CHAPTER ONE
“It’s a simple, undeniable truth,” Jocelyn said matter-of-factly, “if you watch dubbed anime instead of subbed anime, you are garbage.”
She flicked her hot-pink hair as she leaned over the 3D printer, which was about two-thirds of the way through making the barrel of her buster rifle.
“Bullshit,” D’Anthony fired back from the beanbag he was lounging in. He licked his lips and pushed his glasses back into place without looking up from his Game Boy Color, the one he’d borrowed (or perhaps stolen) from one of his older brothers. He’d been on this vintage game kick for the past few months; he was working his way through Pokémon Yellow now. “Watching subbed anime doesn’t make you more sophisticated, it just makes you more pretentious.”
I glanced at my phone for about the eighth time since Jocelyn and D’Anthony had started their argument five minutes ago. Those two were always bickering about something; their tastes were what you could call diametrically opposed, especially when it came to anime. Ordinarily it was my job to end the debate by choosing a side, but right now I was too preoccupied to keep up.
Still no messages.
I set my phone down on the table in front of me, screen down, and started thumbing through my worn copy of Trigun, a space Western about a legendary peace-loving sharpshooter set in a semi-dystopian future. It was one of my favorite manga, but right now I couldn’t even concentrate enough to read the words.
From 1:15 in the afternoon until 2:10, the third-floor tech lab belonged to G.A.N.U.—Geeks and Nerds United, Hilltop High School’s one and only nerd culture club. Jocelyn, D’Anthony, and I were its founding members. The room was a makerspace, the walls lined with workbenches, the interior dotted with hexagonal workstations and multicolored stools, chairs, and beanbags. There were a pair of 3D printing machines in the back, where Jocelyn had set up shop. The wall next to the door was a projection dry-erase board.
The text I was waiting for should have come by now, and I was only growing more anxious by the minute. I closed my book and checked my phone again.
“Hey, Cam, are you alright?” asked Jocelyn. “You look like you need to take a shit.”
The pink hair was new for her. Up until last week it had been cotton candy blue. Her look lately was what she called “Kawaii Wednesday Addams”—today she wore black overall shorts and a floral print high-collared shirt. She was hardly five feet tall, but her chunky black boots gave her an extra four inches of height, not that she needed it. She had one of those personalities where she just seemed taller, somehow.
“You do seem a little keyed up,” D’Anthony added, again, without looking up from his Game Boy. He was a firm believer in the fact that high school was not a fashion show and that he wasn’t here to impress anyone, and so he usually opted for comfort, like rugby shirts and old skate shoes. Although, he always had a pick with him to maintain his immaculate afro.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I hated lying to my friends, but this wasn’t something they’d understand.
The PA system crackled, and Principal Standish’s nasally voice rattled through the speakers. “Good afternoon, Hilltop Hawks!” he proclaimed. “I want to wish everyone a safe and happy Friday. Get out there and enjoy this beautiful weather before the snow hits. And now, just a quick message from our student council president, Karla Ortega.”
I released my viselike grip on my phone. That explained that, at least.
“Hey, everyone,” Karla said in her usual chipper voice, “just a few quick reminders. Yearbook Committee starts at the end of the month. Seniors, it’s time to start thinking about your senior pictures.” She paused between sentences, and you could feel the smile she punctuated them with. “Also, if you’ve got an idea for a superlative, be ready to turn it in to any member of the committee or student council. We love to hear from you.” Another smile. “Lastly, this year’s winter production is Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice. If you’d like to be considered for a role, auditions begin Monday after school in the auditorium and will be held until that Friday. Thanks, guys, and have a great weekend!”
“Ugh. Karla,” Jocelyn muttered. “Could she be any more fake? And did you guys see what she was wearing today? Those tights, and that skirt? She’s definitely appealing to a very specific demographic ever since she won the election.”
“What, the every-allosexual-person-ever demographic?” D’Anthony laughed. “Yeah, of course I saw her. She’s living, breathing fan-service, and that’s why she won the election. Hell, I voted for her and I don’t even like her. I may not care for sex, but I do understand sex appeal. Sometimes. I think.”
“Guys, can we not?” I groaned. “Gross.”
“Right, I forgot, Cam hates Karla,” Jocelyn said teasingly.
“Remind me again what you have against art?” D’Anthony asked with a smirk.
If there was one thing those two could agree on, it was teasing me about Karla. They liked to do this bit anytime she came up in conversation or in real life, and seeing as she was Hilltop High School’s premier golden girl, she came up a lot. “I don’t hate her,” I explained for about the thousandth time. “I just don’t see the hype. Yeah, sure, she’s good-looking—”
“Understatement,” Jocelyn interjected.
