How It Ends (3 page)

Courtney.

I panicked and hunted for an escape route. I didn't want to miss Annie, but I couldn't be caught standing there, all alone.

I let my hair hang down over my face and peeked out from behind my bangs. They didn't see me yet. I slipped away from the cafeteria doors and headed down the arts hallway, fear coiling in my belly. I was going to miss meeting Annie, I just knew it. Frustrated tears prickled my eyes, and I put my head down to hide them.

I made a beeline for the safety of the stairwell and crashed headlong into someone racing toward the cafeteria.

“Sorry!” Annie yelped before recognizing me. “Jessie? What's wrong?”

“N-nothing,” I forced out, blinking hard. “Just . . . the first day of school sucks.”

“You read my mind.” She laughed, looping her arm through mine and pulling me toward the cafeteria. “Sorry I was so late. I got caught up talking to my art teacher.” She held up her phone. “I'd have texted you, but I forgot to ask for your digits.”

I rattled off my cell number, my heart thumping. “I should get yours, too,” I said, fumbling with my bag.

“No need. Texting you right. . . . now.”

I felt my whole body relax. Who was this girl? I'd never felt so immediately comfortable around anyone in my life. “C'mon,” I said, “I'll show you where to buy the worst food you've ever tasted.”

We waded into the lineup, and I watched in wonder as Annie shamelessly heaped fries, chocolate milk, and two enormous cookies onto her tray. By the time we strolled out to look for a table, I felt giddy, my earlier panic forgotten. For the first time ever, I walked through the cafeteria with my head held high, feeling like a new person with Annie by my side.

“Who do you usually sit with?” she asked innocently, peering around at the crowded tables.

My heart lurched, and I snuck a glance at my fellow outcasts at the back table. Charlie and Kevin were sitting with a girl I didn't recognize. They were all hunched over their laptops, most likely playing an online game over the school's WiFi.

I couldn't take Annie over there. She thought I was cooler than that. “I don't see the people I sat with last year,” I lied, angling my body away from them and dropping my tray onto the nearest empty table. “Let's sit here.”

“Okay . . .” Annie said, looking puzzled. “But . . . isn't that guy over there waving at you?”

I looked up to find Charlie flailing his arms like he was about to take flight.
Oh, good Lord.
I waved back and smiled shyly at Annie. “He's just someone I know from class.”

“Should we go sit with them?”

“Maybe another time,” I said, not wanting to share her.

“I think he likes you,” Annie declared, sitting at the table and popping a fry in her mouth.

“You're insane.”

“What? He looks totally bummed we didn't go over.”

I looked back at Charlie. He definitely looked disappointed, and I could guess why.

“Trust me,” I told Annie. “I hung out with them for a while last year, and he never gave me a second glance. If he's disappointed, it's because he didn't get a chance to meet the hot new redhead at school.”

Holy shit.

“Are you kidding me?” I whirl around and glare at Jessie. “You're crazy, you know that? Certifiable.”

“You hate it,” Jess says, like a complete idiot.

“I
love
it! I cannot believe
this
is the room you were afraid to show me. I'm so stinking jealous that if I didn't like you so much, I'd hate you.”

Jess's face melts into a relieved smile. She's such a freak. I swear to God, she worries about the most random shit. She obsessed all the way home from school, telling me over and over that she hasn't redone her room since she was a kid, and that she's never put much thought into it. I was expecting
Dora the Explorer
and Barbies, the way she was freaking out.

I drop my backpack by the door and rush into the room. “Would you look at all this
space?
” I say, twirling around with arms spread wide. “I could do cartwheels in here.”

Jessie inches into the room and I grab her by the hands, twirling with her until we both fall, dizzy and laughing, onto carpet so thick I feel like it's hugging me.

“It's like nerdvana in here,” I tell her, surveying the room.

Her face falls. “That's me.” She sighs. “Nerd extraordinaire.”

“Nerds are sexy,” I say, pulling on her ponytail before getting up to check out her books. No joke, Jess has an
entire wall
of bookshelves, filled with the most kick-ass collection of books I've ever seen. I run my fingers along the spines, feeling like I'm looking into her brain. There's something of everything in here, from Judy Blume to A. S. King, to Maya Angelou to Charles Bukowski. There must be thousands of dollars of books on these shelves. This isn't a bedroom—it's a library.

And there's more.

She has a fucking reading area. And I'm not just talking about a beanbag chair in the corner. This girl has a full-on leather armchair, with a wooden table and a fancy reading lamp, like something out of a magazine.

And her bed. My God.

When I was a kid, I remember clearly the bed I wanted more than life itself. It was pink and girly and had a canopy. I shit you not, it was the exact bed Jessie has in her room.

If you paid a Hollywood stylist to design the perfect room to suit Jess's personality, she couldn't have come up with anything more perfect.

“Your room is probably way cooler,” Jess says, picking at the carpet and eyeing me nervously.

“Are you crazy? My room is four blank walls and a bunch of unpacked boxes. I just never know what to
do
with my room, you know? I don't know how to make it mine, like you have.”

I wander over to the far wall, where Jess has posted a collection of quotes.

“Let me guess which is your favorite,” I say, running my fingers over the papers before stopping on one that makes me smile. “This one?”

It's “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

Jessie laughs and shakes her head. “That's a good one, but I love this one more.” She points to a quote from a
Calvin and Hobbes
comic strip: “Reality continues to ruin my life.”

I stop in front of a page marked
Alice in Wonderland
and feel the air rush out of my lungs. It reads, “I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

“That's a good one too.” She pulls the page off the wall and hands it to me. “For your room. It's time you started decorating it.”

I could kiss her.

Instead, I grab my sketchbook out of my bag and head for her bookshelf. “Let's find some new ones to add to the wall.”

