One
“Getting jitters?” LC asks me.
I tear my gaze from the black metal case sitting between us on my bed. “No,” I lie, forcing a smile. “Of course not.”
“You better not be,” she says playfully. Her light brown eyes, impeccably made up with killer mascara and festive gold eye shadow, gleam with excitement. When she grins, the whole room gets brighter. It’s this crazy, infectious thing that usually makes me want to cannonball into whatever thrill she’s proposing. But what we’re about to do tonight is different. Bigger than our normal fun. It also means serious trouble if we get caught.
“Everything is sterile, right?” I ask, trying to quash my nerves.
She squeezes my hand. “I wouldn’t let my girl go out like that. I got you.”
Boss up, I tell myself. Tonight is a crucial friendship test. The ultimate trust fall, in honor of our three-month friendiversary. I can’t fail.
She picks up the metal case and snaps it open, pulls out a small, sleek piercing gun.
I finger the earring that dangles from my right earlobe. My ears are the only things I’ve pierced. Until now.
“Wanna know a secret?” LC says as she tears open an alcohol-wipe packet. She slides the wet wipe over the plastic part of the gun and its metal stud holder. “I hate needles. All types. I dread shots at the doctor. When I got this done last year, I was scared as shit too.”
“Really?” I say.
“Hell yeah.” Only LC could say she was terrified of something and seem even cooler and more self-possessed after copping to it.
She unfolds her long legs and scoots closer to me on the bed. She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Our matching nape piercings will be fucking epic and bold. Just like we are.”
I smile and swallow my nerves for good because she’s right. It will look fierce. And that’s the entire vibe I want. The next time LC says we’re epic and bold, it really will apply to the pair of us. Not just her, with me hopelessly trying to keep up.
The decision made, a jolt of anticipation zips through me. I’ve never done anything this wild before. Dyeing my hair its current shade of violet is the closest I’ve gotten. But it’s time for an evolution, and LC is the perfect wingwoman.
“Okay,” I say, “so what’s next?”
She reaches behind my head, lifts up my curly hair, and pinches my neck.
“Ow!” I yelp.
“That’s how we prepared folks for the sting in the shop. It shouldn’t feel much worse than that.” She clips a slim silver barbell into the stud holder. Her aunt owns a tattoo and piercing studio in Fairburn Heights, south of here. LC worked in it while staying with her last summer, so she knows what she’s doing.
Originally, when she brought up the idea to seal our friendship, I suggested she draw us matching bass-clef tattoos. She’s an incredible artist (I’m low-key jealous), and I thought it’d be perfect, since we first clicked over our love of the indie rap playing in Hyped Up, our favorite coffee shop. But LC made me realize that was too basic—tons of kids get matching friend tats.
I eye the barbell, imagining how it will look on me. It’ll be hidden. Unless I want someone to glimpse it, and then when I pull my hair up, it’ll be sexy and unexpected. Daring. Like me. The true me. Not the annoyingly vanilla girl I was before meeting LC.
And, most important, it will match the one LC already has.
We’ve only been friends for a short time, but I feel like I’ve known her my entire life. We bonded so hard, so fast, I swear best-friends-at-first-sight is a thing. We’re Betty and Veronica, without the frenemy wars.
“This is going to be a little cold,” she says, lifting my hair again and rubbing the alcohol wipe on my skin.
Creeeeak! I bolt off the bed at the noise of the door opening. My younger sister, Sophie, barges into my room.
I glower at her. “I know I locked that door.”
She waves a hairpin in the air with a sly smile. “You did.”
“Get. Out,” I growl, throwing a fuzzy star-shaped pillow at her head. “Right now!”
Her eyes snag on the piercing gun LC holds and widen with interest. “Ohhhh!”
I lunge for her to physically shove her out, but the little troll dodges my grasp.
I’m so dead if she tells Mom and Dad. “Sophie—” I start.
“Y’all are getting piercings?” she squeals. “This is sooooo cool. Can I get pierced too?”
“We are not getting anything,” I tell her.
She plants her hands on her hips. “Yes, we are if I’m keeping quiet.”
“Soph,” I snarl. “The answer is no. You’re a little kid. So how about you keep this secret because you love me and you don’t want to see me die, and I’ll give you forty dollars, buy you that new video game you want, and do your chores for two weeks?”
She crosses her arms. “Megan. Make it sixty dollars, Ghosts of Saturn, a new pink Xbox controller, my chores for a month, and unrestricted access to your manga collection you claim you don’t read anymore but won’t let me touch. Then it’s a deal.”
“That’s robbery!”
She smiles at me sweetly, her lone right dimple making her appear angelic. “If you cave about the piercing, it’ll cost you zilch.”
Zilch except my soul and my moral compass because I mutilated an eleven-year-old.
