The microwave beeps.
I pick up my backpack from a kitchen chair and fish for the car keys in the side pocket.
“Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll go.”
Driving is a relief. Lately, I crave motion. Velocity. Speed. Movement chases the thoughts from my head and unleashes me, temporarily, from the past and the future. There is only wind rushing into open windows. The familiar Vicks VapoRub smell of the eucalyptus trees swishing past. Music cranked up as loud at it will go.
The traffic light at Mission Road breaks my momentum. I stop. I wait. I think.
When was the last time I saw Emma?
She visited me in the hospital when I was moved out of the ICU after the transplant and stopped by my house on occasion to watch TV on our family room sectional once I was discharged. I think she considered it her duty to keep me engaged with what was happening at school, so she always came prepared with a little gossip.
Example: “Wes Thomas and Jordan McGuire broke up.”
This had been no big surprise. They were each applying to schools on opposite sides of the country.
“Saw that coming,” I said, scooping more popcorn from the bowl and turning up the volume on The Walking Dead. A minor character was getting his guts ripped out.
Emma covered her face with a pillow.
“Ugh. What happened to House Hunters International?”
I shrugged. “You’ve seen one vacation villa in Ibiza, you’ve seen them all.”
I could feel her shifting in her seat next to me, tightening her already-tight ponytail.
“Lily Kim was accepted early to Princeton.”
“Wow,” I said. “How’s Addison taking that?”
Addison Watson, close friends with Lily and a contender for valedictorian, had wanted to go to Princeton since . . . possibly birth.
“They’re not speaking.”
“That seems like an overreaction.”
“You think? Lily never said anything about applying to Princeton. I get why Addison’s pissed.”
“What, Lily can’t try for the same school?”
“Chloe.” Emma stared at me as if I had suddenly lost my mind. “It’s pretty bad form to apply to a friend’s top choice.”
This got me wondering if any of the applications I submitted would prompt Emma to stop talking to me.
She did have one more piece of intel to share.
“Oh, and Justin Stein was suspended.”
“Justin?”
Now this had surprised me — Justin was the last person I would have expected to be suspended from school.
“Got caught cheating on the AP chem exam.” Emma was almost whispering, this was such scandalous news.
“Why was he cheating?”
Justin didn’t need to cheat. He’s super smart.
“He wanted a perfect score.”
College application and acceptance season is a pretty tense time at high schools like mine. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is trying to gain an edge. There are the kids who buy Adderall so they can stay up late and study after a full day of school and team sports. There are the parents who are constantly scheduling meetings with teachers, or better yet the principal, to protest “unfair” test scores. Weekends are fully booked with travel to soccer tournaments, SAT prep courses, and service projects. There are always a few kids who crack. Who decide to blow it all off and join the party-all-the-time crowd. Or end up in rehab. Or cheat. I guess that’s what happened to Justin.
So although Emma was trying hard to be a good friend by keeping me company while I binge-watched zombies, I could tell it was making her twitchy. She had places to go and things to get done, and killing time with me was just that — killing time. There would be no extra credit for chilling out in my family room. Plus, our friendship was missing its usual competitive dynamic — and with it, a certain kind of energy — now that I had stepped, at least temporarily, out of the race.
Competition had always been a big part of our relationship. When we were little, we used to argue about who was faster, who was taller, who could eat the biggest serving of mashed potatoes. The day after my dad got me up on my first two-wheeled bike, Emma was out in the elementary school parking lot with her dad, intent on catching up. If she was reading Harry Potter in second grade, then I demanded that my mom get me the books too. But we shared as much as we compared. Favorite books. Silly dance moves. Our top-secret secrets. If we were always pushing each other to do our best, we also supported each other when our best fell short.
But in the last year, something had changed. The connection between us had become less supportive, more adversarial. All compare. No share.
I’m a math and science girl. Emma is the wordsmith. When we did homework together, I’d show her how to solve for x or explain the rules of probability. She’d help me edit my English papers. Until her parents invested a fortune on a specialized math tutor and Emma announced that she didn’t need my help anymore.
“My mom thinks I should just follow Margaret’s approach so I don’t get confused,” she explained one afternoon in late spring, last year. Margaret, an insanely smart graduate student at UC Berkeley, was helping Emma prep to get into AP Calculus our senior year.
Later, Emma started sighing when I’d ask if she could proof an essay on King Lear or give my history position paper on the Reconstruction Era a review. “Chloe, I’m not going to be able to help you with your college application statements, you know. You need to be able to do those yourself.”
“Already done,” I had replied. In reality, they were only partially done. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.
The summer between junior and senior year, we didn’t go away together to camp in Oregon, as we had the previous six summers. Emma was enrolled in an SAT-preparatory course that kept her busy for the better part of June and July. She’d already taken the test once, but her mom, a Stanford alum and COO of a San Francisco technology company called Novae, was encouraging her to try for a higher score. I’d already taken the SATs too and wasn’t planning to again. “Why wouldn’t you?” Emma had asked. “It’s just another chance to do better.” I couldn’t tell if she was concerned about me wasting the opportunity or annoyed that I possibly didn’t need it to begin with.
As senior year kicked off, Emma and I were back to meeting for lunch under the campus oak tree and after school to get our miles in for cross-country, but the weird undercurrent that had been there in the spring and summer remained. Emma’s sympathy seemed less than genuine when I confessed that I hadn’t made it into the AP History course taught by Mr. Britton, considered one of the school’s best teachers. And I was maybe just a little bit satisfied when I noticed her struggling in AP Calculus, despite Margaret’s best efforts.
Then came the party. And Liam Morales.
It was a warm night in late September. Craig Swanson’s parents had departed for a wine country weekend, leaving their hilltop house and infinity pool under the care of their son — an opportunity too good for even the most die-hard overachievers to pass up. The books would get a break for a few hours.
We didn’t really know Craig all that well, but Emma assured me that “everyone” was going. She wasn’t wrong about that. The back patio at Craig’s house was packed with people splashing in the pool, spilling drinks in the hot tub, and a few who were passing a vape pen around a huge outdoor firepit. I remember immediately regretting my decision to go along. I’ve never been big on crowds.