22. Mina

Quinn whoops as Hollis and I come out of the caf doors. I try to turn around and slip back inside, but Hollis grabs my elbow and drags me forward. It's been a long day and it's only lunch. I can't tell if I'm having fun or if I want to go home and get into bed forever. But I've decided that tapping out would prove Caplan right or confirm he has successfully embarrassed me. Which he has. I feel so angry at him, and I can't even home in on one specific reason.

"Sorry," Quinn says, ducking his head and grinning at me when I get to their table. "Can you blame me?"

Actually, I can. I can home. Kissing someone you could never see that way is evil behavior. Worse than that, it's stupid. Worst of all, the kiss has lodged in my brain like gum in my hair, and the more I try to get rid of it, the stickier and messier and stranger it becomes. If that's how it felt, to me, to kiss someone who was just testing and confirming they have no ounce of attraction to me, something must be medically, emotionally wrong with me. I must experience everything all wrong, through a broken lens that reverses everything. But what else is new.

"Come on." Ruby takes me and Hollis by the hand and has us sit up on the table. She arranges the boys on the bench in front. "Last one, I promise," she says as they bitch and moan.

"It's too late to go into the yearbook, anyway," Quinn says from where he's lying on the ground across the front of the group.

"But you'll be glad in twenty years that we took this," Ruby promises.

"Where's Caplan?" someone asks.

"Detention, I think?"

"Should we wait?"

"No, the whole yearbook is gonna be an homage to him, anyway."

I get a sick twist in my stomach. What am I doing here? What am I trying to prove? How am I going to look back on this someday and not feel humiliated that for thirty seconds at the very end of high school I pretended to have friends?

"You know, you've always been this person," Hollis says, looking forward for the photo, chin down, hardly smiling. "That's pretty amazing."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember when we called you a witch in fourth grade and then you dressed as one for Halloween? That's why I knew you'd say yes to this."

I can't decide if I see the connection, but the idea makes me feel better.

"It wasn't, like, overkill, was it?" Hollis says after the photo call is finished. "That I Instagrammed us?"

"Did you?"

"Oh, right." She takes out her phone and shows me the post. "You know, we really need to make you an Instagram before you leave for college. We'll keep it low-key, a prom picture, a baby throwback, just something so potential friends know you're normal."

I barely hear her because I'm staring at the photo. Hollis and I stand in front of her locker, holding hands, halfway between glaring and smirking. I didn't know I could make that face. I didn't realize my belly button was out, if I stand up straight. Someone's hands stick in at the edge of the frame, clapping for us.

"We're the same height. I never realized."

"Is it okay?" she asks me. "I can take it down right now—"

"No! Don't take it down." I put my head in my hands.

"Are you overwhelmed," she asks, "because you look so fucking cool?"

"Yeah, I think so," I say into my hands. It makes her crack up. "I just don't know how to act."

She shrugs. "Just play the part. Act like a badass."

"How am I supposed to do that?"

"I don't know. For one thing, chin up, tits out," she says.

"That's two?"

"And whenever I'm feeling like a pussy or a fraud, I make myself do something that scares me, so then I can feel like a proud, hot bitch."

"You should put that on inspirational classroom posters."

After lunch, we walk back inside together, and I try to focus on the first part of her advice, if not the second. I find, much to my surprise, that it kinda works.

"I can't believe you walk around like this all the time," I say.

"I recommend only six to seven hours a day of it. Otherwise, you'll get a god complex."

"So what are you pushing? Eight to ten?"

She flicks me in the arm. My phone vibrates.

"What?" she says when I stop walking.

"Nothing," I say, putting it back in my bag.

"Is Caplan throwing a fit? Confessing his love?"

"No. No, of course not."

"Well, it's coming. Mark my words."

Her face betrays nothing when she says this. I have no idea if she's messing with me, or testing me, or performing some act of girl code so far above my head I don't even know the words to name it.

"It's not," I say. "Trust me. I heard it firsthand." She looks ready to ask more questions or double down on the subject, so I change it. "That was just an email from some alumni woman who interviewed me for Yale."

"Why's she emailing you?"

"Who knows," I say.

"You don't want to go, right?"

I look at her. "Did Caplan tell you that?"

She snorts. "You glitch every time someone mentions it. You skipped College T-Shirt Day."

"I was sick. I had a doctor's note and everything."

"Mm-hm."

"Fine. Yeah. I don't wanna go. But it's too late."

Do I mean this? Am I really this passive? Or this tragic? Maybe I'm the one testing her. If I am, she passes with electric flying colors.

"Are you shitting me, Mina? We haven't even graduated yet. People transfer halfway through, like, sophomore year all the time. Or they take gap years. Or they drop out and invent something or publish the next great American novel and become rich and famous. There are no rules, and it's never too late. You can do whatever you want."