“Fine!” I grip Sophie’s shoulders and march my pain-in-the-ass little sister out of the room. Between the cash, the video game, and the controller, I’m out a good two hundred dollars. I’ll be broke until I get Christmas money next month.
“Sis is ruthless,” LC says, like it’s a good trait. “I’ll pay half of what Baby Boss Bitch is extorting us for.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I mutter. LC works an after-school job as a remote tutor for her spending money. I’m only giving up the rest of my birthday coins.
I sit back down next to her. “Okay,” I say. “Ready.”
Her hands brush the nape of my neck. I shiver as she gathers my shoulder-length curls into a high ponytail. She raises the piercing gun. “On three?”
I nod. “One . . . two . . . three!” I brace for the quick prick of pain. Nothing comes. “What are you waiting for?” I toss her a teasing, confident grin over my shoulder. “Are you scared now?”
She snorts, but I swear it sounds shaky. “Who, me? Never.”
I’d gassed myself up before; the delay lets doubt creep back in. “You positive?” I say, suddenly hoping she’ll give me an out.
“All good.” LC grips my neck, and then—bam!—a million hot fire pokers stab into my skin. I clench my teeth so my parents don’t hear me shriek.
“I thought you said it wouldn’t hurt this bad,” I gasp. I legit wanna cry.
LC leans forward and smooches my cheek. “You would’ve chickened out if I told you the truth.” A second later, I hear the snap of a picture.
“You are so badass! Look!” she says, showing me her phone.
I gawk at the pic of my newly pierced neck. It’s a whole vibe. Boring, plain Megan? She’s ghost. Gone. The best-friend gods did their thing when they schemed for me and LC to collide at Hyped Up’s pickup counter. Me thinking she swiped my secret-menu frap drink changed my life.
“Are you mad at me?” she asks.
I look at LC like she sprouted tentacles. “No! It’s gorgeous! I love you. You’re the freaking best for suggesting it.” I throw my arms around her.
She stiffens in my hug.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, pulling back.
Her features are pinched tight when I let her go.
“Nothing,” she says. But she still has the same worried . . . or sad . . . or sorry look.
“You sure?” I say. “Because even if you think you messed it up somehow, which it doesn’t look like you did, I can just take it out and we can do it over. No big deal.” She’s a perfectionist, so this is the only guess I have about what’s upset her.
She shakes her head. “It’s nothing. For real. I’m fucking up the mood. We still have more friendiversary shit to do tonight. You wanna call the rideshare so we can head to Nathan’s?”
She finally smiles, but it stretches too wide, and her light brown eyes are flat. They’re missing her spark—it’s like staring into the empty eyes of a doll.
Two
As LC and I wait outside for the car, her funk seems to evaporate as fast as it arrived. She goofs around, practicing her twerk skills and knocking her hip into mine, trying to coax me to do the same. Despite my relief that her playful side is back, I snort and swat her away. Me and dancing (of any kind) don’t go together. I’m like the one Black girl cursed with zero rhythm.
LC, true to form, doesn’t give up so easily. She’s switched from knocking our hips together to full-on shenanigans of an old-school butt bump. I relent a smidgen and meet her next bump midair. Giggling, I think about how we first met. After the frap mix-up, LC asked if I wanted to hang for a bit. I said yes, albeit hella awkwardly, and then we ended up spending the whole day lounging in a pair of beanbag chairs, vibing to the indie rap playing through the coffee shop’s speakers, sharing our own favorite songs we pulled up on our phones, scoping the cute guys who passed by the shop’s front window, and laughing at absurd TikToks and YouTube videos. We had so much fun, it felt like the besties version of a meet-cute. I asked if she wanted to continue hanging at my house, and our extended chill session turned into a whole girls’ night. She didn’t leave my house until like two a.m. From there, we were a done deal.
I keep up the silly booty bumps until our car pulls up to the curb. Already in party mode, LC threads our hands together with a loud whoop and starts dragging me toward the Kia Soul before it even stops. The party is only a mile away, but it’s too chilly to walk. A jacket would destroy the vibe of my off-the-shoulder plum sweater and ripped jeans.
“Megan?” the driver says as I duck into the cramped back seat.
“Yup, that’s me,” I confirm. LC settles in beside me while I tie my hair up into a high, stylishly messy knot, which I wouldn’t have dared to do until I left my house. I peep the driver checking out LC in the rearview mirror. No wonder—she’s hot as hell in the ripped black jeans and fitted gray sweater.
“So, yummy Nathan Ross?” she says, slinging her arm around my shoulder. “It’s our mission tonight to hook you up with his fine ass.”
I smirk, trying to downplay my major thirst. Nathan is beyond fine. We met him at the Music Midtown Festival in Piedmont Park last weekend, and me and him have been texting a little since then. He and LC have been texting too.
