Surviving High School

she said. “I’m not exactly welcome at the center table anymore, either.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Let’s just say I may have miscalculated when I thought I could dump Phil for Marcus. Apparently, contrary to what popular culture would have you believe, boys sometimes do talk to each other about relationships.”
    “Sorry.”
    “It gets worse,” said Kimi. “I kind of accidentally left a few documents open in my e-mail on a library computer. And Amir kind of forwarded them to his account so he could study them in depth. And he may have kind of mass-forwarded them to everyone at school.”
    “So all those pro/con sheets you made—”
    “Public knowledge. What guy in school is going to ever want to go to a dance with me now?”
    “Wow. So someone’s life does suck worse than mine.”
    “Thanks. That’s nice. Really.”
    “Sorry if I’m not exactly in the mood to comfort you about your boy drama.”
    “Well, I’m sorry if my life isn’t as tragic as yours,” said Kimi, getting to her feet. “Sorry for bothering you with my stupid little problems.”
    “Kimi, I didn’t mean—”
    “Even when our lives are going well you find a way to make me feel bad about things. Why would I possibly think you could console me now?”
    “Kimi,” Emily started. “Wait. I didn’t mean to—” But it was too late. Emily’s best friend—the only friend she had left—was gone.
    At the point when her friendship with Kimi imploded, Emily was pretty sure her day couldn’t get any worse. She was wrong. By the time she arrived at Honors History, Emily was so upset about her talk with Kimi that she’d completely forgotten about her missing textbook—that is, until Mr. McBride shouted, “Books out! Flip to two-thirty-nine to consult table twenty-two B. Chinese dynasties.”
    Emily unzipped her backpack and looked helplessly inside, willing her textbook to reappear. It did not.
    “Ms. Kessler,” Mr. McBride said, stopping by her desk. “Left our book at home, did we?”
    “No,” she said quietly. She thought about trying to explain what Dominique had done, but it seemed pointless. She had no proof, and Mr. McBride wasn’t the type to believe students’ excuses anyway.
    “Oh?” he asked. “You’re not trying to tell me it’s—”
    “It’s lost,” she said, defeated, trying not to let her facebetray any emotion. Her B-minus would become a C-minus now, the lowest grade she’d ever gotten.
    Mr. McBride took a step back and looked away from her.
    “Right,” he said. “Most unfortunate. You’ll have to look on with another student for the time being. Please come see me after class if you’d like to discuss your other options.”
    When class ended, though, Emily just couldn’t face him. She picked up her backpack and left without a word.
    For the next three nights, Emily could have gone to sleep at ten thirty like usual. She was certainly in bed by then, earlier even. Trying to make up for her lost hours of rest, her dad had instituted a nine o’clock bedtime. But instead of sleeping, Emily stared at the ceiling, thinking about everything that had gone wrong. Ben seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, Kimi wasn’t speaking to her, and Emily couldn’t even get online to IM Kimi, since her dad had taken the computer.
    If Sara really had dated Nick Brown, Emily was starting to understand why she’d kept it a secret. As it turned out, the truth often had consequences—especially when their dad was involved.
    Emily’s mind ran in loops as she tried to figure out how everything had gone wrong, and whether it could be fixed, but no matter how many times she thought things through, the solution eluded her. She might as well have tried to stick a broken egg back together with glue and tape. She couldn’t sneak out anymore, and there was certainly no way she couldgo to the dance. And she was who she was. She couldn’t change into the kind of friend Kimi wanted her to be.
    Over and over again, she imagined Ben showing up at an unfamiliar house in a well-tailored suit. He approached the doorway and pulled a bouquet of roses from behind his back as Lindsay or Hannah or even Kimi opened the door. The girl threw her arms around him and nearly devoured him with kisses before tossing the flowers carelessly aside and running with him hand in hand to his car. After they’d left, Emily, who had been watching from behind a tree, would pick up the flowers to smell them, but they’d turn stale and