“I guess you didn’t hear,” Isabel says casually. “I dumped Jared over the weekend. My lunches will be a lot freer from now on.” She flips her hair, looking pleased with herself.
I, on the other hand, close my eyes in pain. Usually I enjoy when Ethan enters a relationship. He’s way easier to beat when he’s distracted. However, never in the past have I had quite so close a front-row seat to the proceedings. I’ve shared classes with Ethan and his girlfriends, sure—watched them eye-flirt and exchange stupid little smiles. But student government has a fair amount of after-class obligations. I’ll have to interact with Ethan and Isabel up close and personal in class and outside of school. I don’t know if I’m over my food poisoning enough to start now.
I cut in before this conversation can go where it’s obviously headed. “Why does Williams want both of us?” I ask.
Isabel shrugs. “She didn’t say. Oh, and do you have your bonfire volunteers?”
Shit. “Working on it,” I say. It’s a generous characterization. By working on it, I mean finding volunteers for the baseball kickoff bonfire that ASG’s putting together remains near the bottom of my very long to-do list.
“Ethan’s already signed up four people. I need yours by Friday,” Isabel says casually, knowing exactly what the comparison does to me. “Thanks, guys,” she adds. Her gaze lingers on Ethan a fraction of a second before she walks away.
Ethan’s eyes follow her—or more precisely, follow the hemline of her skirt. Without turning, he says to me, “Lunch with Alison Sanger and Principal Williams. I’m being punished for something, surely.”
“Feel free to blow it off,” I reply.
Finally, his eyes flit from Isabel. He cuts me a dry glance, then walks off to follow her.
Isabel’s on the opposite end of the room, talking to Kristin Cole, the treasurer. I watch Ethan come up next to Isabel and effortlessly enter their conversation. Ignoring them, I return to my English homework. We have to read the first half of Macbeth by the end of the week. With three hours of meetings with reporters and editors after school, I need to read ahead now, and I immerse myself in the pages of Scottish rulers and sinister prophecies. I don’t resent my packed schedule, of course. I don’t particularly like unstructured time. Ethan, on the other hand . . .
Isabel laughs loudly, and I look up. It’s obvious from Ethan’s pompous expression he’s just said something funny. Something Isabel finds funny, I mean.
I know he’s not actually interested in her. He’s never interested in his romances, not in a real way or in a way that extends beyond three months. It’s just how Ethan is—flighty, distractible in everything from relationships to class lectures.
I don’t understand him. The flirting, the extracurriculars, even the rivalry. Sometimes I think Ethan only works hard in school because he has nothing better to do, and not because he truly wants the things he achieves. It’s infuriating, knowing I’m spending endless hours feuding with someone who’s probably only playing with me. He’s using our rivalry just to pass the time, interchangeable with chatting up the newly single student body president. However hateful it would be to know he was working his hardest out of the unshakeable desire to destroy me, this—this petty, throwaway opposition—is worse.
I want the things I achieve. Student body vice president, editor in chief of the Chronicle, Harvard, valedictorian. Ethan competes with me in almost everything, but does he even want any of the achievements he’d take from me? Or is it just fun for him to say he did?
I move to a desk without a direct view of him and return to work.
Ten
PERPETUALLY UNIMPRESSED WITH HER students, Principal Williams is scarily silent, with a stare capable of rooting class-cutters and freshmen goofing off in the hallways where they stand. She’s in her fifties, Black, of medium height, and partial to pantsuits. I think of her in bullet points, in organized punches of information, because it’s the way she requires you speak when you’re in her office.
We don’t have the friendliest relationship. To be fair, we got off on the wrong foot when I complained to her that my freshman English teacher was too easy. I wasn’t wrong—we went the first week of school without a mention of homework while Dylan’s class was five chapters into Lord of the Flies. I returned to Williams’s office every day until she finally relented and switched my classes. Since then, we’ve crossed paths whenever Ethan and I publish unflattering stories about the administration in the newspaper or petition the PTSA for funding for the humanities department.
Right now, I’m waiting in her office. I don’t know when I’ll eat lunch. I definitely won’t try it in here. Once when I brought my prepackaged salad in, Williams watched the little plastic fork disapprovingly until I threw the whole thing out.
Ethan sits silently in the chair next to me, once again scrolling aimlessly on his phone. He clicks off the screen with practiced deftness and returns his phone to his pocket. “You’re quiet,” he observes.
I frown. “You’re literally equally quiet.”
“Except I’m the one who spoke first,” he points out. “Just now.”
“I wish you hadn’t,” I reply. I hate this fight. I hate it on a conceptual level. We’re fighting about fighting. It’s grossly married-couple, the whole framework. Worse, Ethan’s now smiling, elbow on his armrest, chin on his palm.
“What, Sanger?” he inquires slowly. “You don’t enjoy our conversations?”
“They’re not conversations, they’re hostage negotiations,” I inform him. “You holding me captive until I’ve paid your ransom of pithy remarks and retorts. Enough for you to feel important.”
Ethan hmms. “I wonder why you extend them, then?” he drawls. “A negotiating tactic, I assume?”
I’m fuming over my reply when Williams walks in. Deliverance. She’s wearing black, and her hair is cut close to her head. It’s a straight-to-the-point look, which is like Williams.
Sitting down smoothly, she picks up the papers on her desk. “My favorite students,” she says drolly without looking up.
I say nothing. Ethan says nothing, which is rarer. This is when he’d fire off some sarcastic comment with one of our teachers like he’s on a Netflix comedy special instead of at school. With Williams, though, he holds his humor in.
“Any disasters I need to know about in ASG?” Williams inquires in sharp syllables.
I exchange a confused glance with Ethan. “Not at the moment,” I say, hearing the uncertainty in my voice. If this is just our normal ASG meeting, I don’t understand why she wanted both Ethan and me.