“But, people act like she walks on water when she totally doesn’t. Not to mention, she’s super conceited. Every year she gets more and more selective about who she deigns to speak to.”
“Maybe because everybody she speaks to is trying to jump her sexy bones,” Jocelyn pointed out.
I scoffed, but before I could respond the door burst open, and Mackenzie Briggs sauntered in like a cowboy stepping into a saloon. “Sorry I’m late,” she announced in a tone that made it clear she was not at all sorry. She dumped her backpack on the ground, slumped into a chair at the workstation across from mine, and kicked her feet up. “What’s up, dork?”
That part was directed specifically at me.
Mackenzie had transferred to Hilltop High from some art magnet in Minneapolis, which, if you asked me, was an egregious error on the part of her parents, her advisers, and whoever else was involved in making that decision.
“Hello, Mackenzie,” I said coolly. “I see you got dressed in the dark again.”
It could very well have been true, that or she just threw on the first thing she yanked out of her closet. Today she had on high-top red Converse, green camo pants, a black hoodie, and a weathered jean jacket. She looked like a homeless hipster.
She sat up, curling her legs underneath her, and sniffed the air. “Hey, Cameron, did you know you’re supposed to wear your deodorant, not eat it? It works better that way. Although, with all the shit you talk I guess you could do both.”
I closed my book and set it down.
Here’s the thing. I did not like Mackenzie. I didn’t like her big curly hair or her pointy nose or the way the edges of her lips were always curled just enough that she looked like she was smiling at some secret joke and you were the punch line. I didn’t like the languid, I’m-so-over-it way she walked, like she was so much cooler than everyone else, and even though she was sort of G.A.N.U.’s fourth ranger, floating in and out of our meetups whenever she felt like it, she made no secret of the fact that she didn’t like me, either.
“Wait a second,” I said. “You know what deodorant is? That’s strange—do you put yours on before or after bathing in the blood of innocent virgins?”
“If I bathed in the blood of virgins, I would have killed you for yours a long time ago.”
“Goddamn,” Jocelyn said under her breath.
“Flawless victory,” D’Anthony added.
My phone finally buzzed. I snatched it off the table faster than I should have.
Meet at our spot? XOXO
Fucking finally.
I was up before I’d finished reading the text. “We’re still on for movie night tonight, aren’t we?” I asked as I made for the door.
“I’m busy tonight,” Mackenzie said.
“No one cares. You never show up anyway.”
“Where are you going?” Jocelyn asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“I, um, gotta take a shit.”
“Gross,” Mackenzie said, but I hardly heard her, because I was already halfway out the door.
The only two things you needed to know about Hilltop High School were:
- The school was not, as its name implied, on a hill. If anything it was a knoll, and barely that.
- From above (or on any campus map) the school, with its rectangular main building that connected to a pair of smaller, circular buildings, looked like a giant penis. It was common to hear someone say they had to get to their class in the shaft, or to meet up on the third floor of the southeast testicle—much to the consternation of our principal and the handful of teachers who didn’t have a sense of humor.
The tech lab was near the base of the shaft, south of the gymnasium. I headed south, through the enclosed breezeway that connected the dick and the balls, then hit the stairwell and descended to the basement level, where the lights were dim and the air was always just a little dank, and it usually smelled like cheese and old socks. I made my way deeper into the bowels of the building. That’s where the old library was. It hadn’t seen much use since the new media center had been built; the stacks were covered in dust and the old reference books on them were ratty and moth-ridden. But I couldn’t wait to get there. Each step I took sent a surge of electricity coursing through me, and I was drawn like a magnet toward my destination, and who was meeting me there.
I meant what I’d said about Karla. Thing is, Karla’s crowd and my crowd didn’t exactly mix. Her friends were the overachievers. Student government types, theater snobs, the kids who thought they were better than everyone else because they could quote Shakespeare and had perfect 4.0 GPAs and took AP courses. It was a very exclusive club, almost like a cult, or a hive mind, where who your friends were, who you dated, and who you were seen with were all dictated by the group. Karla wasn’t mean, per se, not like some of the others, but if you weren’t part of the group she was happy to pretend you didn’t exist.
Which was why I still had no idea why we had been hooking up since this summer.
CHAPTER TWO
A little bit about Karla.
