Daniel leans out the door, looking left and right. “Nope,” he says succinctly.
Ivy narrows her eyes. “Stop trying to change the subject and explain yourself.”
“I’m sure this is a fascinating story,” Daniel says, picking up his lacrosse bag. “But I don’t need to hear it. Trevor and I are going to Olive Garden.”
“Of course you are,” Ivy sighs, but not like she’s actually mad about it.
He lifts his eyebrows. “You coming home later, or what?”
“I…yeah,” Ivy says, getting slowly to her feet. “I’ll explain everything then.”
“Trevor has his mom’s car, so you can take ours,” Daniel says. His expression gets even more smug as he glances between us. “If Cal was your ride, I’m guessing you’re gonna need it.” He backs out of the doorway, and I give him the finger in my head.
“Okay,” Ivy says. It’s bad news for me that she’s letting him go like that, because it means all the laser-like attention that was focused on Daniel a second ago has shifted firmly to me. “Start talking,” she says, folding her arms across her chest. Then, before I can say a word, her eyes go wide and almost sympathetic. “Oh my God. Were you in love with me?”
“No! Come on, Ivy. Just because you and Mateo picked up right where you left off, and Charlie’s developed some kind of weird fixation, doesn’t mean the whole world is in love with you.” I say it with the force of complete certainty, and it’s not until the words are out of my mouth that I realize I just trashed the only excuse she might have been willing to accept.
She scowls. “Then why?”
It’s not like I went to her house with the intention of taking anything. I wanted to hang out, because we hadn’t done that in a while, even though we had plenty of free time. I didn’t text, because she’d started taking hours to return my texts, and I didn’t feel like waiting for company. When I entered the porch, I saw the Sugar Babies straightaway, but I didn’t look at them until my knock on the door went unanswered. Then I picked up the note, unfolded it, and read Mateo’s words.
I didn’t know, then, that the two of them had kissed. Ivy didn’t tell me until after she thought he’d ghosted her. But I realized in a flash why I’d started feeling like the odd man out.
“Because I didn’t want things to change,” I tell Ivy now.
“You didn’t want things to change,” she echoes.
“Yeah. For two years, you guys were my best friends. And then suddenly, you’re a couple? You’d already started to ignore me. You did,” I emphasize when she starts to protest. “You’d been leaving me out of stuff for weeks. And we were about to start high school, and I thought…I thought if you guys were going out, I’d be completely on my own. Or you’d have a bad breakup and want me to take sides. Either way, everything was going to change. And I liked things the way they were.”
The irony, of course, is that the three of us fell apart anyway. If I hadn’t been a scared, stupid thirteen-year-old, I might have seen that coming. It was naive to think that ripping up a note, and tossing a gift, would end the attraction between Ivy and Mateo. They were still magnets vibrating in each other’s presence, but—I flipped them. All the things that used to draw them together started pushing them apart, until they were so far away from one another that I was left standing alone in the middle.
Ivy’s face droops, her lips turning downward. “I liked him,” she says quietly, tugging at the hem of Daniel’s sweatshirt. “I liked him so, so much.”
“I know.” I did, but I also didn’t. I didn’t understand, back then, what that kind of liking felt like. My middle school crushes were infrequent and unreciprocated. There hadn’t been a Noemi, and there definitely hadn’t been a Lara. I thought what I’d done was a ripple on a pond, something that would be barely noticed and easily forgotten.
An apology is on my lips, but then Ivy’s brows shoot up and her hands fly to her cheeks. “That is—that’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard!” she says.
And with that, my temper spikes. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, a refusal to accept that what I did was so bad after all, but—considering the day we’ve had, you’d think she might realize the irony of that statement. “Oh, really?” I ask. “The most selfish? The absolute most? Sorry, have you already forgotten the car ride over here? Do I need to remind you that you shut down Spare Me with a bottle of baby oil?”