When I can focus, I watch BFF Sarah grow impatient and walk away.

And I see Sawyer’s mouth moving, and Roxie scowling and getting angry. But I can’t comprehend anything.

After a minute, I look at Trey. “I really need to go,” I say in a low voice.

“If you leave now, she’ll feel like she won something. Just stay here and talk to me. Ignore them. She’s looking to get a rise out of you, so don’t let her. You and Sawyer will work this out. He’s a good guy, remember?”

“I know.” But he made out with Roxie. He was a couple with her. How did I not know this? Maybe because I’m a freaking outcast, huh? Pretty stinking likely.

“So, about that other thing,” Trey says, keeping my gaze locked on his. “Let’s meet up after school and do the library again. I need to do some research for a term paper anyway. Sound good?”

“Sure,” I say, my voice hollow. They’re talking about me now. I stare at Trey, and he keeps talking. And then he laughs, and I think it’s because Roxie just suggested Sawyer was gay and having a secret relationship with Trey, and I was acting as his beard. I can’t help it—I have to tune in.

Sawyer looks hard at Roxie for a long moment. And then he says, “Yes, okay, I admit it. I’m gay, and I’m in love with Trey.”

Roxie stares at him. “You are not.”

“You just said I was. And, well, it’s true.”

“I made out with a gay?”

The immediate area goes silent. Heads turn, everybody looking to see who the newly outed gay guy is. I hate this. I glance at Trey, who seems to be enjoying this immensely.

“Well, I’m not just any old gay, I’m Sawyer the gay.” His lip twitches. “That’s what we call each other.”

“True story,” Trey adds. “But I rejected him.”

“He did, yes. Multiple times, in fact.”

“But he’s still very much in love with me, and I like that, because it kind of feels like I have power over him. It’s a form of torture, and it’s fun.”

Sawyer nods. Then he shakes his head. “Not fun for me, I mean. For him.”

A few people around us start snickering.

Roxie’s face turns red. I think she figured out they’re teasing her and sort of throwing her own actions in her face, but she says through gritted teeth, “So are you gay or not?”

Sawyer drops the shtick. “Really? You’re asking me this?”

“Obviously.”

Sawyer gives her an incredulous look. “Okay, well, then I . . . I am.”

Her eyes bulge. “Were you gay when we made out?”

Sawyer holds his straight face. “Not before, but after . . . well, then I was.”

A few people laugh, and Roxie falters, and I feel sorry for her. Not because she’s gullible. But because it means so damn much to her to know if she made out with a gay.

“Okay, that’s enough, guys,” I mutter.

The bell rings. People around us turn back to gather their stuff. Trey squeezes my shoulder and slips away. Roxie stomps off, and I stand there, looking across the table at Sawyer, who is searching my face with his eyes. And I don’t know what to say, except “I guess I’ll see you at the library after school.”

He sighs and looks down at the table. “Yeah. Okay.”

I stand there a second more, and then I take my tray away. I have to run to make it to class on time.

Twenty-Five

And here’s the thing. I hate that junk. I hate that whole whatever you want to call it—the misunderstanding-slash-thing-between-us story line. It’s on every TV show, in every book you read, every movie. Something always happens to put this stupid wedge in the budding relationship, and the people don’t talk about it so they just keep being misunderstood, and by the end of the movie, maybe it all works out and maybe it doesn’t, but I hate it and I wish this kind of crap didn’t happen. Why can’t the two lovers just be together? Why can’t the fucking plot of the fucking story of everybody’s life just be like, hey, you finally find the person you want to be with, and you just be with them, and that part is the good part? And the conflict is something else, like a crash and an explosion, or a school shooting, but you’re just still together with that person as a team and you both fight together against some other enemy? Why does this have to happen? Because it’s very clear to me that we just. Don’t. Need this. Right now.

“So, uh, that got a little out of hand,” Trey says when he gets to our table in sculpting class. “Sorry about that. It was all in fun.”

“I know.”

“Why are you being so quiet?”

“I’m not sure.”

He nods, and we sit there in silence for once, working side by side making a bowl and painting fruit, both of us knowing that scary junk is coming, and the world is so much bigger than this place, and these people, and a stupid rivalry.

We meet up at the library after school and Trey wisely goes to look for books for his research project, leaving me and Sawyer alone on the couch in the library loft.

And the dude, to his credit, looks way more distraught about what happened at lunch than he is over the visions that are driving him crazy. “I’m sorry I never told you I made out with Roxie,” he says. “We were never a couple, I don’t care what she says. We made out twice at the beginning of ninth grade, more just to experience things and mess around.”