Page 22 of We’re All Going to Die Tonight!

I watch him carefully then, examine the way he meets my stare with his own. Has he learned how to lie better after all these years?

“You weren’t there with Jay and me,” I say. “And you told them you were.”

He shrugs. “Fine. It was a small lie. I did hear you talking to him, though.”

His eyes never leave mine. A bolt of lightning outside splashes the room with light before plunging it back into darkness.

“How much did you hear?”

Caulder’s gaze doesn’t shift. “Enough. I heard him telling you that you’d regret what you were doing or whatever. That you…”

“Wouldn’t win,” I finish for him. “And to give up.”

Caulder nods. “Yeah. I heard that.”

I worry my lip, still dry but no longer bleeding, and sit down on the edge of the chair in the corner. It’s a dance, what we’re doing, giving each other scraps of information because neither of us trusts the other with anything more.

In a blink, I’m back to orientation. I’m back to staring at him, at how he’s changed, but my heart’s filling up like a balloon because I think I do have a friend in this place. He’ll be back in my life, and everything will be like before. I’m walking up to him and tapping him on the shoulder.

He’s turning around. His eyes are the same, soft and warm, and they sweep over me. I’m telling him, Hey, I can’t believe it’s been so long. The other ninth-grade guys next to him are looking from him to me, whispering something about, Who’s the girl? I’ve done my hair in space buns, but they’re wobbly and uneven, and suddenly, I’m self-conscious.

And then he’s asking who I am, the other boys are laughing at me for daring to approach him, and I want to die.

From that moment on, I hated Caulder. First, for rejecting me. We never talked about it after that moment, never acknowledged who we had been for the other before. I knew he’d recognized me. And when I’d cried to my sister, she’d told me he’d probably just been trying to be cool for his friends. And maybe that was true. But he never apologized. He just became a Caulder Grant I didn’t know, easily taking the crown of class favorite. It didn’t matter that I ran down to the office to get my teachers’ copies made during class or did every single extra credit assignment or knew the answer to every question they ever asked. My kind of participation was somehow grating and unwelcome, but Caulder’s was exactly what they wanted. They were hungry for it, for the easy way he navigated every project or class discussion. He didn’t have to work for it. And they loved him for that.

Maybe it could’ve just stayed bitterness and that moment of betrayal. But then came co-captain and valedictorian, and it all crystallized into something sharper. Because now I’m going to spend all of fall applying for every scholarship I can possibly qualify for, and Caulder will get handed one for baseball.

It doesn’t matter that he occasionally stands up for me, like he did just now. None of it can erase our history. But I also don’t need him to think that I was trying to seduce Mr. Jay. The thought of it brings up bile in my throat.

“I wasn’t trying to hook up with him,” I tell Caulder. “I was just trying to talk to him about what happened.”

When I messed up in our final round. When I lost the entire competition because of my own inability to hold it together.

“This is why I voted for you to not be captain,” Mr. Jay had said when I followed him out of the end-of-competition celebration, the banquet-slash-dance that was meant to be a finale of the weekend. I hadn’t known he’d been the one who’d cast the vote deciding to take away everything I’d been working for since I was a freshman, so finding out then when I was broken and ashamed was a slap in the face that sent me reeling.

“What do you mean?” I’d insisted. “You always said I was a natural. That you were proud of me. That—”

“You think you’re better than everyone,” he’d said, trying to wave me off, breathing alcohol into the air as he spoke. “But no one likes you. You can’t rally this team to save your life. You fall apart when it matters. And Jesus Christ, you still think it’s about how smart you are, Avery. It’s about charm and charisma. Two things you’ll never have.”

No one in my life had ever said anything like that to me. Not even my parents during their lowest moments—and with their messy divorce dragging on and on, there had been plenty of those.

I knew he was drunk, but it didn’t matter. I could tell, under the slurring, he was telling the truth.

Mr. Jay’s words didn’t just hurt. They burned. They stung. And then he left me there with those open wounds, not realizing—or not caring—how they would undo me. What I would do next as a result.

“I know,” Caulder says, drawing me back into this room and the present. “I know you wouldn’t do that. Especially since…”

He makes a vague gesture, and I nod, cutting off any further elaboration. We don’t need to talk about that now. Now would be the worst time, actually.

“Why would Emerson even ask that?” I say, shivering. It’s colder in here, like all the warmth got sucked up by the rest of the house.

“Because he’s an asshole,” Caulder says.

Down the hall, a song starts playing, the melody dulled by the heavy wooden door standing between us and the rest of the first floor. I recognize it as “Give It Up,” an ’80s, disco-style song, one of the songs Dad made me memorize the name of when I was little. He’d quiz me on the titles so that I was the only kid in a two-hundred-mile radius who could recognize something by KC and the Sunshine Band. Now the upbeat melody has turned sour. I don’t remember the last time my dad asked me about a song.

“What’s that?” Caulder asks. “I thought there wasn’t a TV.”

“Someone must have started the record player,” I say, shrugging. “Maybe it’s part of someone’s dare. I hope it doesn’t wake up the teachers.”