Chapter Two — The First 

Annie Allen isn't just waiting by my jeep—she's draped over it like a dare. Arms folded, chin tipped the way she does when she wants the last word before the conversation even starts. Dust has settled across the back bumper in a soft film; Annie never cares about dust. She cares about leverage and timing, two things she understands better than anyone I know.

"Out here in the parking lot now?" I ask, trying to sound unfazed. It comes out half a smirk, half a swallow.

Across the row, Wesley Henderson moves with his friends in a loose, easy tide. He's laughing at something, shoulders shaking, a sound I know without hearing it up close. My brain flickers, unhelpfully, to that night behind the abandoned church: damp grass, air that smelled like leftover rain and old stone, the way we both acted like the dark could hide us from ourselves. Firsts aren't supposed to happen in places that feel like disappearing. But sometimes they do, and you tell yourself it doesn't count if no one names it.

At school, daylight rules apply. He and I are strangers, perfectly edited. But my phone will remember us. It always does.

"We're just hanging out," Annie says, pushing off the fender and tugging on the door handle. "Since when is that a crime? Also, I'm changing. No way am I being seen next to Christian Day in a uniform."

"Yeah, it'd be a crime if—" The rest of the sentence snags on the truth I won't say out loud. If you knew about him. If anyone did. This town chews secrets like gum until the flavor's gone and then spits them into the middle of the hallway for someone else to step in. People love a story as long as it cuts someone else.

Annie flicks through my playlist and grimaces at the first song. "Emergency," she announces, deadpan. "This is not a parking-lot soundtrack." She taps until a riff she likes kicks in, then pops a Coke and wedges it between her hands. The cap clatters somewhere under my seat. She doesn't bother looking for it. "Let's go."

By the time we turn into my driveway, the porch light is off and the windows are a soft, friendly dark. Relief and nerves braid together in my chest. Empty house, empty rules; the kind of freedom that can feel like falling if you look down too long.

Inside, Annie drops her bag by the door like she lives here, then disappears down the hall. When she comes back, she's swapped the uniform for a faded grunge tee and cutoffs, hair still bright and freshly mauve, smelling faintly like drugstore dye and cherry chapstick. She sprawls across the couch with the entitlement of a cat, toes nudging the armrest until she carves out her idea of perfect comfort.

"Pizza's ordered," she announces from the kitchen. "Pepperoni, extra cheese."

"You could add pants," I say, collapsing into the opposite cushion.

She grins without looking over. "Later. When society demands it."

She returns with two glasses and the last clean plate in the house, balanced precariously. She sets the plate down, then thumbs through the streaming apps like a doctor reading charts. I watch the cut on her thumb from yesterday's art class—ink-stained, bandaged badly, very Annie.

"You only ever call when you want noise to drown out the real noise," she says, not unkind. "Which, to be clear, I respect. I contain multitudes and also I'm good at drowning."

"That's a terrible superpower."

"Useful, though." She nudges my knee with her foot. "You okay?"

The question is casual, but it lands hard. I am about to say something reassuring and generic when my phone vibrates against my thigh.

Ping.

Then again, insistently.

Ping.

Names don't need to appear. You just know.

Wes: r u thr? 🤩
Wes: u ok babe? 😍

Babe. The word is small on the screen and huge behind my ribs, warm and electric, the kind of word that can tip a whole day onto its side if you let it. He's never once said it out loud. Neither have I. We keep everything written, like the alphabet can save us.

I text back before I can second-guess it.
Me: I'm here 🖤

The typing bubble appears, disappears, returns, disappears. I don't wait for his next message. Instead I catch my reflection in the hallway mirror—hair long enough to fall into my eyes when I let it, the purple box still sitting unopened on my dresser upstairs, waiting for a braver version of me. I tilt my phone, find a flattering angle that looks accidental, and send a mirror selfie. No caption. Nothing clever. The urge to attach a whole explanation pulses under my skin and then recedes.

When I drift back to the living room, the TV screen is dark, the app still parked on the title card of something we won't watch. The Coke can is gone; the glass sweats slowly on the table. Annie's an expert at exiting without ceremony—push, then vanish. A napkin on the arm of the couch has a doodled heart and a lightning bolt, her shorthand for call me if it's an emergency or if you're bored enough to pretend it is.

The door is cracked. She didn't slam it. She never slams anything.

The pizza shows up twenty minutes later. I eat two slices in tired silence and save hers in the fridge, because that's also part of the rhythm: she will text at midnight or not at all.

Morning arrives as an ache behind my eyes and a crust of cold pizza on the plate beside my bed. Adam Lambert hums through the speaker on low, half-asleep, almost like he's trying not to wake the house. I stretch until my shoulders pop and stare at the ceiling where the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck up in middle school still insist on their tiny constellations. It makes me smile and also a little sad.

Another ping. I don't need to check to know.

I don't open it yet. Jeans. Plain shirt. Tie I have to redo twice because my hands can't remember how on the first try. I find the purple dye box on the dresser and set it on top of a folded slip of paper with an address and a schedule—the one Aunt Linda gave me. I don't move either thing, like stacking them means they cancel each other out.

When I finally check my phone, Wes's notification lights the screen and then fades. I let it. I don't have the language for him and morning at the same time.

By the time Annie climbs into the jeep, cigarette already lit and windows cracked, she leads with, "Who'd you ditch me for last night, asshole?" No hello. Love in her language rarely comes in hello.

"Maybe Miley Cyrus," I say, pulling away from the curb. "We FaceTimed. She told me to buy better boots."

