Chapter 19

On the way home, I send a group text to the improv group telling them what happened. Cecily writes back: That’s awful—anybody wanna meet tomorrow and talk about what to do?

But what can we do? I tug on Nana Linda’s sleeve. “Hey, Nana Linda, would it be okay if my improv group came to your house tomorrow so we can . . . you know?” I punch the air. “Figure out what to do next.” And I’ll get to hang out with them, I add in my head. Which I like.

She squeezes my hand. “Of course. The more the merrier.”

I squeeze her hand back.

Mr. Sukow gives us class time to work on our group project the next day. Sometimes thinking about it makes my stomach hurt and then I don’t even want to try to do it, so I don’t. Ty’s got his desk pushed against mine, but his head is lowered, his face hidden by the Chromebook cover and the black hoodie. He kind of stinks the way my brothers stink when they don’t shower and don’t open their bedroom window all weekend. I wrinkle my nose.

Of course that’s when he looks up and sees me. My look of grossed-out-ness. I cringe, feeling my face go hot. “What’s your problem?” he says. “I’m just trying to fix what you lost.”

“The program lost it. Not me.” The woman who wrote the app had written back to us, apologizing, but hadn’t been able to recover my document. Mr. Sukow said we could have an extra week to make up for it if we wanted. Both of us said no. We don’t want to work on this a second longer than necessary.

“You should have made a backup in Word. You were the typist.”

I shake my head. He sounds like Luke. “Are we going to talk about this forever?” Or can you build a time machine to travel into the past to fix it? I add in my head.

Ty cranks his neck back to look at me, startled by the gush of words. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

Ty’s words appear on my screen in our shared document.

This is a napkin. It is absorbent. It helps you clean up spills. Buy me.

I blink at him. It’s not long enough. It’s boring. It’s never going to convince anyone to buy a napkin. But he’s smirking at me as if he’s written the best thing on the planet. Just like when Luke sets the dining table and doesn’t bother folding the napkins.

I add, Made from 100% recycled materials, Bliss Napkins are the best on earth.

“Bliss? What’s that?” Ty wrinkles his nose like I just ate brussels sprouts and had a stinky toot.

I smile and point at my mouth. “Happy.”

Ty deletes the word and types happy. “Too fancy.”

“It’s not.” Is he really going to do this to me? Bliss, I type back.

Blis| I watch the backspace get rid of my word.

Bliss bliss

Blissbliss

bliss

bliss

I type over and over again.

HAAPPPPPY, he types. Yelling.

I’m about to unleash about three hundred blisses when something soft yet rough hits my forehead and bounces down into my lap.

The napkin.

“Did you throw this at me?” My heart’s beating fast and my chest burns. I glare at Ty and uncrumple it as best I can. “We need this.”

“I give up.” Ty gets up and stalks over to Mr. Sukow. “I can’t work with her, Mr. Sukow.”

I follow. “Mr. Sukow, Ty . . .”

“Mr. Sukow, Ava . . .” Ty says.

Mr. Sukow holds up his hand. “You’re both talking at the same time. Ava, you first.”

“Figures,” Ty grumbles.

My chest feels like I ate too much hot salsa. “He threw something at me!” Is my heart doing okay? My fingers go up to my neck, looking for my pulse. It’s pounding hard.

“Just a napkin!” Ty raises his voice. “She’s impossible.”

The burning sensation goes away and my heart stops pounding. I think I got paced, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I’m okay, I remind myself.

My head hurts.

“All right.” Mr. Sukow gets eerily calm, the same way Dad does when he’s about to deliver justice. “I have thirty-five other students who need my attention, and frankly I’m tired of both your attitudes. Why don’t you go down to the office and talk to Ms. Shepherd?”

My palms go cold. “Ms. Shepherd?” That’s the vice principal. Luke calls her “Bad Cop” because she’s the school disciplinarian.

Mr. Sukow picks up his school phone. “Go on.”

Ty and I walk down the hallway, Ty in front of me. The heels of his sneakers are worn down at the corners and there are holes near the rubber. I don’t know why boys always let their shoes get so bad. Last year, Luke didn’t tell Mom he needed new shoes until the sole fell off on the way to Disneyland.

If Zelia were here, I wouldn’t be in this mess at all because she would be the one who stuck up for me. She would probably be here now. She definitely would have told me what to do. Once, I had to do an assignment with a girl in fourth grade and she took over the whole thing. Zelia told me to just let her. “Who cares?” she’d said. “She can do all the work if she’s going to be like that.” And I’d gone along with it.

