Just Another Girl

  For Jackson Pearce, who planted the

  seed for this book years ago,

  and Jen Calonita, who has had to listen

  to me talk about it ever since.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  HOPE: 40 DAYS AWAY

  PARKER: 479 DAYS LEFT

  HOPE: 18 DAYS AWAY

  PARKER: 453 DAYS LEFT

  BRADY

  HOPE: 12 DAYS AFTER

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  HOPE

  PARKER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  COPYRIGHT

  This is it, I tell myself.

  “Are you ready?” Brady asks as he leans into me. “Although when aren’t you prepared for total world domination?”

  “Precisely. It’s about time you noticed,” I reply with a flip of my hair. Brady always brings out my sassy side, and my flirty side, and my I-love-you-so-much-it-hurts-sometimes side.

  Brady knows every side of me, except for that last one. How can a person be so close to somebody, literally and figuratively, yet be so painfully blind?

  Maybe things will be different now. Maybe this is when everything will change.

  He winks at me behind his black rectangular frames, his dark, messy hair partly obscuring his vision.

  I’m always telling myself, Maybe now. Maybe this.

  I’m always telling myself, This is it.

  “Oh, I’ve been noticing that about you since, hmm, the beginning of time,” Brady says. “Or at least first grade, which for all intents and purposes is the beginning of time. It was unmistakable.”

  “Greatness is like that,” I fire back.

  Brady and I face each other, him with his arms folded, me with eyes narrowed. It’s a standoff to see who is going to relinquish their banter throne first. It’s always like this with us, one-upping each other in ridiculousness until someone breaks.

  I bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from smiling.

  “Ah, guys? Can we do this?” Dan calls out from the machine. He exchanges a look with Conor. They always get annoyed when Brady and I spend the majority of our time together being … well, being us.

  But, hey, it’s my club and I’ll flirt if I want to.

  Why? a dark part of me wonders. Why do you keep torturing yourself? Why are you so blind that you can’t see that he’s just—

  No.

  “Saved, once again, by the siren call of Rube Goldberg,” I whisper to Brady before I turn my attention to the machine that’s been taunting and teasing us for weeks now. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  Brady gives me his biggest smile, the one that melts every inch of me.

  He puts his hand on my arm.

  I don’t think he even knows what he’s doing.

  Or maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.

  I never know for sure.

  The project. Focus on the project, I tell myself, trying to chase out the butterflies in my stomach so another species of butterfly—the kind that cares about school projects and grades and the future blah, blah, blah—can move in. There’s no more avoiding the truth. This is when I find out if our countless hours and months of work have paid off.

  No pressure or anything.

  But here’s the thing: I’m not really nervous. Okay, I’m a little worried it won’t work, but I look over at Brady and know that with him by my side, I can do anything.

  That’s the way it’s always been between us, so I have no doubt we’ll succeed. Eventually.

  “Do you want to do the honors?” Dan asks as he gently places a small blue-and-white marble in my hand.

  We hold our collective breath as I walk up to the machine we spent the better part of last semester working on. I wish I could say I have no idea how I got involved in this, but the answer is one word, and it starts with a B. It’s a very simple story: Brady was obsessed with Rube Goldberg machines. I was obsessed with Brady. So voilà! I started the club so we could work on the machines together. Emphasis, in my mind, on the word together.

  And the weird thing is, I think that’s why he went for it, too. So we could have something together. But neither of us was brave enough to admit that. We never are. Especially me. It’s like our relationship is one of these crazy contraptions we build—one false move and the whole thing falls apart. So you spend all your time making sure you don’t knock things off course. Even if you think that maybe there might be an even better course you could be on, if only there weren’t … obstacles.

  I position the marble at the start of our contraption and say a silent prayer as I let go. The marble makes its way down a ramp. It then knocks over the first in a series of dominos in an S-shaped formation. All eight eyes in the room intently watch as each domino goes tumbling down, creating the perfect chain reaction. The last domino sets off a mousetrap, which snaps so loudly, I jump a bit. Then the string attached to the mousetrap pulls down on a lever and … nothing.

  The machine stops. The balloon hanging at the end remains limp.

  “What happened?” Conor grumbles as we examine the other side of the pulley, where a spoon’s supposed to snap up, releasing a ball.

  “We don’t have enough momentum.” Brady leans down to look at the string, his hands behind his back to reduce the risk of knocking anything over.

  “Back to the drawing board, I guess,” I reply, hiding any disappointment in my voice.

  If I’ve learned anything in my sixteen years on this planet, it’s that anything worth having takes work. Anything can be accomplished with the three Ps: Patience, Planning, and Perseverance.

  That voice of hope pops back into my head. Maybe now. Maybe this.

  “Don’t give up,” Brady says.

  It’s hard not to take that as some sort of sign.

  I’m always looking for signs.

  Spotting them is easy. Reading them, though—that’s the part I always seem to get wrong. It’s frustrating how easily you can misinterpret something when you only want to believe in one thing.

