How It Ends Read online

  When no text arrives, I shove my phone into my bag and take a deep breath. There’s no escaping today. I square my shoulders and head across the street to be swallowed up by the crowd entering my new school.

  I’m sitting in first-period English class when Gemma’s reply comes in. Chin up, Annie-the-brave. We miss you! She’s attached a picture of the whole crew. Minus me. Gemma, Stacy, and Susanna, with their smiling faces smooshed together. Stacy’s eyes are closed, like they are in every picture ever taken of her, and a little laugh escapes me before tears fill my eyes. There’s this huge pit of emptiness right in the center of my chest that yawns open painfully as I look at their happy faces. I should be there.

  I slump down in my seat and check out my classmates. They’re all so phony.

  Except.

  I sit up a little straighter when I catch sight of her. Unlike the rest of our classmates, who wear their coolness like a mask, this girl is beautifully uncool. She’s perched on the edge of her seat, so caught up in what Miss Donaghue is saying that she’s somehow managed to scratch her cheek with the wrong end of her pen, leaving a line of blue across it. She has frizzy brown hair bursting out of a thick blue elastic, no makeup, and she’s wearing a sweater that’s at least two sizes too big for her. And yet she’s stunning. She has these huge brown eyes and the softest features. She’s so painfully real that it almost hurts to look at her.

  I take a last look at the picture of my Highland friends and then turn off my phone and stash it in my bag. I have a mission now, and it makes me feel better. Today, somehow, I will get to know this beautifully uncool girl.

  Jessie

  When people call you Lezzie, you learn to fear the whole locker-room experience. So when I saw gym on my schedule this morning, I broke out in a cold sweat.

  If not for the long line snaking out of the guidance office, I’d have dropped that class faster than you could say Team sports give me hives. God bless the inefficiency of our guidance counselors, though, because in the kind of plot twist that just doesn’t happen to girls like me, my whole world changed inside the sweaty confines of the girls’ locker room.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  At the beginning of class, I was sitting on the gym floor feeling like the answer to one of those which-of-these-things-doesn’t-belong puzzles, when the coolest girl to ever walk through the doors of our school actually came and sat next to me. The whole school had been talking about Annie Miller all day. She moved here from the city, and she’s like some kind of exotic animal plunked into the middle of our boring lives. I’d first noticed her in English. She was dressed all in black, with thick eyeliner rimming her eyes, and I’d pegged her as a stoner before I got a good look at her. She defies categorization. Under all that black, she was luminous. With bright red hair that fell in shiny waves down her back and green eyes so bright they didn’t even look real, no one could possibly confuse her with a waste case.

  In gym, Annie plopped down next to me and smiled like we were old buddies. “You’re in my English class, right?”

  Let me just take a moment to marvel over the fact that Annie noticed me. I almost checked behind me to make sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.

  “Y-yes. I think so. Miss Donaghue?”

  Annie smiled so wide I could see her back teeth. “Isn’t she great?” She leaned toward me. “I was thinking we should sit together at lunch.”

  I felt like I was going to explode right out of my skin. It was one of those moments that feel so good they’re almost painful. Sweat prickled my palms and my heart raced, but not in the bad I-think-I’m-going-to-die way. It was . . . pleasurable panic. I guess normal people would call that excitement.

  We spent the rest of gym class earning detentions for our poor attitudes, and I didn’t even worry about getting into trouble, which is so not like me. It all started with Annie insisting that she was the worst gym student ever. I took one look at her athletic build and called her bluff. Hilarity ensued. We fell over ourselves trying to be the most uncoordinated, and we failed miserably at hiding our laughter from our overzealous teacher, who apparently thinks she’s training future Olympians rather than teaching gym to a bunch of apathetic teenagers.

  By the time we headed into the locker room after class, I was so recklessly happy that I forgot to keep my head down and not attract attention. It was an oversight that did not go unpunished.