When she was six years old she’d been voted cutest toddler at the Hennepin County Fair. At fourteen she’d been crowned Junior Ms. Robbinsdale at Whiz Bang Days. She was a varsity cheerleader, she ran cross-country track, and had set a state record in the pole vault last year. She had never had a bad hair day (it was a long-standing rumor that she woke up at three in the morning each and every day just to style it). It had once been rumored that a kiss from Karla was enough to induce a seizure, and that this was allegedly what had sent Scott Foreman, the guy she’d been dating up until the second week of freshman year, to the hospital after he’d had a grand mal seizure in the front foyer.
These were all things I’d heard about her before I’d ever even seen her.
I first met Karla in the ninth grade, when by sheer coincidence Ms. Lola assigned me to sit behind her in English class. After about ten minutes of staring at the back of her head she had suddenly turned around, flashed one of her ultrabright you’re-going-to-remember-this-for-the-rest-of-your-life smiles, and said, “Hi, I’m Karla, what’s your name?”
“Cameron,” I’d said, completely and truly starstruck.
“Nice to meet you, Cameron.”
Those eleven words were the first and only words Karla said to me that year. I still couldn’t recall much else about that day, and she, being Karla Ortega, probably forgot about the whole exchange the second class let out. But I never did.
She was what one might call “sun-kissed.” Like, if Kryptonians were real, and they drew their power and vitality from the sun, they would probably look like she did. She just had this glow, this indiscernible something that drew people to her. She was hot, as D’Anthony would and frequently did say, but there was a warmth to her, too. She really was the star around which the entire student body orbited, and she was a hypervelocity star, always moving faster than anyone else around her. Her campaign blitzkrieg had earned her the position of senior class president in what had to have been the most lopsided election in the history of democracy, and it was common now to see her flitting through the halls, smiling and waving at people as she blew past. It was a fitting role, since like most politicians she was ridiculously charismatic. When she spoke to you, she made you feel like you were the center of the universe, but just like she could crank the charm up to eleven, she could switch it off just as quickly, leaving you to fade back into obscurity. Many a poor soul had lost their way chasing her glow, but I liked to think I wasn’t that stupid. If she was the star we all orbited, I might as well have been Pluto. A happy, contented Pluto who didn’t mind his cold, lonely corner of the solar system.
The library was tucked away so that you could only get to it if you were looking for it, like a cursed temple, and making a trip to the library was like visiting a tomb, or some other ancient location that could be a set piece in an Indiana Jones movie. Cameron Carson and the Cave of Relics, a B movie made on a shoestring budget, premiering on the SYFY channel right after the latest Sharknado sequel. And just like a cursed temple or a tomb, very few people wanted to be there, which made it the perfect place to be when you didn’t want to be seen.
Karla was already waiting for me next to a stack of outdated textbooks and dusty encyclopedias, casually flipping through a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and looking for all the world like the galaxy’s sexiest librarian in her gray pencil skirt and dark nylons. That had become something of a uniform for her these days, now that she was president, instead of her usual rotation of assorted leggings and hoodie combo (on cheer practice days), her oversize sweaters and jeans (my personal favorite), or the time-tested flannel. Not that I paid attention to those sorts of things. At least, I hadn’t used to. This past summer had changed all that.
I understood now what Jocelyn and D’Anthony had been talking about.
I still couldn’t figure out why we did this, why it had happened that first time. Maybe she’d been bored. Maybe she lost a bet. Whatever the reason was, it didn’t matter.
She marked her place and closed the book when she saw me, and wordlessly crashed into me like a rogue wave, like a force of nature, one who smelled like Victoria’s most secret secret and tasted like cotton candy lip gloss. I may not have understood the why, but I very clearly understood that we weren’t here to talk, we weren’t here as friends, and we definitely weren’t here for questions. To anyone else at this school, Karla and I were oil and water—we didn’t mix. My friends couldn’t stand her crowd, and her crowd pretended my friends and I didn’t exist—but right here, right now, none of that mattered. This time was ours and ours alone, and there was no thought, only the heat of her breath and the taste of her tongue dancing with mine. The pinprick pressure of her fingers kneading my shoulder blades. The weight of her body as she rolled and rocked against me. Buttons coming undone, clasps unhooking, we found each other beneath our clothes. She trailed her fingers down my chest, and I felt the smile on her lips when I shuddered. My right hand slid beneath her bra and cupped the warm mound of her breast, and she sucked in a sharp breath and sighed with her lips at my ear.
“Wait.”
I jerked both hands away, holding them up, palms out. “Sorry! Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” she breathed. Her face was flushed, and the look in her eyes made me dizzy. She took a few more deep breaths and licked her lips. “I just...” She sighed and ran her hands through her messy hair. “I think it’s time.”
