And most of us killed our babies, which meant she was one for two.)
Anyway, I remember being really intimidated when I found out I had to have a fake husband, and even more intimidated when I found out it was Liam. Not that I was the type of girl who got all crazy about boys—at least, not the way some girls in my class did. I mean, I had my favorite celebrities and pop stars, but I’d never really had a huge crush on a real-life boy.
Until I met Liam.
He was gorgeous.
And nice.
He didn’t try to kill our baby.
He probably wanted to—all his friends were doing it, and I’m sure he thought it was funny. But he knew my grades were important to me. I wasn’t going to fail health just because some popular kids wanted to make a mockery out of the whole thing. So Liam took care of that dumb baby, even when it kept him up until three o’clock in the morning the day before his lacrosse tryouts.
I was in love with him from the second we got our A.
And I’ve been in love with him ever since.
“I have something for you to listen to,” Liam says to us as we’re boarding the bus to the airport.
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
Liam’s a musician. He makes electronica on one of these weird machines called an Ableton Push. It plays drums and keyboards and guitar, only electronically. I can’t figure out how to use it, but I love the music Liam makes, and not just because I’m in love with him. He’s super talented.
“You can borrow my headphones,” Izzy whispers to me under her breath, and I try not to feel annoyed. I love Izzy, and she’s usually really nice. But she doesn’t like Liam’s music. Actually, that’s not totally true. It’s not that she doesn’t like Liam’s music, it’s that she doesn’t really get it. It’s not like the stuff you hear on the radio. It’s more of an underground, niche kind of sound, the sort of thing you have to seek out on YouTube or look up on SoundCloud. But still. Would it kill her to be a little more supportive? I give her a tight smile.
Once we’re on the bus, Izzy slides into a seat with Hartley Parsons.
“You don’t want to sit in back with us?” I ask.
“Nah,” Izzy says, waving her hand. “You guys go ahead and listen to Liam’s music.”
“Okay,” I say. It’s not unusual for Liam and me to have time alone without Izzy. Even though the two of them are a couple, they’re not, like, inseparable or anything. And Izzy is either really secure, or she doesn’t see me as a threat at all, because she doesn’t care if Liam and I spend time alone.
Liam picks a seat in the back, then pulls out his iPhone and hands it to me.
“Here,” he says, and I stick Izzy’s earbuds into my ears.
Liam turns the song on, and I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes. I like to close my eyes when I listen to music, any music, but especially Liam’s songs. I feel like I need to block everything out while I let the beats move over me. Liam’s music doesn’t have lyrics. It’s just the rhythm of the electronica. Every once in a while he’ll pull out his acoustic guitar and strum a little bit, but it’s always just a melody or something. He doesn’t sing.
This new one is good, and I tap my foot along with it.
When it’s over, I don’t even realize that the bus has pulled out of the school parking lot and is on its way to the airport.
“Liam, it’s awesome,” I say, handing the phone back to him. “I really like it.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Do you think it’s uploadable?”
He means to his SoundCloud account. “Definitely,” I say. “You should upload it immediately.”
But he’s not listening to me anymore. He’s looking down at something in his hand. My phone. I must have handed it to him so I’d have my hands free to take his.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“What’s what?” I look down at my screen, praying my mom hasn’t sent me some kind of humiliating text asking me if I remembered to pack underwear or something.
“You sent an email to yourself.” He looks at me guiltily. “Sorry, the notification just popped up on the screen.”
I look down at the notification. One new email from Aven Shepard. I know what it says before I even open it.
To: Aven Shepard (
[email protected])
From: Aven Shepard (
[email protected])
Before graduation, I will . . . tell the truth.
“Oh,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “That’s . . . weird.”
“Yea
h.” He looks at me, his eyes serious, and I wonder again how we can have spent so much time together and he can have no idea how I really feel.
Tell him.
Do it now.
Tell him the email is about him, that you sent it to yourself years ago, that you’ve been in love with him all this time, that it’s driving you crazy, that you need to know if he feels the same way.
I open my mouth, not believing that it’s going to happen here, on a random bus ride, before the trip even begins.
“Oh, well,” Liam says, giving me back my phone. “It’s probably just spam.”
“What?”
“Spam. You know, like when your email gets hacked?”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“It happened to me once before,” he says, shrugging. “It’s when someone mirrors your email address and makes it seem like you’re emailing yourself. You know, for an advertisement or something?”
“Oh,” I say, shoving my phone into my bag. “Yeah. Definitely.”
“You should change your password,” he says.
“I will.” Not.
“Hey,” he says, looking at me. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine.” I turn and look out the window, watching the blur of houses and cars going by, blinking fast to stop myself from crying. Why would I even cry? It’s not like I told him and he rejected me. At least not yet.
“Aven,” Liam says. “What’s wrong? Are you worried about your writing?”
“My writing?”
“Yeah, that someone is going to get it from your email?”
“Oh. Um, yeah.” I’m working on a novel. I have been for the past six months or so. Liam keeps bugging me to read it, but I haven’t let him yet. He thinks it’s because I’m some supersecret artist, but the truth it, I can’t let him read it because it’s kind of about us.
Well, not exactly. It’s about a girl who’s in love with her best friend. I know it’s cheesy, but they always say to write what you know. And that’s what I know. The novel started out as a short story I wrote in creative writing, this sort of slice-of-life vignette based on something that happened with me and Liam.