I can’t erase his face from my brain.
Deep cleaning my room doesn’t help. Going for a run in the scorching midafternoon sun doesn’t help. If anything, it makes me hallucinate. Seeing him in cars and behind trees and everywhere else I look.
My thoughts are no better than my eyes; they are loud and anxious and sad.
Finally, figuring there’s no other way to shut my mind off, I call Willow and agree to go with her to Bailey’s party. It’s kind of a gamble, because people I might not want to see could be there. People like Eric Lerner.
But I also know who’s not likely to be there, since he’s a year older and this isn’t really his crowd: Luke. And that’s good enough for me.
“Yay, you’re going to have so much fun!” Willow says that evening as she climbs into the passenger seat. Willow is a tall brunette with bright eyes and an even brighter future. She lives in this massive, Old English style house, but it’s only a couple of minutes from my house, so we’re carpooling and meeting her boyfriend, Brett, there.
“Seat belt,” I say, waiting to start the car.
“One sec,” she says, holding her phone to the roof of the car and aiming the camera at her face. At this point Willow knows me well enough not to even ask if I’ll be in the picture with her, but I scoot closer to the door anyway, out of her camera’s line of sight.
She taps away on her phone, and it vibrates immediately. The first of hundreds of likes she’s going to get. Willow is what people call “internet famous.” Her videos accumulate hundreds of thousands of views, companies send her all sorts of products clamoring for a feature in one of her posts, and a couple of her followers recently started selling T-shirts with quintessential Willow sayings. A favorite is “Hold hands, not grudges.” Budding social media empire aside, she manages to be one of the nicest people alive.
“I’m so happy you’re coming,” Willow says now, finally pulling her seat belt across her chest. “What changed your mind?”
I start the car. “Just super bored.”
“Right,” she says, unconvinced.
“I’m serious.”
“No, I believe you. I would be too if I spent most of my days with a grandpa I’m not even related to.”
Spending time with people I’m not related to is kind of my specialty, but since we rarely discuss what my life was like before she got here, she doesn’t know that.
“He’s really sweet, you know,” I say in Ernie’s defense. Willow may be a good person, but like most eighteen-year-olds, I guess she prefers spending time with people her own age. Which is probably why she hates our job at the community center, where we work with kids. Her dad, who has no clue about her thriving online life and the money she earns from views, made her work there because, millionaire dad or not, he wants her to learn the value of hard work.
“Like, it’s not a bad job if they took out all the sports and science classes and let me teach something I actually have a clue about,” she muses when the topic of work comes up. “Like makeup tips or confidence advice. We could call it a life skills class or something! If I had access to experts at that crucial stage, I’d have turned out completely different.” She says the last part so wistfully, I have to laugh.
“Um, it seems to me like you turned out just fine.”
“Omigosh, Jessi. You don’t even know who I used to be,” she says, giving her lip-gloss a once-over in the mirror.
You don’t know whoIused to be,I think.
“One day I’ll tell you all about the glow-up,” she promises. Considering that she isn’t even in the vicinity of ugly, I’m skeptical that Willow’s “glow-up” involves the usual ugly duckling to swan tale, but I say nothing.
We pull up to Bailey’s house, which is nestled in a cul-de-sac. I’ve been here a couple of times before. Once, for her all-girls eleventh birthday party. Another time to work on a group project with Bailey and Rowan.
My heart pinches with a familiar pain, but I force my brain to think of something else.No Cohens tonight,I tell myself.
We park and make our way around Bailey’s house to the backyard pool, where the party is taking place. There are a bunch of people already in the pool, another few lounging around in swimsuits and drinking.
“Wills, you made it!” Bailey says, grabbing Willow by the hand. They hug, like long-lost friends, even though I’ve known Bailey longer than Willow has been in the state.
“Hey, Jessi,” Bailey says. She looks a little surprised to see me, but she gives me a genuine smile and leads us over to a cooler full of cans and bottles on a small foldout table.
“What do you want?” Willow asks me, digging into the cooler.
“Is there soda?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bailey says. “There’s some in the fridge. I can go grab a couple of cans.”
“Do you want me to come and help?” I offer.