  “Looks like Lezzie Longbottom has a girlfriend,” Emily Watson sang.

  My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe. Being humiliated was one thing, but having it happen in front of someone like Annie was unbearable.

  “What did you say?”

  I blinked in confusion. One second Annie was right beside me, and the next she was across the room, bearing down on Emily and her friends.

  Emily patted Annie on the head like she was a little kid. “You’re new here, so you don’t know about our little Lezzie Longbottom yet.”

  If I could have tunneled through the floor to escape the scene in front of me, I would have.

  “Longbottom?” Annie asked, her hands on her hips. “Like, as in Harry Potter?”

  Emily faltered, and Annie looked at me with an eyebrow raised. I nodded haltingly.

  “Well,” Annie said with a shrug of her shoulders, “that sounds like a compliment to me.”

  The girls burst out laughing.

  “Maybe not to a bunch of bleached-blond illiterates like you, but to those of us who read, we know that Neville Longbottom was the real hero of Harry Potter.”

  “Who are you calling illiterate?” Emily challenged.

  “Well, if you’d actually read the book, you’d know that Neville is all about bravery and kindness and loyalty to his friends.” Annie walked over and looped her arm through mine. “I’m pretty proud to have a friend like that.”

  “Girlfriend, you mean,” Emily snarled. “You’re obviously a lez just like her.”

  Annie tossed her hair and blew Emily a kiss. “You wish, honey. You wish.”

  Annie’s defense of me in the locker room was like battle armor, and I spent the rest of the morning feeling invincible. That is, right up until the moment when I arrived at the cafeteria doors and found no sign of her.

  She’ll be here, I reassured myself as long minutes ticked by. We’d agreed to meet right there, I was sure of it. I peered through the window at the chaos that is our school’s cafeteria. What if she already went in without me?

  “Oh. My. God.” A familiar voice rang out, turning my insides to ice. “Did you see what she was wearing? Some people try way too hard.”

  Courtney.

  I panicked and hunted for an escape route. I didn’t want to miss Annie, but I couldn’t be caught standing there, all alone.

  I let my hair hang down over my face and peeked out from behind my bangs. They didn’t see me yet. I slipped away from the cafeteria doors and headed down the arts hallway, fear coiling in my belly. I was going to miss meeting Annie, I just knew it. Frustrated tears prickled my eyes, and I put my head down to hide them.

  I made a beeline for the safety of the stairwell and crashed headlong into someone racing toward the cafeteria.

  “Sorry!” Annie yelped before recognizing me. “Jessie? What’s wrong?”

  “N-nothing,” I forced out, blinking hard. “Just . . . the first day of school sucks.”

  “You read my mind.” She laughed, looping her arm through mine and pulling me toward the cafeteria. “Sorry I was so late. I got caught up talking to my art teacher.” She held up her phone. “I’d have texted you, but I forgot to ask for your digits.”

  I rattled off my cell number, my heart thumping. “I should get yours, too,” I said, fumbling with my bag.

  “No need. Texting you right. . . . now.”

  I felt my whole body relax. Who was this girl? I’d never felt so immediately comfortable around anyone in my life. “C’mon,” I said, “I’ll show you where to buy the worst food you’ve ever tasted.”


  We waded into the lineup, and I watched in wonder as Annie shamelessly heaped fries, chocolate milk, and two enormous cookies onto her tray. By the time we strolled out to look for a table, I felt giddy, my earlier panic forgotten. For the first time ever, I walked through the cafeteria with my head held high, feeling like a new person with Annie by my side.

  “Who do you usually sit with?” she asked innocently, peering around at the crowded tables.

  My heart lurched, and I snuck a glance at my fellow outcasts at the back table. Charlie and Kevin were sitting with a girl I didn’t recognize. They were all hunched over their laptops, most likely playing an online game over the school’s WiFi.

