At school the next morning while I stood in the circle with the guys, I kept looking over my shoulder to check for Alex. Every passing minute made me more worried something had happened to her — car wreck? House burned down? She was so weirded out by me waiting for her at the bathroom yesterday that she transferred back to her old school?

The bell rang and my paranoia festered through every class until lunch. Since I brought food from home, I always sat down at our table first while the guys waited in line defending their crotches from Patrick’s snapping fingers while he said, “Let me pinch that ’ner.” I was at our table peeling my banana when Alex emerged through the swarm of generic kids crowding the cafeteria and walked toward me.

“I’m a bringer, too,” she said when she sat down. “This looks exactly like my old school, but, like, completely different. I went up to the line and asked about you, and people told me this is where you sit. I just met Luke, Will, Patrick, and — ”

Shit. They met her before I’d explained anything to them. I should have given them some reason why I knew her. They were probably making up stories right then that she’d helped me locate the extra-small condoms at CVS. I guess telling them the truth was an option: It wouldn’t surprise anyone to find out I was on Accutane. But even if I was fine with people knowing I was on it, Alex probably wouldn’t want that to be the first thing everyone knew about her.

“Cool, cool,” I said. “Wait, so, what did you tell the guys about, like . . . how we know each other?”

“Oh, I didn’t. I just asked if anyone knew you and they said they were your friends and pointed me this way.”

I wasn’t sure what to talk to her about when we were surrounded by random other kids who could hear everything we said. When I looked up, the guys were sitting down with their trays of chicken fingers, pizza, and fries.

“Sorry,” Alex said to Sam, “but remind me what your name is?”

Patrick pointed to Sam and said, “Rickets. We call him rickets because he has rickets, like a guy from the Great Depression.” Alex laughed.

Sam shook his head and pointed at himself and said, “Sam.”

I’d never heard that stupid nickname before. I think Patrick was just making up dumb bullshit in a desperate attempt to make the new girl laugh.

Luke said, “So you transferred into our ridiculous school?”

What was ridiculous about our completely average, normal school?

“Yeah, and they messed up my schedule and put me in the wrong classes yesterday, but they changed it this morning and now I’m in this lunch. Surprise!” She laughed nervously, looking at me.

“Cool . . .” I said again, and I realized this might be my only opportunity to find out why she transferred without having to explain to her I hadn’t been listening when she told me at our appointments. “So, uh . . . why don’t you, like, tell the guys why you go here now? Just to, like, catch them up and stuff?”

She squinted at me like she was confused or maybe even hurt. “Uh, all right,” she said. “My parents just . . . they got divorced and my dad wanted a smaller place, so we moved. Now it’s just me and him in an apartment.”

She looked down and a silence fell over the table. Fuck. I was supposed to know that already, and now she must have thought I was a piece of shit for making her tell everyone.

Luke said, “Damn. Sorry.”

She smiled at him and shook her head. “No worries. Anything I should know about this place? Kids to avoid? Teachers to be scared of?”

Luke’s eyes lit up. “Our math teacher, Mr. Randolph, wears pants that are way too tight. Keep your eyes above his belt.”

Alex laughed. Sweat drops fell out of my armpits, and my face got fifteen degrees hotter. I don’t think what Luke said was true or even based on anything. All of them were like jackass chimpanzees trying to grunt the loudest for the new female.

“You’re in their math class?” I said.

“I just got switched into it today,” she said, and handed me her new schedule. The only period we had together was lunch. She was in the same math as Luke and Will and she had a couple classes each with Sam and Patrick.

“Since when does Mr. Randolph wear tight pants?” I asked Luke.

“Since, like, 1978, when he put them on. He probably hasn’t been able to take them off since.”

Alex laughed again. Even louder than before. It seemed like she was nervous and trying to make the guys like her.

I said, “I guess I just never noticed. He wore a suit to the last pep rally, so he must have changed out of them.”

The guys glared at me, but I didn’t care. Reality was wrapping its claws around me, perforating my daydreams from last night. I wanted Alex to be my secret girlfriend, but this wasn’t the waiting room. I couldn’t spill my emotional guts to her in front of an audience. The fantasies I’d had of us being in school together hadn’t included Michaela Barton sitting four chairs down from Alex and staring at us, slack-jawed and unashamed, while picking god knows what out of her braces. They also didn’t include Cody Dometti’s blue-jean-shorted ass scraping the back of my head when he scooted by to get to his seat, or Tyler Liu screaming from the table behind us, “What if you could fart out of your dick?” There’s a reason people in romantic movies don’t go on dates in high-school cafeterias.

And forget about introspective Alex from the waiting room. Social Butterfly Alex — Alex June, from the pictures online — was there.

