“Go,” I tell him through gritted teeth. “Gray, seriously.”
Gray goes, but not before shooting Bex a look that could take the bark right off a tree. “See you at lunch, Marin,” he says.
Bex watches him go for a moment before turning back to me. “Well!” he says, faux-brightly, and there’s that sheepish smile again. “I guess we know where I stand with your friend Gray.”
I take a step backward; the backs of my legs bump awkwardly against a desk. “He’s just—”
“I’m kidding,” Bex says, holding both hands up. “It was a joke.” Then he makes a face.
“Okay,” he says, perching on the edge of his desk, “Marin. Can we just . . . reset?”
“Reset?” I repeat dumbly. That . . . is not what I was expecting him to say. “Like . . . between us?”
“Yeah,” Bex says. He picks a rubber band up off his desk, stretching it between his thumbs. “Listen, I’m sorry I came down so hard on you about that paper.”
Wait, what?
“It wasn’t about the paper,” I blurt, faintly horrified. Holy shit, is that what he thinks? “I mean, I didn’t go to Mr. DioGuardi just because—”
“No, no, no, of course not,” Bex says. He’s still fidgeting with the rubber band. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
Then what are you saying? I want to ask, but even as I have the thought it feels extremely unwise to argue. I think of the way everyone’s been staring at me since yesterday morning. I think of Mr. DioGuardi and maybe you were confused.
“Okay,” I say finally, edging toward the doorway. My heart is thudding. “Yeah. Um. A reset would be great.”
“Good,” Bex says, finally dropping the rubber band back into a jar on the desk and getting to his feet. “Glad to hear it.”
“Okay,” I say again. “Um. Thanks.”
“No problem,” he says, with a brisk, businesslike nod. “Have a good day.”
I pull my backpack up on my shoulder and book it out of Bex’s classroom. Gray’s leaning cross-ankled against a bank of lockers across the hall.
“How’d it go?” he asks, standing upright and reaching for my hand.
I shrug, weirdly reluctant to talk about it. “Fine?”
“Fine like he’s going to move to Saskatchewan and never talk to you again?”
“No, fine like . . .” I shake my head, fighting a flash of annoyance. I know he’s just trying to be supportive, but I need a second to myself to try to figure out what just happened. “Forget it.”
“No, hey, talk to me.” Gray puts a hand on my arm, but I shrug him off, harder than I mean to. He takes a step back, hands up.
“Sorry.” I feel like a shaken-up soda bottle, like if anyone even looks at me wrong I might explode in every direction. “I think I just need some air.”
“Marin—” Gray frowns. “You’re not coming to lunch?”
“Not hungry,” I say. “I’ll see you later, okay?” I don’t wait for him to answer as I head down the hallway.
I’m so focused on getting away from him—on getting away from everyone—that I’ve made it almost all the way to the far end of the building before I realize I have no idea where I’m actually headed. It feels like there’s nowhere to hide. Two months ago I would have hightailed it directly to the newspaper room, flung myself down on the couch—and complained at great length to Bex himself, probably. It’s grossly surprising to realize I miss him—or at least, I miss the person I thought he was. All at once I’m furious he’s taken that from me too.
Finally I make my way to the bio lab, where Ms. Klein is sitting at her desk grading papers and eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.
“Hey, Marin,” she says, surprise flickering briefly over her features. “You okay?”
“Yep!” I say. “I just, um—” I break off, trying to come up with some kind of plausible book-club-related excuse for being in here and coming up empty.
Ms. Klein doesn’t seem to need one: “Do you want to talk?” she asks quietly, putting down her pen. “About . . . what everyone is talking about?”
“Um,” I say, struggling to keep my voice even. God, I can’t believe even Ms. Klein knows. “Not really. Can I just, like, hang out in here for a bit?”
Ms. Klein lifts her chin in the direction of the lab benches. “Sure thing,” she says, and her voice is very even. “Have a seat.”
Twenty-Five
Weekend afternoons are notoriously slow at Niko’s if there isn’t a bridal shower or a christening booked in the sunroom, which is bad news for tips but good news in that it’ll give me four long, boring hours’ worth of chances to try to smooth things over with Chloe. We’ve been avoiding each other since we got back from break—or, more to the point, Chloe’s been avoiding me. On the rare occasions I’ve made it into the cafeteria, she’s been eating with some girls from the drama club. We’ve been putting the next issue of the Beacon together entirely via a string of extremely tense, polite emails.
When I get to the restaurant though, I find Chloe’s monosyllabic cousin Rosie rolling silverware at the wait station instead, chunky rings on every one of her fingers and a diamond stud glittering in her nose.
“She changed up her schedule,” Steve explains when I ask about it, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “Some new club she’s in.”
I sincerely doubt that—after all, it’s Saturday—but it’s not like I’m about to argue with her dad of all people. I shuffle my way through my shift, then swing by Sunrise with two plastic clamshells of baklava tucked under my arm. I drop one with Camille at the nursing station and bring the other into Gram’s room, where we sit on the love seat with the window cracked to let a tiny bit of cold, fresh air in, brushing flakes of puff pastry off our laps.
“Oh, you know what, Marin?” she says suddenly, getting up off the sofa and heading for the closet, surprisingly spry in her cardigan and khakis. “I’ve got something for you.”
I raise my eyebrows. “You do?”
“I do!” She stands on her tiptoes and rummages along the top shelves for a moment; when she turns around she’s holding a fabric-covered storage box, the kind you buy at craft supply stores. We must have moved a hundred of them from her house in Brockton, full of old papers and mementos and slightly creepy locks of hair from when my mom and uncles were little kids. When she brings this one back to the love seat and pulls the top off though, I see it’s full of old photos—and not the ones from the seventies that I’m used to seeing, my mom with pigtails riding her bike and my uncles’ hair curling down over their collars. These are older: my grandpa at his high school graduation, looking grave and serious even as a teenager. The narrow brick apartment building in the North End where my grandma grew up. And—
“Is that you?” I ask, grabbing a faded photo out of the pile and holding it up to get a better look.
“Damn right it’s me,” Gram says with a laugh. Her shiny brown hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it. She’s standing in a crowd in a leafy green park, dressed in bell-bottoms and huge sunglasses and a sleeveless white T-shirt, a clunky beaded necklace nestled in the deep V of the collar. She looks ferocious, her arms flung in the air and her mouth opened in a howl.