  I couldn’t take Annie over there. She thought I was cooler than that. “I don’t see the people I sat with last year,” I lied, angling my body away from them and dropping my tray onto the nearest empty table. “Let’s sit here.”

  “Okay . . .” Annie said, looking puzzled. “But . . . isn’t that guy over there waving at you?”

  I looked up to find Charlie flailing his arms like he was about to take flight. Oh, good Lord. I waved back and smiled shyly at Annie. “He’s just someone I know from class.”

  “Should we go sit with them?”

  “Maybe another time,” I said, not wanting to share her.

  “I think he likes you,” Annie declared, sitting at the table and popping a fry in her mouth.

  “You’re insane.”

  “What? He looks totally bummed we didn’t go over.”

  I looked back at Charlie. He definitely looked disappointed, and I could guess why.

  “Trust me,” I told Annie. “I hung out with them for a while last year, and he never gave me a second glance. If he’s disappointed, it’s because he didn’t get a chance to meet the hot new redhead at school.”

  Annie

  Holy shit.

  “Are you kidding me?” I whirl around and glare at Jessie. “You’re crazy, you know that? Certifiable.”

  “You hate it,” Jess says, like a complete idiot.

  “I love it! I cannot believe this is the room you were afraid to show me. I’m so stinking jealous that if I didn’t like you so much, I’d hate you.”

  Jess’s face melts into a relieved smile. She’s such a freak. I swear to God, she worries about the most random shit. She obsessed all the way home from school, telling me over and over that she hasn’t redone her room since she was a kid, and that she’s never put much thought into it. I was expecting Dora the Explorer and Barbies, the way she was freaking out.

  I drop my backpack by the door and rush into the room. “Would you look at all this space?” I say, twirling around with arms spread wide. “I could do cartwheels in here.”

  Jessie inches into the room and I grab her by the hands, twirling with her until we both fall, dizzy and laughing, onto carpet so thick I feel like it’s hugging me.

  “It’s like nerdvana in here,” I tell her, surveying the room.

  Her face falls. “That’s me.” She sighs. “Nerd extraordinaire.”

  “Nerds are sexy,” I say, pulling on her ponytail before getting up to check out her books. No joke, Jess has an entire wall of bookshelves, filled with the most kick-ass collection of books I’ve ever seen. I run my fingers along the spines, feeling like I’m looking into her brain. There’s something of everything in here, from Judy Blume to A. S. King, to Maya Angelou to Charles Bukowski. There must be thousands of dollars of books on these shelves. This isn’t a bedroom—it’s a library.

  And there’s more.

  She has a fucking reading area. And I’m not just talking about a beanbag chair in the corner. This girl has a full-on leather armchair, with a wooden table and a fancy reading lamp, like something out of a magazine.

  And her bed. My God.

  When I was a kid, I remember clearly the bed I wanted more than life itself. It was pink and girly and had a canopy. I shit you not, it was the exact bed Jessie has in her room.

  If you paid a Hollywood stylist to design the perfect room to suit Jess’s personality, she couldn’t have come up with anything more perfect.

  “Your room is probably way cooler,” Jess says, picking at the carpet and eyeing me nervously.

  “Are you crazy? My room is four blank walls and a bunch of unpacked boxes. I just never know what to do with my room, you know? I don’t know how to make it mine, like you have.”

  I wander over to the far wall, where Jess has posted a collection of quotes.

  “Let me guess which is your favorite,” I say, running my fingers over the papers before stopping on one that makes me smile. “This one?”

  It’s “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

  Jessie laughs and shakes her head. “That’s a good one, but I love this one more.” She points to a quote from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: “Reality continues to ruin my life.”

  I stop in front of a page marked Alice in Wonderland and feel the air rush out of my lungs. It reads, “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

  “That’s a good one too.” She pulls the page off the wall and hands it to me. “For your room. It’s time you started decorating it.”

  I could kiss her.

