Chapter One
It’s quite a thing for a girl to watch her future go up in smoke. I suppose I’m being a little melodramatic, given that it’s my mom who lost her job, not me. And honestly, I hate how dependent my dreams are on her hard work. I’ve never found it fair, but there are a lot of things in my life that I consider unjust but nonetheless are sewn into my fabric. What’s one more?
My mom worked at Tiny Prints Studio in the mall at the edge of Allensville, our town that’s like a pimple on Indianapolis’s forehead. We’re a nice zit, but economically? Full-on parasite. Most of the department stores closed when the huge outlet mall opened off the turnpike a year ago, and the empty spaces taken up by a charter school, pawn shop and thrift store. Other than the few remaining fast food joints, the photography studio was the only original business still operating in the plaza . . . until Tuesday.
Rent on the studio was too much for the couple who owned the business, and retirement was far more inviting than negotiating. They gave a few of the oldest pieces of equipment to my mom, sold the rest, then rode off for warmer temps in some retirement burb near Phoenix. Meanwhile, Kristen Mabee is once again working the wedding circuit, shooting weddings all over the tri-state area so we can stay in this shitty house full of shitty memories of how my shitty dad decided to walk out on us.
And me?
Well, no more Montessori school, for starters. It’s not posh private-school expensive, but it does cost, and public school is nice and free. And anything beyond community college is out of the blueprint too, unless the bowling alley gives me a hundred-dollar-an-hour raise. Not likely. In my immediate future, though, I wish like hell there’s a way I could borrow my mom’s photo tech to touch up the photo on my ID before my first day back at Public. I seriously miss the warm cocoon of the tiny Montessori school I got to go to for junior year.
“June, it’s fine!” My best friend Abby rips the card from my hand and tosses it into her back seat. It’s a mess back there so I’ll be lucky to find it before school starts on Monday.
“I’m cross-eyed.” I sigh, pulling the visor down and flipping on the light for the mirror. Am I always that way or just for this one picture?
“Nobody will ever see it. I promise,” she says.
I flip the visor back up, not convinced that I don’t actually look that way in real life, and flop back into my seat. Six people have already seen it, and the school photocopied it twice for registration. At this rate, my high school ID photo is in line for billboard placement any day now.
“You promise I’m going to know people at this party?” I’m not great with socializing. It was part of the appeal of going to a small school for the last year. The closer we get to the D’Angelo house, the more ill-fitting my T-shirt feels. I swear it shrank in the wash. I don’t buy belly shirts, but I see my flesh when I raise my arms up halfway. And the top of my jeans is folding in on itself. It makes the zipper part bulge like I’m some jock with a huge cup. I squirm in my seat and shimmy the tight black pants down my hips while simultaneously tugging the black and white striped T-shirt toward my waist.
Abby glances at me and laughs.
“You’re being nuts. You look great. And it’s everyone you remember from sophomore year. It’ll be like you never left.” She pulls into a free space at the side of the road about four houses down from the twins’ house. Cars line up both sides of the street, and we can hear the music thumping the moment Abby opens the driver’s side door.
“I don’t really like everyone from sophomore year. And I did leave for a reason.” Perspiration builds at my neck despite the coolness of the late summer air.
“You left because you thought people didn’t like you.” She actually rolls her eyes when she says it, which pisses me off a little. She makes it seem so insignificant. She’s always thought most of it was in my head, but a few things were plainly undeniable. The dog poop left on the hood of my car about a dozen times when it was parked at school was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Abby, someone literally picked my car up and moved it into the middle of the drainage area by the school. Being a dick like that takes a coordinated effort. That’s a bit of a sign.”
“Yeah, I know. But people at this school are just dicks, like, unilaterally. To everyone.” She nods in halfhearted acknowledgement, flipping her own mirror down to touch up the red on her lips. She turns to me and holds out the gloss. I recoil and she shrugs. Abby is pin-up beautiful. Her hair is this caramel color that lightens every summer, and her skin is a rich, cocoa brown. She got curves in eighth grade, and her skin is expensive and flawless. Her mom got her into modeling when she was young, and she’s been landing some big print ads lately. At a thousand dollars a gig, the money in her college account has grown to Ivy League proportions over the years. I’ve always been her alt-friend with near-black hair that I sometimes wear in braids on either side of my head because it’s literally the only hair style I know how to do. My friend has always said she’d trade me her hair and curves in a heartbeat for my green eyes. I wish trades like that were a thing. Done deal. Enjoy the lanky body with knobby knees and size A cups.
“Look, everyone has gotten older,” she begins, flipping her mirror closed and flicking her long-nailed fingertips toward my door handle in a gesture that urges me to get out. My hand grips the handle, but I can’t seem to bring myself to open the door. “You’re living in the past too much. People don’t care about pranks and childish things like grudges or whatever.”
“You mean bullying,” I correct. A grudge would mean I did something wrong, and I would know who I wronged. I’ve never known any of it. It’s just these little things that always came out of nowhere and built up. And yeah, maybe Abby is right—our school is full of immature pranksters. I’ve seen others get hit with the fallout, too. But for me, it wore me down.
“Fine, bullying. All I’m saying, June, is we’re going to be eighteen this year—all of us. This is it, the last moments of unabandoned freedom and youth! We’re supposed to party and stay out late and maybe even—gasp!—fail a class that doesn’t count on our transcripts. And there are so many boys we need to kiss! I know you wanna kiss boys at parties, June.”
I hate that I blush when she teases me. I get out of the car just to escape her conversation, but it only delays the inevitable. She’s going to bring this all back to Lucas Fuller. It always comes back to him.
I’ve been in love with my neighbor since the day he moved in at the start of our sixth-grade year. We were instant friends, though admittedly, my attraction to him was heavily dimples and blue-eye driven at first. Our moms took turns with school carpool duties. We swam together in the same summer league. We wasted away afternoons licking sticky grape-flavored popsicle juice from our arms while we sat in the sun on the roof of the old Buick my dad stored in our back yard. Technically, Lucas Fuller was my first kiss—it was an eighth grade dare in the back of a field trip bus. Our lips were puckered, there was zero tongue, and our eyes were wide open. Even after that awkward kiss, not a single day passed without us either hanging out or texting each other good night. I made my mom drive me two hours away once to watch his freshman football game, and I was always the one yelling the loudest for his home ones.