Kat shrugs. “Why do people always act like attention is so bad? Oh, she just wants attention. So? Attention’s great!”
I stare at her.
“What?” She giggles and checks something on her phone. “OMG. You have to see this GIF Quinn just sent me. An otter is eating lettuce, like, super delicately.”
“You know I don’t share your otter thing, right?”
“Don’t you dare call them OCEAN DOGS again, James,” she says in her faux-outraged tone. “Look, you’re bananas, because there’s nothing cuter in the whole world than an otter, except a baby otter.”
I just kind of stand there while she texts back. Why am I here and not still at Jon Kessler’s party, where I at least feel like people would listen to two sentences in a row from me before getting distracted by otters or girlfriends or anything else?
“I guess I’ll head home.” I wait for her to stop me.
“Oh, OK! Talk later.” She gives me a quick hug and bounds off down the sidewalk without a look back.
“You said this would be exciting.”
“I absolutely didn’t.” I grin at Hannah and then look back to the pile of canned goods I’m sorting. “But I’m glad you volunteered anyway.”
“Sure, sure, sure.” She stares at a box of cornbread mix. “I can’t even read this expiration date. It’s completely worn off.”
I point at the discard pile. Unfortunately. Food banks receive so many expired or near-expired donations, and we’re here to get rid of the old stuff. It’s far from interesting, but if it makes it easier for people to get food that they need, I’m happy to give up a Saturday afternoon.
“Hey, whatever it takes to hang out with the elusive James McCall.”
I pretend to glare at her, but eventually I laugh. “You see me all the time.”
“We’re going to college together . . . hopefully! I’d like to be your actual friend, not the girl from your track team you occasionally walk cooldowns with and who drags you along to parties.”
I open my mouth to point out other times we’ve hung out, but notice that she’s closed her eyes while she’s shaking her head.
“What?”
“I sound like such a sincere weirdo,” she says, and even though Hannah isn’t Kat, at all, it sounds like something Kat would say. Maybe there are things about Kat that are also about Hannah, the things I miss, at least. Not the things that have kept me from even mentioning my volunteer work to Kat in the first place. I try to imagine Kat quietly working toward good in the world, and I literally can’t. Everyone would have to know.
“Sincerity isn’t weird,” I tell Hannah. “And we are friends, aren’t we?”
We work silently for a while, which is good because a coordinator from the local food bank peeks in to see how our work is going. I never want to be a teenage stereotype, so the last thing I’d want is for someone to catch me chatting instead of working.
“I am here to help,” she says. “I’m not just scamming my way into a friendship via volunteer work.”
“Likely story,” I say, and I’m relieved she laughs because my sarcastic voice often sounds eerily similar to my regular voice. We keep working, and I like the silence punctuated with only the sound of boxes and cans of food being sorted into piles. This is where it’s different, I feel. This is where it’s not Kat, not at all.
I know that, originally, I wanted to prove something to Mom by volunteering. Of course, I care about the world and also about my own future. Sitting here making sure that people who are hungry have food to eat, though, I feel ridiculous that I’d ever thought that this was about me. What a relief that, really, it never was.
CHAPTER SIX
January of Senior Year
KAT
“Did you know that what you’re doing at midnight is supposed to be, like, symbolic of how you spend your whole year?”
Quinn’s standing right behind me with her arms around my waist, so when she laughs, it’s right into me. “That sounds OK.”
“Only OK?” I turn around to kiss her, but her serious face gives me literal pause.
“I like you,” she says.
“Duh.” I laugh and kiss her. “I like you, too. Like, a huge amount.”
“Earlier was . . .” She gazes away into the distance as a grin slides across her face. “It was pretty great.”
“It was amazing,” I say. “We could go back to your house and—”
“Kat, trust me. When it turned 12:01, my parents said good night to their friends and immediately Ubered home.”
“My dad probably didn’t even stay out until then! He was probably all, OK, Diane, let’s be home at a reasonable hour.”
Ugh, I’m somehow sneakily alone with my amazing girlfriend at a party and it’s only moments into the New Year and my brain decides to fixate on my dad and his love life. Super awesome.
“Want more beer?” Quinn asks me, and I nod and follow her back to the crowd. She navigates through the room easily and has nonkeg beer for us almost immediately. I look around for James, but I think she’s still on the roof. I only said the symbolic midnight thing because at midnight exactly I was mid-extremely-dreamy-kiss with extremely dreamy Quinn, but I genuinely hope it isn’t too real. Otherwise, it means something that my best friend was up on the roof, a place I was afraid to climb to.
And, like, symbolically? That sounds pretty bad.
Logan is ahead of me in line when I walk into Simply Coffee a couple days later, and I’m not sure what the correct best friend protocol is. I decide that ignoring him is proper and not harmful to him or to James.
“Hey,” he greets me. “How’ve you been?”
“Pretty good,” I say, immediately. Oh no. I’d be terrible in wartime; I’d give my secrets over to an enemy as soon as they asked. Forget being a spy! Not that I ever considered work in the spy industry, but it’s never fun to learn a new shortcoming.
“It’s OK,” he says, and I wonder if my thought process is that obvious on my face right now. “You can go ahead and feel as sad as you want for poor pathetic brokenhearted Logan.”
“What?”
He turns around to order his cold brew, and then he’s back to facing me. “Rydell, I’m not a proud guy. I am a sad broken shell, hoping my ex-girlfriend reconsiders whatever she’s thinking, and texts me.”
“But I—” I stop myself, pleased at my restraint. “She broke up with you.”
“Don’t remind me.” He sighs and turns back to the counter, as it registers I’ve had this whole thing wrong, and James has never bothered to correct me. “And whatever my friend Kat is getting, on me.”
“No, Logan, I—” But I can’t resist Logan, who’s the nicest guy I’ve ever known. Nicer than my own brother! “An iced dirty chai.”
He orders it for me, and even though I guess I don’t really know what’s going on, I feel somehow so settled at seeing him. He’s a calming presence, just like James. Even if, right at this moment, I don’t even know what’s going on with James. Is that normal? Maybe best friends don’t have to have every detail logged. Maybe this is just growing up.