Leo

LEO

NOW

Back at school, Piper Hanaka comes up to me. “Hey, Leo. Can I show you something?” I’m at my locker, trying to open it for the third time because Adam Beltner already slammed it shut on me twice. I let it slide both times. He called me a wuss for it. If I’d have fought back, he would have exterminated me. I can’t win, no matter what I do.

You’re lucky you never got to experience high school. High school is pretty fucked up.

I tell Piper, “Sure. Okay. I guess.”

It’s game day, which means the cheerleaders wear their uniforms. The skirts are short enough that Piper is all legs. It barely covers her crotch. I learned the hard way that I’m not supposed to look at her legs because if I do I get called things like peedy and perv. So I don’t look at her at all. I pretend to be looking for something in my locker.

“I saw Delilah’s picture in the paper.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“It’s all so sad.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Except it’s supposed to be happy, too, because she’s, like, back.”

I don’t know what to say so I say, “What do you want to show me?”

I’ve never had a girlfriend before. I’ve never even had a girl like me. Freshman year, someone told me in gym class that some girl named Molly liked me. I still have nightmares about it. It took me three days to get the guts to ask her to the homecoming dance. Turns out it was all a hoax. Kids laughed their asses off at my expense when she said no. Molly already had a date, a junior on the varsity football team, built like a linebacker because he was.

Piper says, “My mom, like, made me get rid of everything-Delilah after she disappeared. She didn’t think it was healthy to have it around. It sucked. Like, I used to have half of a best-friends necklace that I shared with Delilah. My mom made me toss my half in the trash. She was all, like, ‘It doesn’t mean anything without the other half.’ I cried over it. So she went and bought me a new best-friends necklace and told me I could give it to anyone I wanted. I might have been six but you don’t just, like, forget your best friend.”

“Who’d you give it to?”

“Lily Morris. Do you remember her? She doesn’t even live here anymore. She moved to, like, North Carolina when we were twelve.”

I shake my head. I don’t remember her.

“Doesn’t matter. Lily was never a good friend, anyway. In fourth grade she started a rumor that I, like, peed my pants when I laughed.”

I want to ask her if it’s true. If it is, I’d find it endearing.

“Anyway, my mom let me keep one picture of Delilah, though.”

“That’s cool,” I say, though it was a dick move for Mrs. Hanaka to make her get rid of everything that reminded her of you. Dad, on the other hand, kept everything. Your rainbow glitter shoes are still by the door and have been for eleven years. You’ve probably noticed.

Piper shows me the picture. You’re a little kid in it. It’s a close-up of yours and Piper’s faces smashed side by side together. You’re smiling. Half your teeth are missing. You’re all red hair and freckles, happy like the kid I saw dancing around on Dad’s home videos, not scared like the person you now are.

“It’s just that, I was, like, digging around on the internet, trying to figure out if cleft chins are one of those things that just goes away, you know? And they’re not.”

No matter what kids like Adam Beltner say, I’m no idiot. I know what Piper means by this. What I don’t know is how to feel about it.

Piper cut out the picture of you in the newspaper. The Hanakas might be the only people in the world who still get the actual, physical newspaper. She sets both pictures side by side, the one some asshole photographer shot yesterday, and the one of you when you were six. They’re mostly similar—red hair, green eyes—except for that cleft chin. I never noticed before that you had a cleft chin. It’s not something that’s super obvious. It’s on the small side as cleft chins go, the kind of thing you might not notice unless someone else pointed it out for you. But now that I know it’s there, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Except that on the picture taken yesterday, there’s no cleft chin. None at all. Not even a small one.

The bell rings. I look around and the halls are empty. We’re late for class.

Piper is backing away from me. She hugs her books to her. “Don’t be mad at me, Leo,” she says before she turns around and runs.