8:02 a.m.
FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH him, and I already feel a McMigraine coming on. I rub the space between my eyes as I hurry to homeroom.
“Our future valedictorian,” Mrs. Kozlowski says with a smile when I hand her my late pass, and I hope she’s right.
Our homerooms are mixed to foster camaraderie between the grades. McNair proposed it two years ago in student council, and the principal ate it up. It wasn’t the worst idea, I guess, if you ignored every single one of our other, more pressing issues: rampant plagiarism among the freshman class, the need for an expanded cafeteria menu to accommodate dietary restrictions, reducing our carbon footprint.
Before I make my way to Kirby and Mara, a trio of junior girls pounces on me.
“Hi, Rowan!” says Olivia Sweeney.
“We were worried you weren’t going to be here!” says her friend Harper Chen.
“Well… I’m here,” I say.
“Thank God,” Nisha Deshpande says, and the three of them giggle.
We’re all in student council, where they’ve unanimously thrown their support to me instead of McNair, which I’ve always been grateful for. They compliment my clothes and worked on my campaigns and brought me cupcakes when I got into Emerson. Kirby and Mara call them my fan club. Truly, they’re very sweet, if a little overeager.
“Is everything ready for Howl?” I ask.
The three of them exchange wicked grins.
“We’ve been ready for weeks,” Nisha says. “I don’t want to say it’s going to be the best Howl the school has ever seen, but it just might be.”
“We’re not giving you any hints,” Harper adds.
“As much as we might want to.” Olivia reaches down to tug up one of her knee socks, which are eerily similar to the pair I’m wearing.
“No hints,” I agree. McNair and I organized the game last year, but none of the previous year’s locations can be reused.
“Will you sign our yearbooks?” Nisha asks. “Since it’s your last day?”
Three arms thrust Sharpies in my direction. I sign all of them with slightly different messages, and after a chorus of thank-yous, I turn toward Kirby and Mara, who are waving at me from a corner of the room. My mom was right; all we’re doing is signing yearbooks. We have an extended homeroom, then the assembly, and then shortened classes for everyone who still goes here.
“There you are,” Kirby says. Her black hair is braided in a crown around her head. The three of us spent hours teaching ourselves how to Dutch braid last year, but Kirby is the only one who mastered it. “What happened this morning?”
I recount the day so far, from the power outage to my Spencer bender. “And then I was McNaired in the front office,” I finish. “So yeah, it’s been a day and a half, and it’s only eight o’clock.”
Mara places a hand on my arm. She’s quieter, gentler than Kirby, rarely the first to speak in a group conversation. The only time she steps into the spotlight is when she’s dancing a solo onstage. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. McNair was just being his usual troll self. Can you believe he wrote my late pass in calligraphy? It was like last fall when he downloaded all those dog videos in the library to mess with the internet when I was researching my Jane Austen paper. He’ll do anything to slow me down.”
She arcs a pale eyebrow. “I meant the accident.”
“Oh. Right. A little shaken up, but I’m okay. I’ve never hit anyone before.” I’m not sure why my mind went immediately to McNair when the accident was clearly the more traumatic event.
“Mara,” Kirby says, pointing to a yearbook photo of the two of them dancing in the winter talent show earlier this year. “Look how cute we are.”
Kirby Taing and I became friends first, when we were grouped together for a fourth-grade rite of passage: the volcano experiment. Kirby wanted to add more baking soda, create a bigger eruption. We made a mess. We got a B. She met Mara Pompetti in a ballet class a couple years later, though Mara’s always been the more serious dancer.
We wound up at the same middle school and have been a unit ever since, and while I love them both, for years I felt a tiny bit closer to Kirby. She got me through my grandpa’s funeral in seventh grade, and I was the first person she came out to in ninth grade, when she said she’d only ever liked girls. The following year, Mara told both of us that she was bisexual and wanted to start using that label for herself. For a while, she and Kirby used me as a go-between, trying to figure out how each felt about the other. They went to homecoming together last year, which has cemented them as a couple.
They laugh at an unfortunate hair situation in someone’s senior photo while I flip through the book, though as editor in chief, I’ve seen each page hundreds of times. For the senior superlatives, the photo editor made McNair and me pose with our backs pressed up against each other, our arms crossed. Above us are the words MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED. In the photo and in real life, we are exactly the same height: five-five. After the photo was taken, he sprang away from me, as though the back of his shirt touching the back of mine was too much physical contact for rivals to have.
“Pleeeease can we leave the classroom?” star quarterback Brady Becker is begging Mrs. Kozlowski. Brady Becker is the kind of guy who got Bs because teachers loved it when our football team was good, and they couldn’t be good if Brady Becker got Ds. “All the other homerooms are.”
Mrs. Kozlowski holds up her hands. “Okay, okay. Go ahead. Just be sure to make your way over to the auditorium after—”
We’re already out the door.
Mara and I lean against the bank of lockers we claimed back in freshman year, sharing a cheesy pretzel and a bag of chips from the student store. The combinations will be changed next week, after we’re gone. We were supposed to clean out our lockers earlier this week. Kirby is doing it now, which is kind of Kirby in a nutshell.
“Should I keep this?” She holds up her WHS gym T-shirt. We had to stage an intervention to get her to wash it sophomore year because she kept forgetting to bring it home.
“No!” Mara and I say in unison. Mara aims her phone at Kirby, who poses as though she’s waltzing with the T-shirt.
“Sophomore gym was a special kind of torture,” I say. “I can’t believe they wouldn’t let us waive it.”
“You wanted to waive it,” Kirby corrects. “I for one enjoyed discovering my hidden talent for badminton.”
