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“Jo-bah sad?” she asked as she handed the drawing up to me. “You crying?”
“No, I’m not crying, but I am kind of sad,” I replied, examining the drawing. It was a brown circle with two black ovals that were maybe my eyes. Blue lines ran out of the black ovals, so possibly, those were tears? “Did you make this?”
“Uh-huh,” she answered, skirting around me to dash into my room, then climb onto my bed. She flopped to her back—Little Mermaid nightgown twisted around her middle, her chunky thighs and calves exposed—and grabbed her toes. “I see Johny.”
“Yeah, he’s still there.” I sat down beside her as she tried to stick her big toe into her nose. “Don’t do that,” I said, and she quit. For now. “Thanks for the drawing.”
“You well-comb. Why you sad?”
I fell back on the bed to lie beside her. She giggled and cuddled in close to my side. The girl was a major cuddle-bug. I’d lost count how many times she’d left her toddler bed to come into my room to sleep with me—at least twice a week, if not more. I didn’t mind. My bed was more than big enough for one teenager and one toddler.
“I did something bad,” I told her, figuring that was enough for her.
“Oh, Jo-bah, why did you do bad things?” she asked as she rooted under my arm. I lifted it, and she snuggled into my side.
“I don’t know. Why do you do bad things?” I asked, then glanced at her. She’d popped her thumb into her mouth, a sure sign she was tired. She shrugged. “Yeah, same here. But I won’t do those bad things anymore.”
Her tiny hand, the one with the free thumb, came up to pat my face. “Jo-bah good boy forever now,” she said—or I think that was what she said—around her thumb before her long lashes fell to rest on her pudgy cheeks. As she slept peacefully at my side, I pulled a notebook out of my backpack and opened it to a new page.
I had a list to make of the people I’d hurt.
And at the top of that list was Tyler Corrigan.
Yeah, I was doomed as doomed could be.
ChapterTwo
Tyler
“…then apparently, so Maeve said, the parents were called in, and Miles got a five-day suspension.”
“Not Jonah?”
“Yeah, but only three days for him…”
I tuned out the discussion of the latest gossip circling the halls of Chesterford. I had already dissected the whole suspension thing with Soren, who’d tracked me down as soon as he’d heard. He’d told me someone had anonymously turned in Miles and Jonah for bullying, and I didn’t have the energy to summarize all the stuff in my head about any of them, nor about the complicated relationship I had with Felix, Jonah, and Miles.
Hell, I was barely handling the fact that Felix was talking to me instead of shouting at me. Him falling for my best friend was a kick in the teeth, or at least it had started out that way. What could Soren have possibly seen in someone like Felix, who enjoyed asserting his dominance by scaring people? Then, I began to see Felix through Soren’s eyes, and suddenly, he was nothing more than a scared kid who didn’t have a mom who cared for him, and slowly, the way Felix was with me had changed. We were kind of friends now.
“… heard that Jonah was all up in Miles’ face telling him to leave a kid alone.”
“Nah, but he apologized to the kid, told Miles they should leave.”
The voices lowered then, but I could still hear. “Eva told Marc that it was the pink-haired kid who turned them in. Him. The one behind you. Don’t look! Jeez, I said don’t look.”
“The one with lip-gloss and the rainbow pins?” the second voice asked.
“Yeah, the one who…”
I tried to tune them out, but it was as if I could feel the gazes of whoever was talking, and even though I wanted to turn around and say they were wrong, I didn’t. It wasn’t me who’d reported Miles and Jonah to the principal; it wasn’t me who’d taken the video that had gone viral in the school and beyond. The one that had caught Miles shouting in some new kid’s face, threatening him, calling him all kinds of shit things for his skin color, his size, accusing him of being queer like that was okay.
The video caught other things—like Jonah attempting to tug Miles away, Jonah apologizing to the kid after Miles eventually left him alone, and Jonah walking off in the opposite direction from Miles, his head down.
All of that spoke to the feelings I had for Jonah—that he was as stupid as Felix, and that maybe there was a good guy inside him, too.
“And you’ll never guess what I heard about—”
I poked my earbuds in to drown out the talking, the cast ofWickedtelling me that I needed to dance through life. Yeah, that would work well. Pink hair and lip gloss, plus a hint of eyeliner, was my go-to, but dancing in the hallways was so not happening. I’d save that for the bedroom or for when I was finally at college where I could be me all the time without being shamed for it.