  I pull on the string. “It’s still not as tight as we need it to be.” I grab some glue and lift the mousetrap up. “This needs to be firmly planted down in order for the snap to work properly.”

  Dan comes over to help me press down on the trap while Brady and Conor watch. “I think you’re right. Once this is properly secured, this will be a snap! Get it? SNAP?”

  We all groan. Not only is Dan unaware that his attempts at humor are outright embarrassing, he genuinely thinks he’s a comedian. We put up with it because Dan’s the smartest science and math student we’ve got.

  “We’ll get this,” Conor reassures us. He then puts his hands on his hips and sticks his chest out. (I think he’s trying to emulate a superhero. I don’t want to tell him he looks less like Superman and more like he’s constipated.) “Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out clearer.”

  At least with Dan, I have some idea what he’s talking about. Conor relies upon quoting from Tolkien or making Dungeons & Dragons references.

  As for Brady?

  Well, I’m fluent in Brady-isms. I know he’d say the same about me.

  Brady leans in to inspect my work on the mousetrap and places his hand on the small of my back. “Looks like you’ve saved the day, Hope.”

  There’s another sign. Someone who’s “just” a friend would move his hand away from my back as soon as the sentence was done.

  Yet his hand remains.

  “Yes! Once again, Hope gives us hope,” Dan says with a snort before adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.

  We all groan even louder this time as Conor hits Dan
with the notebook we’re using to map out our machine.

  Brady’s hand remains on my back.

  Mr. Sutton, our science teacher and club advisor, walks into his classroom, asking for an update. Dan and Conor begin giving an overly descriptive account of our failed run-through. They try to make it sound positive, but Mr. Sutton doesn’t look pleased. Which starts to stress me out.

  Brady and I decide to hang back. He finally removes his hand, but I can still feel the heat of its imprint. He lets out a small sigh, which signals to me that he’s stressed, too.

  This has to work. It has to.

  I look up at him, wondering what we can do. In response, he wraps his arms around me.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, his voice so reassuring. “We have plenty of time to make it work.”

  He’s talking about us.

  No, he’s not.

  But he could be.

  No, I remind myself. He’s talking about the project. Don’t be so delusional.

  We’re six weeks away from a Rube Goldberg contest in Cleveland, and if we win, our team will go to the national competition in Indiana. A lot can happen in six weeks.

  He gives me another squeeze before letting go and bumping me with his hip. “Plus, I’d never underestimate the girl who once single-handedly bowled a whopping twenty-two.”

  “How dare you insult my athletic prowess!” I give him a look of horrified shock, complete with an exaggeratedly open mouth and my hand on my heart. “Plus, you know, I was nine.”

  “You were using bumpers! Is that even mathematically possible?” He gets out a notebook and pretends to do a few calculations.

  “Give me that.” I try to grab the notebook, but Brady holds it over his head. Since he’s six four, he might as well put it on Mars. There’s no way I can reach it. Unless …

  See, I know Brady better than anyone. I know everything about him, especially his weaknesses. I glance down at a bare stretch of his stomach that’s currently exposed.

  I look up at him with a smirk.

  His eyes get wide. “What? What are you going to do?”

  That’s when I attack. I start tickling the spot above his right armpit, where he’s the most sensitive. He crouches down and tries to wiggle away, but now I have him pinned against the desk.

  “Mercy!” he screams between laughs.

  “You know that’s not what I want to hear.”

  “Fine! Fine!” He holds his hands up in surrender. “Spit-rat! Spit-rat!”

  (Mr. Sutton, Dan, and Conor all give us looks. They’re not fluent in our secret language. I always wished Brady and I could merge our names together like people do with celebrity couples, but Hody never caught on, as much as I tried.)

  I give Brady a satisfied smile as I take his notebook from him. As I suspected, he wasn’t doing math. Instead he wrote, Dear Diary, is it possible for Hope to be the worst bowler of all time?

  “Very funny, ha ha.” I fake pout.

  “A little help here,” Dan says, not hiding his annoyance.

  “Admit it, you love it when I mock,” Brady whispers to me as we approach the machine.

  “I’ll admit to no such thing, Mr. Lambert,” I reply coldly, doing my best to suppress the smile I always have in his company.

  “Come on.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me; his left one sports a scar I have studied for what feels like most of my life.

  I was there when Brady got that scar, the summer after third grade. We were running to the ice-cream truck when Brady, always the opposite of graceful, tripped over his own feet and a tree trunk interrupted his fall. I ran the two blocks to his house to get his mom and held his hand while he got stitches.

  Every time I skim through the meticulous scrapbooks my memory makes, he’s there.

  Our elementary school Christmas concert with matching reindeer antlers and red noses as we sang “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as if our Christmas presents depended upon it …

  Him in our swimming pool for my eighth-grade graduation party, and me realizing how his body had changed …

  Our first kiss, when I was nine and he was ten … we’d been playing hide-and-seek, hiding from his older brother, Zach. We were crouched down behind a bush, trying not to laugh and shake the branches to give away our location. “Stop it!” I scolded him as he kept pulling on my ponytail. He laughed, kissed me on the lips, and then ran away …

  No one’s running anymore. Whenever we’re in the same room, we’re drawn together like magnets.

