“What are you smirking at?” she demands.
I wipe the illegal and unplanned smile off my face. “Nothing. Just…I knew your quiet and polite routine couldn’t last.”
She stops in her tracks, planting her （sensible, walking-boot-shod） feet in the earth and propping her fists on her hips. Her cast peeks out of one sleeve, poking me with the guilt stick. “What is that supposed to mean?”
I shrug, because staying casual when she’s pissed always annoys her more. “What’s with the shy and retiring bit you’re doing in front of everyone else? Are you biding your time? Warming up your audience before you tie them in knots? What’s the problem?”
“I told Allen to shut up,” she counters with a scowl.
“I thought you were shockingly polite to Allen.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, for you. It was basically a gentle scolding. I hope you’re not wasting all your energy on me, Celine. I need to see you scalp at least one other person while we’re here.”
“Funny,” she bites back. “I thought you liked it when I kept my mouth shut.”
All my amusement from making fun of her drains away like water down the plughole. She’s said something like that to me before. Maybe she thinks I don’t remember. Maybe she doesn’t remember, and I’m the only one who’s replayed that day in the cafeteria over and over in my head a thousand times.
Probably not, though.
When Celine was a kid, her dad went missing for a few days and she decided he’d been abducted by aliens. When he came back, announced that his mistress had given birth to twins, and divorced Neneh to go be with his new family, Celine concluded it was due to alien mind control. She had willful delusions and I had obsessive compulsions—that’s probably how we became best friends. Who was I to judge?
But as we got older, I learned to fold myself up nice and neat so no one would notice I was different. Celine never did. She talked about aliens to anyone who’d listen. Especially when she was nervous.
“I thought you liked it when I kept my mouth shut.”
The quiet rush of rain against leaves fills the space between us like a swollen balloon. Her jaw is tight; I wish it wasn’t. My chest is tight, but there’s not much I can do about that. Just ignore it. Don’t say anything. There’s no point—
Except I’ve always struggled to let thoughts and feelings go. They gnaw at me until I give in. “I told you I was sorry.”
She snorts, and just like that, I know there’s nothing coincidental about this conversation. Celine hasn’t forgotten why she hates me.
Maybe she sits beside me in Philosophy remembering things the same way I do.
“It’s not my fault, you know,” I blurt out, “that we got separated. Back then.”
Her expression is incredulous. “Our classes, you mean?”
I shrug, already uncomfortable, wondering why I’m digging deeper instead of shutting this conversation down—
“Of course that wasn’t your fault, Bradley,” she says sharply. “Everyone’s schedule changes eventually.” Her jaw shifts as she bites some part of herself I can’t see—her tongue? The inside of her cheek? She’s talking again. “The problem was, you made it worse.”
I have to put plasters over all my scabs because if I can see them, I’ll pick them until they bleed. Maybe things would be easier if I could put a nice, beige tarp entirely over Celine, but I can’t, so I ask, “How?”
“You had to go and…” She waves a hand. Her nails are glossy and black. “Make new friends. And join the football team, and—”
Righteous outrage roars to life in my chest. It turns out that after almost four years of quiet seething, I am so ready for this argument. “Because that was such a crime,” I bite out. “Wanting to do new things without you. I was the bad guy for joining a new club and quitting Latin? Okay, Celine.”
She presses her raindrop-studded eyelashes together, breathes deep, and says the last thing I expect. “Well, no. Obviously not. You were free to do whatever you wanted, and it was…it was unfair of me to question that.”
Um. Did those words just pass through Know-It-All Celine’s gritted teeth? I think I might be in shock. Thrown off course, I search for something to say and blurt, “My therapist said you were controlling.”
Amazing stuff, Bradley. Team building to the highest power.
She winces and shoves her hands in her pockets. “Ah.”
I’m clearly going through something because I feel bad. Maybe all this fresh air is poisoning my brain. I shift awkwardly and look around, like I’ll find a guidebook carved into a nearby tree trunk. You know: So Your Old Best Friend Admits She Was Wrong and Hating Her Is Getting Exhausting. Something like that. But before I can find any handy-dandy instructions, Celine speaks again.
“You were…” She swallows hard, but her jaw is harder. “You were embarrassed of me. That was the problem. That’s what makes you the bad guy.”
Aaaand my stomach is on the floor again. “That’s not true.”
“You told me not to—”
“I apologized,” I interrupt, because I know what I said, and I don’t want to hear it again. “I told you I was sorry. I told you straight away.”
“As if I was going to believe a word out of your mouth after that.”
I know what that was. I can see it now: me dragging Celine over to the lunch table with all my new friends. The more she talked, the quieter they got, and the quieter they got, the more she talked. Nervous. A bit too loud. Repeating herself. About aliens, obviously—and how smartphones listen to everything you say and target political advertisements accordingly, advertisements designed to radicalize you into proudly destructive apathy or conservative extremism, and a load of other stuff pretty much no other fourteen-year-old was going to appreciate, and I wanted this to work, I wanted everything to work, so I told her after lunch that maybe the next day she should just—
Keep that stuff to herself.
And she said, “But why?” And I didn’t want to say, “Because I need them to like you,” so instead I said,
“Come on, Cel. It’s just…a bit…weird.” I knew as soon as I said it that I’d made a mistake. Sorry, sorry, sorry—
Too late.
“I am weird, Bradley, and I don’t care. Sorry I’m not pathetic enough to fake my entire personality. Some of us actually have integrity.”
You know how things hurt the most when you’re scared they might be true? “I have integrity!”
“Sure you do.”
“Well, sorry people like me but not you, Celine.”
“One day they’ll all find out how weird you really are, Brad. You know that, right?”
Yeah. I knew. Just like I knew this whole fight was a mistake.
“Will your new friends want you then?” she’d snarled.
“Of course they will!”
Except it stung because maybe they wouldn’t.
Things went downhill after that. And by downhill, I mean Celine called me a knock-off Ken doll with an inferiority complex, so I told her aliens weren’t real and her dad was just a dick.