We sprawl on the carpet, flipping through books and sharing the quotes we find. Jess scribbles her favorites into a journal she pulled off the bookshelf, and I copy mine into my sketchbook before adding drawings and embellishments.

I'm finishing my fifth or sixth sketch when I look up and realize that more than an hour has passed in silence. I sneak a look at Jess. She's sitting cross-legged with a book in her lap, chewing on a piece of hair that's come loose from her ponytail. I stop sketching quotes and start drawing her instead. There's something so intense about watching someone when they don't know anyone's looking. All the
stuff
they carry around with them falls away, and you can catch the quickest glimpse of who they really are, underneath everything.

I'm drawing Jessie's eyes and marveling at how the little line that's usually between them smooths out when she reads, and at that moment she looks up and catches me watching her.

“What?” she asks, swiping at her cheeks. “Do I have something on my face?”

I shake my head and stop sketching. The little line is back on her forehead. “I was drawing you,” I tell her, holding up the page so she can see.

“Oh my gosh,” Jessie breathes. “That's amazing.” She comes over and sits beside me. “I didn't know you could draw like that.”

I shrug. “Drawing is easy. It just takes practice.”

“Clearly you've never seen my impressive collection of stick figures.”

I look down at the drawing in my lap. I've messed up the eyes, I realize. And the shape of the face isn't quite right. I flip back to a book-quote page. I don't usually show my sketches to anyone, and I'm not sure what possessed me to share a half-finished one.

“Any new quotes?” I ask, gesturing at her notebook.

She picks it up and reads a few to me. She's come up with: “I am haunted by humans”(Markus Zusak), “Sometimes people just want to be happy, even if it's not real” (Veronica Roth), and “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them” (Lemony Snicket).

She looks over at my sketchbook, open to “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live,” and groans. “No Harry Potter.”

I blink at her in surprise and then remember the locker room. “Don't be stupid. You can't let a bunch of idiots turn you off of Harry Potter. You're a reader!” She looks like she's about to cry. “Besides,” I add, “you are
so
Hermione Granger.”

She laughs through her tears. “It's the hair, isn't it?”

“Kinda,” I admit. “But mostly 'cause you're bookish and smart.”

She points at my sketchbook. “What else have you got in there?”

I flip through the pages, stopping at a quote I memorized from
The Bell Jar.
“This one's my favorite: ‘I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.'”

“I've felt like that,” she whispers.

I nod, and flip through the other quotes I've sketched out. She stops me at “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”

“I love that,” she says, surprised. “I've never seen it before. Where'd you find it?”

“I actually don't know where it's from. My dad says it all the time, and it just popped into my head.” I pull the page out of my sketchbook and hand it to her. “From me. This'll be my contribution to your wall.”

“Our wall,” she corrects, taping the page to the empty space where the
Alice in Wonderland
quote used to be.

“Yes,” I agree, feeling at home for the first time since we moved out here.

Our wall.

Annie is the geekiest cool girl ever. She's like a rebellious supermodel who's secretly a complete nerd underneath.

I mean, really, how many girls with true popularity potential would opt to join the Avery Family Games Night willingly? I thought I was going to die on Monday when my mom told Annie all about our Friday night ritual of tacos and board games, but Annie practically begged for an invitation.

She's been over at my house nearly every day since school started, but never for one of our goofy family dinners. I was a complete basket case before she came over tonight, and my mother's antics certainly didn't help.

“Look what I found,” Mom singsonged about half an hour before Annie was due to arrive. She held up the most enormous sombrero I'd ever seen. It was green and yellow, with little white balls hanging off the rim. “Can you believe I found one for Annie?”

“Oh my God, Mom. Please, please, please put that away. Can we
not
do the sombreros tonight?” The thought of Annie wearing that straw monstrosity was more than I could bear.

“What in the world are you talking about, Jessica? Of course we're doing the sombreros. We do the sombreros every Friday. It's
tradition.
”

“A tradition I think we should most definitely keep in the family.
Exclusively
in the family.”

“You're being ridiculous,” my mom scolded, pulling the other three sombreros out of the pantry while I broke into a cold sweat. “Annie is excited about taco night. She's going to love this.”

My heart banged against the inside of my chest, and I debated telling my mom that she was coming dangerously close to giving me an anxiety attack. With my luck, though, she'd have an ambulance here in five minutes, and Annie would arrive to sombreros
and
paramedics.

“Mom, maybe we should set down some ground rules before tonight,” I said, trying not to sound shrill. “Let's not scare Annie away forever with our craziness, okay?”

“What's gotten into you? This is hardly the first time Annie has been over here. What are you so nervous about?”

I opened my mouth to explain, but words failed me. How do you tell your mother that she gets embarrassing when she hits the tequila on taco night? Or that cutthroat Monopoly might not be cute to an outsider?

Before I could translate my panicked thoughts into words, the doorbell rang and Avery Family Games Night began.

Of course, as usual, I'd worried far too much. Annie embraced my family's craziness like she was born into it. She wore her sombrero with pride and devoured a whopping seven tacos, beating my dad out for the title of biggest eater and forever earning his respect. She also convinced me that we should speak Spanish all throughout dinner, which proved hilarious given that our only exposure to the language had been
Dora the Explorer
episodes and Taco Bell commercials.

“Hola, soy Annie.”

“Un taco, por favor.”

“Cuidado, amigo.”

“Vamanos!”

Later on, while my dad was destroying us all in Monopoly, Annie masterminded a strategy in which the three of us conspired to bring him down. I watched with a mixture of amusement and reverence as my parents laughed their way through the bending and warping of the rules. Only Annie could get away with messing up Monopoly during games night.