2. Mina

Caplan drags me places. When we were little, he'd physically pull me—out into the water at the dunes, into the snow when school was canceled, horror movies before we were seventeen, the middle of the gym at dances—and then eventually, he did it just by existing. Since Caplan went ahead and became the most insufferably physically ideal and athletically competent person on the planet, that meant I went to soccer games. I always sat with his mom and his little brother in the stands above the students' section, with them all between us, this bright roaring sea—girls with his number on their cheek and boys chanting, O Caplan! my Captain! Drunk and happy and part of it all. I wasn't part of it, but I was there watching it, and that's something. He was like a magnet. Or the sun. It would have been more embarrassing if I were the only one, but everyone sort of orbited around him. The sun is bright and warm, and all that.

Sometimes I felt grateful, and others I didn't. The first true warm day of senior spring, right around the time when we were all filming those godforsaken videos, he got me to eat lunch with his friends by taking my book. I knew he was doing it because Hollis was watching, and they were on one of their breaks. I didn't like it when he used me like that. First of all, it never works because there is no universe in which I would be a romantic threat. It is a transparent joke, just like me sitting at a lunch table with people like Quinn Amick and Hollis Cunningham.

I tug my book back for something to do with my hands when we get there. No one's really eating anymore. Hollis is sucking on the last of a Popsicle, and it's turned her mouth red. I make a bet with myself that they'll be back together by the end of the week. She has Quinn's baseball cap on, the one he always wears with the tiny stitched tree. Ah, love and war. Caplan sits down and pulls one of the other boy's half-eaten sandwiches toward him.

"Where were you?" someone asks.

"Filming my video," he says, mouth full.

"I can't believe Mina nabbed him," says Quinn. "Who am I gonna get to say something nice about me now?"

I look at Caplan just as he looks at Hollis. She's meeting his eyes with a blank expression, resting the Popsicle against her mouth. I should probably clarify: Hollis is the scariest person who has ever lived.

"I'll do it for you," she says, turning to Quinn.

"Aw, really, Holly?"

She bites off the last of the Popsicle and flicks the naked stick at him as one of her friends looks forlornly at her. Probably Hollis had already agreed to do her video.

"Why not? It doesn't matter." She looks at Caplan for a second, and then at me.

It's always an unpleasant surprise when I spend so much time observing, peaceful and invisible, and then suddenly someone decides to look at me. It's why actors never look directly into the camera, unless they're being uncanny on purpose.

"Mina," Hollis says, like she's just noticed me standing there, "Friday's my birthday."

"Oh," I say. "Happy birthday."

"No," she laughs. "You're so funny. I mean I'm having a birthday party. My mom's making me, just a thing at my house. Will you come?"

I stare at her. "Um. Yes, sure."

"Well, don't do me any favors," she says.

"No, yes, I'd love to. Thank you."

The bell rings, and Caplan stoops to pick the Popsicle stick up off the ground. He marches toward the trash cans with it, and Hollis sighs, stands, and follows him.

"They're getting boring, aren't they?" Quinn says to no one in particular as I let myself be carried back inside on their tide. Everyone vaguely agrees, and everyone still sort of watches them, standing by the bins, both looking very bright in the sun, the wind lifting their hair, red and gold, beautiful.

As we all condense, trying to shove through the cafeteria doors, I brush up next to one of Hollis's friends—Becca, the one who wanted Hollis to do her grad video. She gives me an unusually overtly bitchy look, so I speed up. In the hallway, I bend down to retie my laces, and she bumps into me from behind. As she passes, she says, "Down, dog," for her friends. I've fallen forward onto my hands and knees, so I take a second to make sure my face is empty, then I stand up and keep walking to physics.

For a while in middle school, they'd say, "Woof woof," every time they passed me. I assumed it generally meant loser or ugly, but I didn't know for sure so I tried not to care. I just started wearing headphones. This aligned pretty well with my then-recent commitment to not look at or speak to anyone unless absolutely necessary. They'd tortured me for years for always having my hand in the air, for being a show-off and a know-it-all, and then when I tried to go silent and invisible, they only hated me more. The hypocrisy would have been funny if I'd been in any state to laugh.

The first time I heard the woof, woof punch line was in eighth grade, a few months into my silence, in the girls' bathroom. "Mina Stern follows Caplan Lewis around like a puppy."

After the girls left, I came out of my stall at the same time as Lorraine Daniels. We used to have playdates as little kids, because our moms were friendly and she lived nearby. Then my dad died, and my mom got weird, and probably so did I. Plus, Lorraine moved. We still sat next to each other in classes sometimes, though. She wore thick red-framed glasses and got plenty of shit for it, but she never changed them or got contacts. I envied her conviction. She was quiet and smart, and I used to wonder if maybe we could be real friends, but she seemed to genuinely prefer being left alone. I guess I probably come off that way, too.

"They're jealous," she said, washing her hands, not looking at me, which I appreciated, because I was crying.

"What? They are. Strawberry Shortcake likes him. She was saying so before you came in."

This dig didn't really work because Hollis is like five nine.

"And honestly, he follows you around."

I know time is supposed to heal all things, but that memory has actually sharpened with age, grown edges, because it's the first time I can remember realizing the truth. Spending most of my time with Caplan didn't make me brighter or better. It made me duller, by contrast. And beyond that, I was not the only one who thought it was a miracle that he wanted to be my friend.

The fact that we had sailed together pretty blissfully through all of childhood attached at the hip is entirely to his credit. He never, not even in the pits of middle school, stopped wanting to do elaborate handshakes with me in the hallway or tried to make me his secret friend. There was never that adolescent moment when he realized it would be easier for him, that his world would make more sense, if he left me behind or at least excluded me from some parts of his life. That just never happened. Caplan does whatever he wants and very rarely wonders what people will think. The spring of our sophomore year, he tore something and couldn't run track. Out of boredom and curiosity and, let's be honest, a true proclivity for being the center of attention, he auditioned for the play, which was Romeo and Juliet. And of course he was good at it, of course he lit the whole thing on fire and made it indisputably cool.

At his audition, he flattened the crumpled printout of his speech on the floor at his feet in case he forgot the lines. The director noticed the rudimentary scanning, a simplified key I made up to help guide him through the rhythm. They asked Caplan where he learned about iambic pentameter, and Caplan said he had no clue what that was, but a friend had helped him practice. After he got the part, they asked me if I wanted to participate in the play, too, as a dramaturge. I had to look up what that meant. In the end, I said no, because it sounded like too much talking to other people, but I agreed to type up some packets about scansion and fair Verona, Italy, to be passed out on the first day of rehearsal.

Caplan and I spent hours that spring learning lines. The standing onstage and looking like a movie star part came pretty naturally to him, but for the words, their meaning, and the memorization, he needed me. That is perhaps Caplan's only arena of doubt—that he's not smart—maybe because it took him a little longer to learn to read, a million years ago. I remember watching him work, intense and stubborn, to understand it all and to say it all correctly, and I was floored.

How, I thought, is it possible that you are this person, all one thousand versions of you? How is it that you are going to be the varsity soccer captain, the prom king, president of some fraternity someday, and also be this boy on my bedroom floor memorizing Shakespeare, face pressed into my carpet, asking me what consequences yet hang in our stars?