Gabriel:Sunday is the Lord’s day, fool. Day of rest and relaxation. No work allowed.
Me:Tell that to the American school system.
Gabriel:UGH. Say less.
Julia:Where are we meeting? And who’s bringing coffee?
Sunny:IVY BETTER BE BRINGING THE COFFEE FOR ACCOSTING US AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR.
Gabriel:I thought we already established that the hour was, in fact, extremely godly.
Me:I’m on the coffee. We’re meeting in the Bat Cave.
Julia:Uh…it’s Sunday.
Gabriel:Have we not gone over this?
Me:I copied the janitor’s key in December. Meet me at the field by nine.
Julia:We’ll be there!
Sunny:BUT ONLY IF THERE IS COFFEE.
Twenty minutes later, the four of us assemble next to the Sixth Avenue entrance of Sunset High. Gabriel slumps near the chain-link fence, his hands tucked into the pockets of his giant hoodie. The hood rests over his thick mop of hair, which already covers the top of his eyes so most of the time he resembles a sheepdog. Julia bounces up and down on theballs of her feet. She’s dressed in a short-sleeved button-up shirt and the just-above-the-knee shorts every parent desperately wishes their teenage daughter would wear. Her notebook is out, along with a handful of different-colored pens. Sunny, the tiniest member on our staff, stands in an actual pink fuzzy robe with her arms firmly crossed. She’s wearing sunglasses light enough to reveal her closed, pinched eyes. I round out the group with my usual ensemble of rumpled black jeans, Doc Martens, and some thrift store sweater LeVar Burton probably rocked in the eighties. The four of us look like Greta Gerwig’s fever dream version of the Avengers.
“What the hell?” Sunny says as I join the circle.
“Sorry.” I thrust the cardboard tray into the center. “Coffee took forever.”
Everyone grabs their order and takes a sip. I march us over to the custodian door near the basketball court and usher the others inside. We creep down into the basement. Julia turns on the hoard of discarded holiday twinkle lights we got at a yard sale a few months ago, just after winter break. We thought it would cheer the place up considerably, but with all the computer towers humming and lights blinking…the twinkle lights overhead have the effect of making us feel like we’re inside the bridge of a spaceship onStar Trek. Which isn’t all bad, actually.
Gabriel and Julia sit at their usual spots. Sunny stands next to my desk and stares at me while I open my laptop.
“Hey, Sunny,” I say as I sign in to my accounts. Her stare is so menacing that I mess up my password twice.
She flips her sunglasses up. “It’s Sunday.”
I look at her and smile. “You know, I think you’re the third person to point that out.”
“So, what’s going on?” Julia asks. She and Gabriel have their spinning chairs twisted to face me. Sunny eventually backs into her own chair and plops down. She takes a huge swig of her coffee, and I make a mental note to get her another as soon as that one’s empty.
I plug my laptop into the projector. Instantly, my home screen lights up the large screen hanging over the back wall. I click open the yearbook document.
“It’s fucked,” I say.
Gabriel chokes on his coffee. “What? Did the files become corrupted?”
“No, but…”
The next words get caught on my tongue. I’ve never really talked about my mom to anyone but Cam. I know how she comes off to other people when she’s sending food back or commenting on someone’s outfit or décor. It might seem easy to dismiss her criticisms as bitchy and move on. But my mom is the worst kind of bitchy. She’s both bitchyandright, meaning it’s all but impossible for me to ignore her.
I also, of course, haven’t shared my Paris plans with anyone at school either. I feel like there’s little point, seeing as my one real friend dumped me and there’s not enough time to make good friends again before taking off. The yearbook crew and I are all about business. We get shit done and we do it well, and that’s the foundation for whatever pseudo-friendship it is we have.
But the deadlines here are too much for me to vault on my own. We’ve been working on the yearbook throughout the school year. And now we have less than a month left to salvage it into a good portfolio before classes let out for the summer.
“There’s…no story here,” I say finally, despising how much I sound like Mom.
The others stare at me.