"Cute. You retired Miley in sixth grade." She flicks ash out the window. "Fine. Then it's Candy Walker. I've seen you two in Bio. That lab bench sizzles when you look at her."

I huff a laugh. "Candy is great."

"But?" she prompts, delighted.

I check my mirror and take the turn a little too carefully. "Not... my type."

Annie studies me for a beat that feels like an X-ray. She's always had a talent for reading the parts you think you've tucked away. "You've got that look," she says at last, tugging her button-down over a band tee and snapping it into place. "Like you're hiding something. But hey—keep your secrets. I'm not the court."

It should sting. It doesn't. It lands more like a blanket being tossed over a sleeping person. Annie's mercy is loud, but it is mercy.

One of our forever songs comes on and she sings the wrong words cheerfully, like she has every year since we were kids. It's impossible not to smile. We hit the long stretch toward school with the windows open and the kind of crisp morning that makes you believe you could start over if you wanted to.

My phone buzzes in the cup holder. I leave it there. Buzzing can be a soundtrack, too.

"You're gonna dye it?" she asks, eyeing my hair. "Purple-purple, or fake-purple that dies after three showers?"

"Undecided," I say. "Commitment issues."

She snorts. "Understatement of the year."

We laugh the rest of the block to the light. It's easy with her, until it isn't.

At school, she peels toward her locker with a two-finger salute without looking back. I angle for the boys' room, shoulder the door with the same practiced casual that says I'm not here for anything in particular. Inside, someone laughs from the sinks and another voice asks for the time. I slide into a stall and lock it. Tile. Echo. The overhead fluorescents have a barely audible hum that becomes a roar if you're listening for it.

Ping.

I already know who.

I thumb the screen. Wes, camera tilted slightly down, glitter dusted across his cheekbone like he walked through a galaxy and forgot to brush it off. His soccer number is inked on his face in blocky marker, a dare and a joke. The caption reads: #ChanningTatumCanSuckIt. It's ridiculous and perfect, the kind of bravado that covers for softness. My mouth does an involuntary thing I will not name.

I take a breath and angle my own phone. Cobain fringe down, eyes shadowed, the version of me that looks most like a bunker. I snap one shot, then another where I let my mouth almost smile and then don't. These are only for him. I don't even store them in the same folder as anything else, like my phone could know which things matter and keep them safe separately.

My thumb hovers over send long enough for my screen to dim. I wake it up and con myself into thinking I'll decide in one more second.

Ping.
Wes: meetup 2nite 😜

The thought that arrives first is not yes or no but where. The second is what if. The third is a memory that doesn't belong to this morning at all—grass under my shoes, the cold side of stone on my back, the feeling of being seen in the dark and pretending that meant we were invisible.

The bell shears through the hall with the usual violence. A body of voices shoves itself into the bathroom all at once. Sneakers squeak on wet tile. A backpack thuds against the paper towel dispenser. Someone makes a joke that is only funny to the person telling it. And then a familiar cadence cuts through the noise: his. I don't hear words at first, just the way his sentences rise and fall, the exact rhythm of who he is when he thinks no one is measuring the sound.

I freeze, breath cupped in my mouth. The stall door is a thin, cheap secret. Footsteps shift, a stall down. A hand slaps water against a sink. Someone says dude, amused. There's a clink of something that could be a ring hitting porcelain, a zipper, the rustle of a plastic wrapper, or maybe I'm inventing half of it because that's what panic does: fills in the blanks with the worst possible shapes.

"Hold up," a voice says. Not his. "You good?"

Wes answers too low for me to make out the words, but I can picture exactly how his mouth moves when he's not letting anyone see what he really means: a shrug you can hear, a smile that sounds like it.

My phone lights again in my palm and I kill it with my thumb before the sound can betray me. The silence I create is so loud I have to close my eyes to stay inside it.

There are a hundred ways to open a door. There are a hundred ways to keep it closed. Every one of them is a decision you're going to have to live with. I count the seconds like I'm waiting for a storm to pass, even though storms don't pass; they spend themselves and leave you to clean up.

The voices filter back out the way they came—less a retreat than a redirection. The bathroom breathes. Somewhere down the hall, a locker door slams with the unsubtle punctuation of the late. I unlock the stall and stand there with my hand still on the latch like I need permission from a piece of metal to exist.

In the mirror, I don't look different. That's the most dangerous lie. I splash water on my face and fail at making it look like I meant to. Then I check my phone again because I am not better than my own worst habits.

The message thread is exactly where I left it: meetup 2nite 😜 hovering like a dare over the rest of my day. I type maybe and delete it. I type where and delete that too. I finally send nothing. The absence of an answer is also an answer. For now.

As I step into the hallway, the tide of people shoves me forward, the way it always does between bells, like motion is a law and we're all too obedient to question it. I find the color of Annie's hair in the crowd a half-second before she finds me. She lifts her brows like a question mark and I give her the smallest nod that says I'm fine, or at least I will be. She doesn't press. She grins, mouths lunch? and I nod again, grateful for the simplicity of a plan.

The day pulls me along. The message sits in my pocket like a coin I can't stop touching, warm from my hand, heavy from meaning. When the next bell rings, I decide I'll answer him after third period. When third period ends, I tell myself fourth is better. Somewhere between one bell and the next, I realize I am building a bridge out of maybes and hoping it takes me somewhere other than the place I already know.

Whatever he came into the bathroom for today, whatever version of himself he brought with him—it wasn't harmless. Neither is mine. That doesn't stop me from wanting to meet it halfway.

And wanting is its own weather. You feel the storm before it hits.