Oh. Huh. I must have assumed because I remember hating it, that they did too. But I guess it was only McNair and me making a case to the counselor about changing our schedules.
If I used to be better friends with Kirby, it’s faded a little since she and Mara became a couple. But that’s natural. While they spend plenty of time alone, for the most part, we’re just as close as we were in middle school.
Across the hall is that trophy case with the plaque of valedictorian names. It says something about our school that this is what’s front and center—not the football or basketball trophies, but our academic achievements. At Westview, it’s frowned upon if you don’t take at least one AP, and not Music Theory, since everyone knows Mr. Davidson uses it as an excuse to play his shitty jam band’s records. He offers extra credit for going to one of his shows. Kirby and I went sophomore year when she took the class, and let me just say I could have gone my entire life without seeing a middle-aged teacher rip off his sweaty T-shirt onstage and fling it into the audience.
Mara turns the phone on me, and I hug my sweater as tightly as I can. “This boob stain doesn’t need to be immortalized on Instagram.”
Kirby waves the T-shirt at me. “Hello, perfectly good T-shirt right here. I won a lot of games of badminton in this shirt.”
“You can barely see the stain.” Mara says it so sweetly, it almost doesn’t sound like a lie. Then her jaw falls open. “Kirby Kunthea Taing. Is that a condom?”
“From health class last year!” she says, holding up what is definitely a condom. “They were giving them out, and I didn’t want to be rude.…”
Mara hides a laugh behind a curtain of wavy blond hair. “I’m pretty sure neither of us needs it.”
“You want it?” Kirby asks me. “It has spermicide.”
“No, Kirby, I don’t want your old health-class condom.” If I need one anytime soon, I keep a box in my dresser, tucked behind my period underwear. “Besides, it’s probably expired.”
She peers at it. “Not until September.” She unzips my backpack and drops it inside, patting the backpack once she zips it up again. “You’ve got three months to find a worthy suitor.”
With a roll of my eyes, I offer Mara the last chip in the bag, but she shakes her head. Kirby tosses her gym shirt and some other tchotchkes into a nearby trash can. Every so often, a group races down the hall and shouts, “SENIORS!” and we whoop back at them. We trade fist bumps with Lily Gulati, high fives with Derek Price, and whistles with the Kristens (Tanaka and Williams, best friends since the first day of freshman year and virtually inseparable ever since).
Even Luke Barrows stops by with his girlfriend, Anna Ocampo—ranked number one on girls’ varsity tennis—so we can swap yearbooks.
“I’ve been counting down the days until they let us out of here,” Luke says.
“Since freshman year?” Anna volleys back. Turning to me, she says, “I’ll miss your Wednesday-morning announcements. You and Neil always cracked me up.”
“Glad to have provided some entertainment.”
They both got tennis scholarships to Division I schools, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I hope they can make it work long-distance.
“Kirby, oh my God,” Anna says, muffling a laugh when a pile of papers tumbles out of Kirby’s locker.
“I know,” she says with a small moan.
Yearbooks are returned to their owners, and Luke crushes me into a hug with arms made muscular from a killer backhand. “Good luck,” he says, and why can’t all breakups be like this? Drama-free, no lingering awkwardness.
While Mara uploads an Instagram video of Kirby extricating an eight-foot-long scarf from her locker, complete with creepy horror-movie soundtrack, I reach into my backpack for my journal. But my fingers skim something else: the envelope I shoved in there this morning.
I know what it is—or at least, I have a general idea. But I don’t remember the exact details, and that makes me a little twitchy. Carefully, I run my finger along the envelope flap and pull out the sheet of folded paper.
Rowan Roth’s Guide to High School Success, it says across the top, followed by ten numbered items, and the words drag me back to the summer before high school. I added number ten a month into freshman year. Naturally, I’d been inspired by something I read in a book. I’d been so excited about high school, half in love with the person I imagined I’d be by the end of it. Really, it’s more a list of goals than an actual guide.
I’ve accomplished none of them.
“What about this?” Kirby asks. “One hundred percent. On a math test!”
“Recycling, Kirby.” But Mara takes a photo of it anyway.
“Our little paparazzo,” Kirby says.
I’m still in the world of the success guide—particularly, item number seven. Go to prom with boyfriend and Kirby and Mara. Since Spencer and I broke up right before, prom didn’t happen. I would have gone without a date, but I worried I’d end up being Kirby and Mara’s third wheel, and I didn’t want to ruin the night for them.
It shouldn’t hit me as hard as it does that my life didn’t go quite according to plan. And yet here’s the physical proof of it. High school is ending, and it’s only today that I’m realizing everything I didn’t do.
It’s a relief when the clock hits 8:15. I spring to my feet, throwing the list into my backpack and my backpack over my shoulder. Time for the final test of my high school career.
“I have to prep for the assembly,” I say.
Kirby tears open a Snickers she found in her locker abyss. “Whatever happens, you’re a winner to us,” she says in a tone that’s probably meant to be encouraging, but from her, it comes out sounding sarcastic. She must hear it, because she winces. “Sorry. That sounded nicer in my head.”
I try to smile. “I believe you.”
“Go, go,” Mara says. “I’ll make sure Kirby disposes of any other potentially hazardous materials.”
As I head for the auditorium, their laughter takes a while to fade.
I’m leaving Seattle at the end of the summer, but Kirby and Mara are going to the University of Washington. Together. Mara wants to study dance, and Kirby plans to take one class in each discipline before deciding on her major. I’ll see them on breaks, of course, but I wonder if the distance will push me farther away. If this friendship is another thing I can’t take with me to college.