“You should go for him,” I say. Tall, athletic guys with dark hair and brown eyes are her thing. They’re my thing too, but friends don’t swipe each other’s prospects. It’s an unbreachable tenet of Girl Code.
She shakes her head. “You met him first,” she says, sticking to another tenet. “I’m stepping aside. Shoot your shot.” She squeezes my shoulder. “Besides, I’ve had plenty of boyfriends before. You, however—”
I clamp my hand over her mouth. “We’re not mentioning that.”
She lets out a muffled laugh, then finishes her statement from behind my hand-muzzle. “You’veneverhadoneboyfriend.”
I flop back against the seat. “I need to change that.”
She pats my hand supportively. “We are changing it. Tonight. My girl will get what my girl wants. I’ll see to it.” LC’s promise almost makes me feel sorry for Nathan. When she sets her mind to something, she pursues it with a ruthless determination. Like the Music Midtown All-Access passes she won us for my birthday weekend. She dialed the radio station legit a hundred times for five days in a row during the contest so we could see Noize Crew, my favorite girl indie-rap group.
“That’s getting annoying,” LC snaps at our driver. I look and see he’s staring at her in the rearview mirror again, real creep-like.
Caught, he turns back to the road. But as he drives the hilly curves, his eyes keep straying to the mirror. He’s young, white, with blond hair and a frat-boy style (khaki shorts, polo shirt, and denim baseball cap turned backward). Between his clothes and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket bobblehead stuck to his dashboard, I’d bet money that he’s a college student. Tech is a good fifty-minute drive south, but some students live around here in the Graysonville suburbs instead of in the dorms in downtown Atlanta.
“Are you famous?” he finally blurts.
LC frowns. “No.”
“Are you sure? You look really familiar. I swear I’ve seen you on TV or something. Are you an actress? This will be my first time driving a celebrity around!”
I laugh. Of course LC has a swagger that makes her seem like a celebrity. I nudge her. “Pretend you are,” I whisper.
She shifts in her seat, uncomfortable, instead of playing along. “You haven’t seen me on TV,” she responds tightly to the driver. “I’m not an actress.”
The guy snaps his fingers. “You’re a YouTuber. I . . . uh . . . can’t remember what your channel is about. But I watch a lot of comedy skits, ghost investigations, and unsolved missing persons cases, so it’s got to be one of those three. Which one?”
LC hastily unbuckles her seat belt as we pull up to Nathan’s address, a two-story brick house on a hill, and thrusts open the door on her side.
“Wait! Can you at least take a selfie with me if you won’t say?” the driver continues.
“Leave me alone, asshole,” LC snaps.
She hops out of the car and slams the door.
I stare after her.
“Your friend’s a jerk,” the driver grumbles.
“She’s not a YouTuber,” I tell him genially. “She’s . . . I don’t know why she reacted that way. I’m sorry she yelled at you.” I climb out of the car, hoping her blowup doesn’t affect my passenger rating.
“That was kind of random,” I say to her on the sidewalk. “Why’d you get so mad? Are you good?”
“I know where I’ve seen you!” the driver shouts out his window. “You were in the news.”
LC ignores him and walks brusquely up to the house.
“You must have a doppelgänger,” I joke to lighten the mood as I keep pace with her.
“Apparently.” She continues to hold herself stiffly.
If the guy just had her mixed up with somebody else, she shouldn’t be so heated. But this isn’t the first time LC has behaved strangely. Like, she once told me that her arm was badly burned in a fire, but when I asked why she doesn’t have a scar, she became all guarded and moody and snipped at me to stop with the interrogation. Maybe she was on the news due to the fire, which would have been traumatic, and that’s why she got so upset with the driver. Instead of prying by asking if that’s what’s wrong and further irking her—or worse, triggering her—I drop the subject.
I loop my arm through hers and flash her the sort of confident grin she’d toss me. “The party isn’t out here in the front yard. Let’s get inside and find some drinks and cute boys.”
“You mean cute boys like Nathan Ross?” she says, visibly relaxing.
We walk the rest of the way to the door arm in arm. When we reach it, LC doesn’t bother to knock or ring the doorbell. She turns the knob and strolls right inside.
We’re greeted by the sounds of thumping trap music and loud voices. The narrow entry hall opens up to a huge living room, where the furniture has been cleared away to create a dance floor. LC drops my arm and grabs my hand, squeezing us through the bodies crowding the room. None of the kids resemble the crowd I hang out with at school. The kids here are all more like LC. The kind you’d meet in front of an indie-rap or rock artist’s festival set, like how we met Nathan. I don’t know anyone here, besides LC and Nathan, but they feel like my people. Like a fun crew I could genuinely click with.
“Where are we headed?” I shout at LC as we pass the DJ booth, where a girl with rainbow braids and sparkly pink Converses mixes tracks. ...
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