The hallway traffic has thinned. We don't have our next class together, and I know I need to turn around and walk to French, but I don't.

"God, all right." She takes my hand and pulls me into the girls' bathroom. A few sophomores are leaning on the sinks, talking.

"Go?" she says. They scamper. "So who have you told that you don't want to go to Yale?"

"Um. Caplan? And my mom, but she becomes instantly hard of hearing whenever I bring it up."

"And who else?"

"Well, you. Just now."

"Okay. Why don't we call the school and tell them?"

"Call—call the school?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

"Because—because we can't just—it's probably really complicated to find the right number and—"

"Here it is." She's holding up her phone. She's on the Yale Admissions website, on a page that says Contact Us in cool blue letters. "Want me to dial?"

"Oh my god." I slide down the side of the bathroom stalls.

"Okay, no dialing." She sits next to me. "But what would happen if you did call and rescinded your acceptance? Hypothetically."

"Well, they'd probably have to deal with the money, and then my grandparents would find out."

"And then what?"

"And they'd be upset."

"And?"

"I don't know. That would be hard for my mom."

"Do you think she'd want you to go to the wrong school because of that?"

I think about it. "No," I say, "I don't. I mean I hope not."

She sighs. "I see the difficulty of your situation."

"Thank you."

"But let's admit here and now, just between us, that if you don't want to go, you're not going. So eventually the unpleasantness of dealing with it all will come to pass. Do you agree?"

"Yes," I say slowly, "I agree." And it's funny because the words mean nothing. I can easily walk them back, and yet as soon as I say them, I feel better. Less tight inside. Another loose thread.

"Good," she says, "that's a start. And since you already agreed to do something that scares you today—"

"I never agreed to that—"

"Let's tell someone else, right now. Someone other than your family or your frenemy."

That gets me to laugh. "I can't call the school without warning my mom."

"All right. So let's respond to this alumni woman and tell her. She doesn't work for the school, right?"

"What's the point of that?"

"It's a step in the right direction."

I open the email. The woman's name is Diana Morano. I barely remember our conversation when she interviewed me. I skim. She's congratulating me and asking me something I don't quite understand about my essay.

"Doesn't matter what she said," Hollis says. "Just respond and let her know you're not actually going to Yale, but thank her for all her help and support or some shit, and say, ‘Have a great summer, all the best, Mina.'"

I do as she says. I stare at the phone. I know I've just said there is no point, but suddenly I feel that there is, and that I'll set something in motion I can't take back.

Hollis looks over my shoulder. "Looks good to me," she says. "Want me to send it?"

"What?"

"Sometimes you need a friend to hit Send."

"Okay." I hand her my phone.

"You sure?"

"Yes. I'm sure."

She sends the email. It makes that woosh—a wonderfully free and finished sound, I realize.

"Well, that's that," she says, handing my phone back and standing up. "Good shit."

I want to hug her or cry, but I don't want to make it weird.

"So," she says. "What's this firsthand source you have about Caplan's feelings for you?"

"Do you really want to talk about this?" I ask her.

She thinks. Her face relaxes out of its terrifying cheekboned armor. "I guess not really," she says. "But I like you. It was an accident. I didn't mean to. But it's too late, I already do. And now I'll be so mad if I can't be your friend because of him."

"Well," I say, "you don't need to worry. My window was open, and I heard him telling Quinn he could never see me that way."

Hollis considers this, leaning back against the stall and looking up at the ceiling.

"You know, we played hot seat at a party this fall, and I asked Caplan what his biggest regret was. Without even having to think about it, he said it was getting everyone to bully you in elementary school."

I start to laugh. "That doesn't make any sense."

"I know. He was so serious and noble about it, I didn't have the heart to tell him I was bullying you way before he moved to Two Docks."

"Do all boys think the world revolves around them?"

"Honestly, I think everyone does. At least everyone our age. But my point is, Caplan has a bit of a hero complex."

We sit there for a moment. I mull over what this means and how it connects to what he told Quinn.

"Why'd you tell me that story?" I ask.

"Cause it was one of the moments I knew that he loved you. In, like, all the ways. And if he didn't realize it yet, he would someday."

She says it with such finality that I don't have anything to say back.

Then she stands up. "We should go to class, I guess." She looks in the mirror and puts on lip balm.

"We'll get late slips."

"So? Don't tell me it'll be your fifth?"

"Well, no." I shuffle my feet. "Actually—"

"Oh my god—"

"Stop. It's not like it even matters to me—"

"You're joking, Mina."

"It just seems a shame, like so close to graduating."

"Will it be your first this year?"

"It'll be my first in four."

She throws her head back laughing.

"Come on, loser." She hooks her arm through mine. "Say you were bleeding. Say you were bonding. Chin up, tits out, and no one will question you."