I shook my head. “Time for what?”
She smiled and bit her lip. “You know what.”
I did. In the animal part of my brain. The logical part was having trouble accepting it.
“Wait, you are a virgin, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I mean, no,” I blurted, too quickly. “I mean, yeah, totally a virgin. Are you a virgin?”
She laughed. “Does that surprise you? I think I might be offended.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just...” I stopped short of telling her how often her ex bragged about all the ridiculous sex they had when they were together. I should’ve known it was bullshit—a lot of what he described sounded like a play-by-play of some porno, and some of it wasn’t even physically possible. I guess I just assumed they’d done it at some point along the way.
Here’s the thing.
My mom was an RN, and a firm believer in health awareness, whether it was mental, physical, or sexual health. Especially sexual health. I’ve met too many grown folks too timid to say the word penis or vagina, she liked to remind my older sister and me. “Too many pregnant young women who didn’t think they could get pregnant if they did it standing up, or on a full moon, or some other nonsense. That kind of ignorance is dangerous, and I won’t abide by it in my home.” Which was why she’d given me my first birds and bees talk when I was twelve—complete with photos and diagrams—and a refresher course just before I started high school. Those lessons held the top number one and two spots on my all-time most cringeworthy experiences list. But I knew how sex worked, probably better than a lot of people. How to properly put on a condom, the anatomy of a vagina, consent... Mom was very thorough. And my family wasn’t religious, so I didn’t have any moral compunctions about having sex before marriage. I just never in a million years would have thought that my first time would be with Karla of all people. That had to be the dream of at least 80 percent of the population at this school, and yet...
“Can I get back to you on that?” I asked.
A look of surprise flashed across her face, but she smoothed it over with a grin. “I’m not used to being told no. Not that I want to pressure you, or anything. I just figured...”
“Figured what?” That I’d jump on this one-in-a-million chance like some sort of horny kangaroo? “I mean, what are we doing? This whole thing? Where is this going?”
“Come on, Cameron,” she said quietly. “You know how it is. You know how this works.”
Yeah. I did. There were rules, after all. And we were breaking them.
We stood there, at the impasse, until her phone went off, conveniently, the chorus of Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown” reverberating through the tomb-like silence that had enveloped us.
“Shit! Thought I put that on vibrate.” She snatched her purse off the ground and rummaged through it until she found and silenced her phone. She stared at the screen, brows puckered in a cute little frown.
“Everything okay?” I asked carefully, cautiously, as if my words might ruin the fragile magic we’d woven here. But that
spell had already been broken.
“I have to go—we have a pre-production meeting tonight.”
I forgot Karla was involved with the play. She was the assistant director, “putting out the fires Mrs. Vernon doesn’t have time to address,” as she put it. She shook her forty-dollar lip gloss from her purse. I only knew it cost forty dollars because Jocelyn had gone on a ten-minute rant about it. “That shit’s Yves Saint Laurent! Who the fuck needs Yves Saint Laurent lip gloss? And it’s nude! Gratuitous, is what that is.” I still didn’t quite grasp the significance of any of that, but I knew enough to know that Karla was low-key extra.
She used the mirror on her phone to apply the gloss, rearrange her hair, and button up her blouse. Somehow, in seconds she’d done away with the hookup hair and was back to the prim and proper librarian aesthetic. “Look,” she said as she slung her purse over her shoulder. “I’ll... We’ll... I’ll see you.” She paused just long enough to smooth out her skirt one last time, and then she was gone.
“No, you won’t,” I said to no one in particular. She never saw me. Not out there.
“These violent delights have violent ends.” Shakespeare wrote that. Romeo and Juliet. Not a huge fan. I only knew that because we’d spent an entire semester of English lit analyzing that stupid play. He had a point, though.
Whatever this thing was between Karla and me, it was weird. And it was wrong, probably, on at least three different levels. I shouldn’t have gone along with it, but it was Karla Ortega, and no sane person would turn down something like this. Someone like her. And she knew it.
At first the secrecy of it had been part of the rush, but that had ended right around the first time we’d crossed paths in the hallway, her surrounded by the entire Caravan, me with the G.A.N.U. crew, and she’d straight up blown right past me without so much as a sidelong glance my way. After that it just felt dirty. What we did was a secret, true enough, but it was one she was obviously ashamed of, and if I was honest, I was, too, just a little.
Stray far from timid, only make moves when your heart’s in it.
That was the Notorious B.I.G. He had a point, too.
I needed to end this. I wasn’t sure my heart was in it, and I was definitely sure Karla’s wasn’t, ...
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