  Instead, I grab my sketchbook out of my bag and head for her bookshelf. “Let’s find some new ones to add to the wall.”

  We sprawl on the carpet, flipping through books and sharing the quotes we find. Jess scribbles her favorites into a journal she pulled off the bookshelf, and I copy mine into my sketchbook before adding drawings and embellishments.

  I’m finishing my fifth or sixth sketch when I look up and realize that more than an hour has passed in silence. I sneak a look at Jess. She’s sitting cross-legged with a book in her lap, chewing on a piece of hair that’s come loose from her ponytail. I stop sketching quotes and start drawing her instead. There’s something so intense about watching someone when they don’t know anyone’s looking. All the stuff they carry around with them falls away, and you can catch the quickest glimpse of who they really are, underneath everything.

  I’m drawing Jessie’s eyes and marveling at how the little line that’s usually between them smooths out when she reads, and at that moment she looks up and catches me watching her.

  “What?” she asks, swiping at her cheeks. “Do I have something on my face?”

  I shake my head and stop sketching. The little line is back on her forehead. “I was drawing you,” I tell her, holding up the page so she can see.

  “Oh my gosh,” Jessie breathes. “That’s amazing.” She comes over and sits beside me. “I didn’t know you could draw like that.”

  I shrug. “Drawing is easy. It just takes practice.”

  “Clearly you’ve never seen my impressive collection of stick figures.”

  I look down at the drawing in my lap. I’ve messed up the eyes, I realize. And the shape of the face isn’t quite right. I flip back to a book-quote page. I don’t usually show my sketches to anyone, and I’m not sure what possessed me to share a half-finished one.

  “Any new quotes?” I ask, gesturing at her notebook.

  She picks it up and reads a few to me. She’s come up with: “I am haunted by humans”(Markus Zusak), “Sometimes people just want to be happy, even if it’s not real” (Veronica Roth), and “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them” (Lemony Snicket).

  She looks over at my sketchbook, open to “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live,” and groans. “No Harry Potter.”

  I blink at her in surprise and then remember the locker room. “Don’t be stupid. You can’t let a bunch of idiots turn you off of Harry Potter. You’re a reader!” She looks like she’s about to cry. “Besides,” I add, “you are so Hermione Granger.”

  She laughs through her tears. “It’s the hair, isn’t it?”

  “Kinda,” I admit. “But mostly ’cause you’re boo
kish and smart.”

  She points at my sketchbook. “What else have you got in there?”

  I flip through the pages, stopping at a quote I memorized from The Bell Jar. “This one’s my favorite: ‘I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.’”

  “I’ve felt like that,” she whispers.

  I nod, and flip through the other quotes I’ve sketched out. She stops me at “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”

  “I love that,” she says, surprised. “I’ve never seen it before. Where’d you find it?”

  “I actually don’t know where it’s from. My dad says it all the time, and it just popped into my head.” I pull the page out of my sketchbook and hand it to her. “From me. This’ll be my contribution to your wall.”

  “Our wall,” she corrects, taping the page to the empty space where the Alice in Wonderland quote used to be.

  “Yes,” I agree, feeling at home for the first time since we moved out here.

  Our wall.

  Jessie

  Annie is the geekiest cool girl ever. She’s like a rebellious supermodel who’s secretly a complete nerd underneath.

  I mean, really, how many girls with true popularity potential would opt to join the Avery Family Games Night willingly? I thought I was going to die on Monday when my mom told Annie all about our Friday night ritual of tacos and board games, but Annie practically begged for an invitation.

  She’s been over at my house nearly every day since school started, but never for one of our goofy family dinners. I was a complete basket case before she came over tonight, and my mother’s antics certainly didn’t help.

  “Look what I found,” Mom singsonged about half an hour before Annie was due to arrive. She held up the most enormous sombrero I’d ever seen. It was green and yellow, with little white balls hanging off the rim. “Can you believe I found one for Annie?”