  It’s not all in my head. He also feels it.

  I know it. He knows it.

  Yet we pretend we don’t, since it’s easier. Or at least we pretend it’s easier, even if it feels harder. But the maybe now is always there. It’s always taunting me.

  Maybe this time, my mind begins to repeat in an unrelenting loop.

  Brady looks at the broken machine. “We totally got this. We’ve got the biggest brain in school and the coolest girl in the history of cool girls. I probably should add that Conor and I are aware we are here solely for our looks.”

  I sigh heavily. “If that’s the case, we’re in more trouble than I thought.”

  Brady pokes me in the side, where he knows I’m ticklish.

  We all get back to work on the task at hand. I steal one more glance at Brady and he gives me his crooked smile that always lifts my spirits.

  There’s no doubt in my mind we’re going to make this machine a success.

  Patience. Planning. Perseverance.

  I’ve had the Patience to know something as special as Brady and me will take time to work itself out.

  I’ve been following a Plan to ensure that, despite being in high school (when some friendships drift apart), we’ve remained close.

  And Perseverance. I was the one he came to when he had a crush on Cynthia Madden in eighth grade. I was the first person he called when she broke his heart by going out with Timothy Heinz. I was the one who went shopping with him when he wanted to get Sandra Cohn a Valentine’s Day gift his freshman year. Me. It’s always been me.

  But I can only control so much. While I’ve followed my Ps to the letter, there’s another P who’s managed to get in the way. A P who’s annoyingly stayed rooted by Brady’s side since freshman year. A P I can’t seem to shake, no matter how hard I try.

  A P who’s now standing in the doorway of the classroom, saying his name.

  He turns away from me. He goes to her.

  His actual, real-life girlfriend.

  Parker.

  39 DAYS AWAY

  It’s hard to keep a secret in a small town.

  I’ve been going to the same school with the same people since middle school, when the two elementary schools combined our class to the whopping seventy-eight people we are today. Everybody knows everybody. If you skip school, someone in the community will see you and call your parents. You can’t flunk a class without four different people saying something to them at the one grocery store in town. If you have a crush on a guy, there’s a distinct probability he’ll hear about it from a friend. Or a teacher. Or a parent. Or his dentist.

  That’s why I’ve kept my real feelings for Brady close to me. Everybody in town knows we’ve been practically attached at the hip since we were little. But only as friends. (It always stings when someone refers to us as friends. We’re much more than that. Even if I’m starting to feel as if that’s all we’ll ever be.)

  The only person I’ve entrusted with my true feelings is my best friend, Madelyn. Not only do I know every one of her deep, dark secrets, but I’m positive she’d never be tempted to betray me. Madelyn’s the kind of person who doesn’t give a crap about what anybody thinks of her.

  Unfortunately (and embarrassingly), I’m the opposite. I care immensely about what people think. I blame the small-town mentality of wanting to get along with the people I’ve been forced to be around every day since birth. I’m starting to get an itch to do something, be someone people can’t help but notice, to make a mark. B
e someone that Brady can’t ignore his true feelings for.

  “You do realize time is ticking?” Madelyn feels the need to remind me at lunch the next day. She drags a french fry through her tailor-made special dipping sauce, which is a sickening pink combination of catsup and mayonnaise. “I’m fully aware I’m a song on repeat on this particular matter.”

  Yes, she is. Brady’s a senior. I’m a junior. We have less than five months until his graduation. Madelyn’s of the mind-set I should come out and tell Brady how I feel. Just like she did last year before homecoming, when she went right up to James Lincoln and told him she thought he was hot and that she wanted to do something with him that night, “be it the dreaded high school ritualistic experience of a dance or something more daring.”

  She didn’t even bat an eyelash when he laughed right in her face. She walked away with a shrug and moved on to her next crush, a guy she met online on some alternative-music website.

  Even now when we pass James and his friends, he’ll say some cutting remark about her. Because of her all-black clothing, short jet-black hair with a navy blue streak in it, and heavy, dark eye makeup (but always with a classic red lip), two of his go-to insults are the walking dread and zombie loser. Madelyn laughs right back at him, referring to him as “my slight mental error in judgment of one’s character.”

  There’s no way, and I mean no way, I could ever be so bold, no matter the situation. I’d cower if a guy ever said that to me, just like I’ve been cowering behind the truth with Brady. I couldn’t handle it if he rejected me. Everything we have now—the banter, the touching, the promise we might someday be more—would be gone. I’d have to let go of all that. So as much as it pains me, I’d rather have a pretend something with him than nothing at all.

  Although I guess Madelyn does have a point.

  Maybe now, the voice rings in my head.

  Why not now?

  All signs are present: a lingering hand here, a blushing face after another compliment there. Just last week he told me on our walk to the parking lot after a meeting that when he thought about college, he was excited—but then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m just worried about all the things I’ll miss.”

  He made a conscious decision to stop and look at me as he said those words. How can I simply disregard that?