I follow Ty into the office through the maze of desks. The receptionist is an older lady with hair dyed almost egg-yolk yellow, curled closely against her head. She wears a sweatshirt with a wolf howling at the moon on it. Hudson has the same sweatshirt, but he says he wears his ironically. She’s got all kinds of wolf pictures tacked up around her cubicle, though, so I guess she really likes wolves. “Hello again, Tyler.” She squints at me. “And you are?”

“Ava.” I guess she knows Ty by name even though school only started a few weeks ago.

Ty flops into a wooden chair. I sit, my stomach switching between feeling like it’s boiling and like there’s a block of ice in it. I’ve never been in trouble in my entire life. I’m like the anti-trouble kid. The only thing teachers have to say about my behavior is that I could speak up more.

“My mom can’t come in,” Ty informs the receptionist. “She’s working.” He twists his mouth. “She just lost one of her jobs, so she can’t leave.”

His mom had two jobs? “My mom’s working, too,” I say quietly. My dad will be the one who comes in. And he won’t be happy. I swallow.

“Well, if my mom leaves work early, she doesn’t get paid.” Ty chews on a fingernail. “She might even get fired.”

“Then I guess you’d better stop getting into trouble, huh?” The receptionist smiles in a teeth-baring kind of way.

Ty doesn’t react, but her words send a shudder over my skin, as if a bunch of spiders have run across my shoulders. I go as still as possible, as if she won’t be able to see me.

The phone buzzes and the receptionist picks up. “Okay, Tyler, Ms. Shepherd’s ready for you.”

I’m sweating so hard my shirt sticks to my back. My pants, too. My breath is kind of fast. I don’t know whether I’m going to pass out or barf.

I lean forward and wrap my arms around my thighs. “I feel sick,” I say truthfully.

The receptionist comes over and feels my forehead because obviously she thinks I’m making it up. “Clammy. Let’s get you to the nurse.”

The nurse, Mrs. Romero, knows who I am—she knows all the kids with medical plans. She takes one look at me and decides I don’t have to see Ms. Shepherd in her office. “You’re having a little anxiety attack,” she tells me. Instead she has me lie on the cot, lined with paper, in the dark and cool room. “Just relax and you’ll be fine.”

Ty’s not going to be happy. He’ll say I’m getting special treatment again. And he might be kind of right. Who else gets sent to the office and ends up lying down?

I’m having an anxiety attack, which means I need to calm myself somehow. If I don’t, my heart won’t like the stress.

Oh no.

I try to notice my surroundings. White walls. Weird disinfectant smell that reminds me of the hospital. Which reminds me of being sick. Which reminds me that my heart could be going nuts.

I turn over on my side to face the wall, paper crinkling under me. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I had been born into another body, a healthy one that could dance and play soccer without thinking about what might happen.

I take a shaky breath. I need to think about something else. Five things about improv.

Laughing. One.

Miss Gwen. Two.

Cecily. Three.

Happy. Four.

IKEA. Five.

Okay, IKEA has nothing to do with improv but that’s what popped into my head, and there are no wrong answers. “These are five things,” I say out loud, and then my stomach growls as I remember Swedish meatballs.

In a little while, a woman comes in. Ms. Shepherd, the vice principal. She’s tall, with an Afro that frames her face like a halo. She sits on a chair next to me. “You feeling any better, Ava?”

I nod. I didn’t know she knew who I was.

“I had a talk with Ty and Mr. Sukow,” she says. “I know you want to switch partners but I really think this is a good chance for you and Ty to work it out.”

That’s what Mr. Sukow says. That’s probably what everyone who’s over the age of fourteen would say. My parents included. I sit up. “Did you call my parents?”

“You don’t have a temperature, and you didn’t throw up, so no,” Ms. Shepherd says. “Did you want me to?”

I’d meant because of the other thing. The in-trouble thing. I sure don’t want my parents to know about that. It’s just totally embarrassing. “No.”

“Okay, then.” Ms. Shepherd pats my arm. “Well, you and Ty just have to do some give-and-take. Communicate instead of argue. If you have another problem, go to Mr. Sukow. Okay?”

I nod, my neck hot. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. You’re a good student.” Ms. Shepherd stands. “I’m glad it’s all worked out.” She walks away, shutting the door behind her. I wonder what adults consider “worked out” because nothing feels worked out to me at all, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. So I just lie on the cot, waiting for someone to tell me what to do.