My head snaps up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means exactly what it sounds like. I’m not the one who—” He stops himself suddenly and takes a deep breath.
I know what he stopped himself from saying: I’m not the one who couldn’t just grow up and act like everybody else.
He runs a gloved hand forward on his head. “Whatever, Lighty. Look. You’re right. We don’t have to be buddies or whatever. But maybe we could, I don’t know, at least acknowledge each other’s presence?”
I look away and mumble, “Fine.”
“Yeah, fine,” he scoffs. “It’s actually perfect.”
Perfect. There’s nothing perfect about it, but that’s how it goes sometimes. That’s how it goes most of the time, I guess.
Something in his tone makes me clench my jaw to bite back a response. Jordan and his perfection. I almost want to ask him how things are going with his perfect girlfriend, Emme, and the perfect couple they used to be before she went AWOL. There have been so many rumors about where she’s gone and why she left that are anything but perfect—I know it must be eating at him. But I can’t bring myself to be that petty. Outside of what happened with me and him, it’s not fair to Emme for me to pry.
It’s hard to believe that we were ever close. But I remember it all, and standing near him makes it even more impossible to forget.
The summer before freshman year, Jordan spent two months at some football intensive camp for the first time ever. He wasn’t returning to band in the fall, we both knew that. But that wasn’t going to change much for us. He’d always played football, and now he was just going to play it a little more seriously, like his dad had been pushing him to.
It was the longest we’d gone without speaking to each other in three years, but it wasn’t unbearable. I spent the summer watching TV with Robbie and lounging around the Marinos’ pool. Me and G read old issues from her mom’s Vogue collection and spent hours on Tumblr reading about our favorite K-pop bands.
But by the time school started again, I missed my friend. I missed laughing with him and cracking stupid jokes in rehearsals and dancing down the hallways like no one was watching, even if they were.
On the first day of high school, I saw him standing by his locker, surrounded by guys I didn’t recognize. They were smiling and joking, all their skin darker from a summer playing football for hours a day. Jordan looked older, his curly hair completely gone, replaced with a close-cropped haircut that made his ears stick out a little. He didn’t have on mismatched socks and a ratty old T-shirt like he had on the first day of eighth grade. All of a sudden he was wearing new J’s, crisp jeans, and a black Nike T-shirt. It looked normal on the guys around him but strange on Jordan.
I ran up to him as excited as we always were to see each other.
My hair was in its full form, big and curly, and fell into my face as I threw my arms around his neck. I knew something was wrong when he didn’t hug me back.
“Jordan! You missed everything this summer. Gabi got poison ivy, and we made up a new dance for this year’s talent show—she says she’s actually going to do it this time. And—”
“Jennings, is this your girlfriend?” one of the older guys asked, elbowing him in the ribs a little too hard. I could tell because Jordan’s face screwed up a bit as he did it. “You like ’em wild, huh?”
The guy reached out and pulled on one of my curls, and I jerked my head away quickly.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, looking between him and Jordan, waiting for Jordan to say something.
“Ooooh, so she’s feisty too!” The guy was really going now. He narrowed his eyes and reached for me again. “Aw, you don’t want to have some fun? I just wanna see how you get your hair like this. Come on, what’s your secret?” He pitched his voice up and imitated a seventies commercial announcer. “Nothing but a little Afro-Sheen!”
“You’re crazy man; I don’t like her!” Jordan laughed. It was nervous but bitter. “I don’t even know her. I wouldn’t hang out with her.”
It felt like I used to feel all the time after my mom died: scared, unsure, out of control. My stomach flipped, and my heart felt like it was in my throat. My chest got tight, and I knew what would come next. I didn’t wait around for it. I ran to the bathroom as fast as my legs could carry me, and I cried through the first period of my first day of freshman year. Eventually, Gabi found me camped out in a stall between periods, helped splash some water on my face, and got me to my next class.
I couldn’t even make eye contact with him the next day when I passed him in the hallway. I couldn’t put a name to it, but I felt ashamed in a way I never had before. I was suddenly embarrassed about everything that made me, me. What memo had I missed that said everyone was supposed to change overnight? Suddenly everything came into focus for me: The outfits were cooler, the haircuts more Pinterest-worthy, the cars in the senior parking lot shinier than I’d ever seen.
And Campbell Confidential meant that all of it—the good, the bad, and the embarrassing—would be caught on camera. I learned what Jordan had figured out over the summer: He had his place in school and I had mine. So I started wearing my hair slicked back in a tight bun nearly every day. Switched from bright colors to quieter tones so no one would spot me coming. No one was going to make me feel that way again.
I figured out my place in the social hierarchy at Campbell, and I stuck to it.
I swallow the lump that forms in my throat at the memory. As annoyed as I am about standing around and pretending to clean a basically already-clean park, I’m even more annoyed by the fact that I have to do it next to Jordan. So the moment the alarm on my phone buzzes to tell me it’s time to go, I’m out of there. I turn on my heel and power walk to the park attendants’ station like my breathing depends on it, leaving Jordan holding the bag.
“Well, time flies when you’re having fun, huh, kids?” The snarky park attendant holds our signature sheets in his hand and uses them as an impromptu fan.
I feel Jordan appear behind me at the same time as the urge to knock the attendant upside the head with the trash claw washes over me.
“Yo, just sign the papers, man.” Jordan’s voice is clipped, way less happy than it was when we started. I almost feel guilty that I had something to do with that. “We don’t have all day.”
“Well, not with that attitude, you don’t.” The attendant tucks a too-long, stringy bang behind his ear with a smirk. “I don’t have to sign these, you know.”
My body immediately tenses, and my heart rate spikes. My stomach starts churning. I can’t redo these hours. I don’t have time, I can’t not get credit for this afternoon, everything depends on every one of these stupid volunteer things, I—
Jordan places two fingers on the inside of my wrist and holds it in place with his thumb on the outside. His grip is firm but gentle as he taps out the beat of my pulse with his foot. It’s familiar. I settle without meaning to, without realizing it, and Jordan’s voice drops an octave as he leans into the attendant’s space. Into his tiny, glorified port-o-potty.
“Look, I don’t want to have to do this. But I still have that video of you from my Fourth of July party last year, and something tells me you wouldn’t want it to mysteriously end up on Campbell Confidential, would you?”