“Kevin told me about the movie you guys are making. About the singer, with the Russia stuff and the trains?”

Luke grinned. “Oh, you mean Kevin’s film Italian Hospital, based on his intense knowledge of Italian hospitals?”

“What? No,” I said. “We split up. We’re not a group anymore.” I really didn’t want to get into an argument about our abandoned project in front of her. “Did any of you start the chemistry lab homewor —? ”

“Wait, how do you two know each other?” Luke asked. “Kevin’s never mentioned — ”

“We, uh . . .” I muttered, but I still had no goddamned idea what to tell them. Alex looked at me. Neither of us knew what the other was comfortable admitting. So I blurted, “We’re both taking this class in, uh . . . writing. This thing my mom signed me up for. It’s nothing. Just . . . don’t worry about it.”

She looked at me for a second; then she shrugged, accepting the lie I’d roped her into. “Yeah . . . well, Kevin actually wrote this story I liked, this thing about the driver’s ed class he was in and this teacher who . . . You should tell them,” she said to me.

“It was nothing. Just this . . . thing. It was stupid. Seriously. Just forget it.”

Alex’s eyes widened. “Sorry . . . Jeez.”

Patrick said, “Sounds cool,” and I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. I stuffed my sandwich into my mouth. I’d written that story for Alex. I didn’t want anyone else to see it or even know it existed.

I didn’t say much after that. Alex filled everyone in on her old schools and the places she’d lived. She revealed more information in ten minutes than I’d been able to gather over the past six months. She mentioned a performing arts camp she’d gone to in sixth grade, and Will went to the same one. They didn’t remember each other, but it still annoyed me. They had something in common that stretched back four years. It was like she’d technically known him longer than me.

The other guys told her ancient stories about kids from our school for the rest of lunch and I didn’t really look at Alex the whole time.

In seventh period, I had to go to math by myself while Alex went to her class with Luke and Will. I couldn’t pay attention. I could only worry about their conversation. What was she telling them about me? Or worse, what were they telling her about me? They knew every embarrassing and stupid thing I’d ever done. The time I woke Will up at a sleepover by squatting over him like a catcher and farting directly onto his face. The afternoon we spent at Best Buy drawing penises into Microsoft Paint on laptops. Things Alex didn’t need to know.

Halfway through seventh period I couldn’t take the worrying anymore, so I got a bathroom pass and wandered over to Alex, Luke, and Will’s math class.

She’ll be sitting apart from them. She’ll be by herself. She’ll be alone and quiet and mine again.

She wasn’t sitting with Luke or Will, but she wasn’t alone, either. She was at a desk in the front row, spun around to talk to the guy behind her — Jordan Breyer, a dumb-ass junior whose defining trait was a pair of orange sunglasses worn backward and upside down across the back of his greasy buzz cut. She was drawing on his worksheet. They were laughing together. Their faces were three inches apart.

It felt like one of her fingers slipped out of my grip in the hurricane.

She eventually noticed me and waved. Jordan Breyer looked up at me, too. I stood there with my mouth hanging open for a second, and then I walked back to my math class, thinking about how nothing was stopping me from walking out the doors, through the parking lot, onto the highway, and starting a new life for myself off Exit 11. I could become a silent man who works behind the scenes at Costco and has no interpersonal problems because he only interacts with cardboard cases of laundry detergent.

The worry that Alex wasn’t Alex anymore wrapped around me. She was becoming the girl from the pictures online that everyone loved, and I was just one of a thousand idiots in khaki shorts at her school. We’d never be project partners, we’d never do homework together, she’d never have a reason to come up to my room.

I should have clarified our relationship the minute she showed up at school. I should have asked her to be my girlfriend right there, instead of stuttering dumbfounded like I’d been fooled by a magic trick. It was messy now. She was at my school and she knew every person I knew.

The next morning I walked into the hallway where everyone loitered before first period and saw Alex standing with the God Squad. They laughed at everything Alex said. Their eyes were wide. They were just as enamored of her as I’d been. I didn’t want to bother them, so I kept my head down and walked past.

I was a gawky disaster compared to everyone else she was meeting at school. I couldn’t compete with them in the hallways; I couldn’t prove I was worth her time with a mumbled self-deprecating joke that would be inaudible under athletes’ confident laughter booming through their polo-shirt-filling chest muscles. There was no point in trying to make school feel like the waiting room. I had to focus on what I was good at and wait until I had the home field advantage again.

What she liked most about me was that story I’d written. I could do that again, no problem. I’d crush it. To stand out from the noise at school, I’d write her something new, something important, profound, blow her away with writing none of the morons in our grade could ever do and give it to her at our next appointment — in secret and away from everyone.