PART 1

Chapter 1: I Hate the World

My parallel life with Shawn Henderson has been going on for eight years. It started with the dinners. The third Friday night of each month, my parents visit the Hendersons and drag me along. Bob Henderson is Dad's boss and golf buddy. They're supposedly "old pals," but all this means is that Dad behaves like an eccentric chihuahua on steroids in Bob's presence. It's revolting.

Our parents kept lumping Shawn and me together—as if we belong in the same universe and are automatically supposed to be friends just because we're the same age.

Eight years ago, we were both nine, and even back then, Shawn was too popular for his own good. It's not difficult to become popular when you're that small. Just have the neatest toys, the best snacks, the most exciting family vacations, and the nicest sneakers, plus the confidence to back it all up, and you're practically a god among the other kids.

We didn't attend the same elementary school, but I didn't need to be in his class to know how popular he was. He told me, with alarming awareness for a kid, how he got the other kids to worship him. He bragged about pitting them against each other, getting them to fight over who sat next to him on the school bus, who was on his team in PE, and who was allowed to play with him during recess. He controlled everything, he said, but they never noticed, and they loved him.

The obvious question to ask was why he would reveal himself to me and risk that he may someday, somehow, be exposed to the world?

But what's the point of purposefully being a jerk if you can't brag about it to someone? He saw my potential value as a girl not from his school. I was someone to commemorate his genius. If he kept the knowledge of what he was doing to himself, it was as if he wasn't actually doing it.

During the first few dinners, he would take me to his father's "den", try to offer me chocolate bars, which I always refused, and would talk and talk, looking happy and relieved. I would sit there on the overstuffed sofa and think to myself, This kid reminds me of Draco Malfoy, only less blond.

The first time he actually asked me a question about myself was on the sixth dinner.

"You're not popular in your school, are you?" He claimed for years that he didn't remember my name. He called me "you."

It was slightly better than what I called him. To his face, I didn't call him at all, but behind his back, he was "Greasy Fart-Face."

I remember rolling my eyes in response to his question. It was the stupidest question I had ever heard.

"I knew it," he replied triumphantly. "Everyone hates you because your hair is all orange and ugly."

Back then, my hair was a lot brighter than it is today. It was an orange that screamed at people. I had plenty of freckles too and hated every single one of them. But people didn't hate me—they were afraid of me. I was as intimidating as a sleeping serpent.

I still am.

"At least people feel something when they see me," I said. I was nine. I didn't actually understand that he was only goading me. "When they see you, they don't feel anything."

His face became very sour at my words. He wasn't expecting me to say that. It wasn't true; people loved him. He looked like a sweet angel back then, with huge blue eyes and a mane of dark curls. He had apples for cheeks, apples.

But I knew he wasn't as confident as he let everyone believe. I knew how to give voice to his small, bothersome insecurities. Like Shawn, even as a child, I had striking awareness of the world around me and how people in it worked.

Yet, I didn't realize that I had created a monster.

***

"I don't know what you're talking about." My dad blatantly denies my accusations from the front seat of the car, his knuckles white as he clutches the steering wheel.

Mom turns to me and gives me a knowing smirk. We're in on this together. The only real way to make him listen is to gang up on him.

"Dad," I say in a flat tone, "we can smell it, you know? You reek of that shit."

"Sophie, language!" My dad loses his composure, his voice rising in pitch.

"Steve," Mom hisses. "Don't raise your voice."

"Yeah, Dad, yelling at me won't make you any less of a liar."

"Sophie!" Mom turns in her seat again, this time to glare at me warningly. There're boundaries, like name calling, that she doesn't want me to cross.

I snort. "Whatever."

That's my catchphrase. I'm Sophie "Whatever" Green. My mom thinks that she also had a "whatever" phase when she was a teen.

But it's not a phase for me; it's my whole life philosophy. It's who I am.

"It was one cigarette." Dad finally passes the denial stage and moves on to the "making it sound not as bad as it is" stage.

"Then that makes it okay," I say acidly. "Remind me how many Dr. Brooks said you can have?"

"Doctors always exaggerate."

Oh, Dad. He can never take the blame. It's not him indulging his addiction; it's doctors who make heart conditions fatal. Most people have this kind of logic. It always makes me wonder how the human race progressed so far. I roll my eyes. "Maybe if you explained that to your arteries, they'd understand."

"That's not—"

"Or you can have that CABG you've always dreamed of."

Dr. Brooks had been very clear about it. Dad has to shape up, or the best-case scenario would be that they'd have to perform a coronary artery bypass grafting—that is, if he manages to survive his next heart attack. My retort leaves him speechless, and the whole car submerges into icy silence.

Mom is the one to break it. She begins snickering. "Trying to take on Sophie isn't worth the trouble, dear," she tells Dad, who laughs at her words and winks at me from the rearview mirror.

I turn to look out the window. I don't think it's funny when he does these things. I need him not to die.

Dad pulls over by the Hendersons' place.

We get out of the car and step up the path to the Hendersons' huge mahogany front door. I frown at the perfectly manicured rose bushes the entire way. A boy I made out with last year told me I resemble a rose bush. The initial impression of beauty can make people overlook the thorns until it's too late.

The Hendersons' house is gigantic in a way that lacks proportion and taste. It's tacky and gaudy, just like everything to do with them.

Cintia Henderson greets us at the door. I don't know what kind of torture she's subjected her face to, but it makes her look slightly less than alive. Her skin is stretched and puffy with a yellowish sheen I'd expect to see on the face of a zombie.

"Lovely as always, Cin," my mom says with her best plastic smile. I try not to blanch.

"Elizabeth! Steven! Oh, and Sophie! You look so pretty with your hair down! I would kill for that color!" Cintia exclaims.

"By all means, you can have it," I say, and God help me, my foot hasn't even stepped through the door and I already feel bored.

"What a dear." Cintia laughs as she ushers us in. "Shawn!" she screams up the stairway, her sudden shout making me bristle. Her voice echoes through the cavernous living room.

"Coming, Mom." Shawn's voice flutters down from upstairs.

The familiar despair steals through me when faced with the prospect of meeting Shawn Henderson again.

I mean, meeting him here again.

We're sitting in the living room tasting marzipan figurines. I don't like candy, I don't like eating things that are shaped and colored to look like other things—in this case, it's all manner of colorful flowers and little birds—and I can't describe how horrible chucks of ground almond mixed with sugar taste. But I pretend, for my parents. I nibble marzipan and pretend I don't want to hurl.

Finally, Shawn graces us with his presence. He comes trotting down the stairs and walks into the living room with a spring in his step. Two out of every three girls in my school have a crush on him. Cintia's from Colombia, and Bob's heritage is something Eastern European. The combination of genes brought to the world a creature of perpetual physical perfection. Dark-haired, tan-skinned, but with luminous blue eyes framed by long dark eyelashes and chiseled cheekbones that could probably cut glass. Not only is he athletic with the body of a dancer—lithe, strong, and sculpted—but he always gets the highest grades in everything and supposedly has a charming personality.

I won't argue with the facts. He's gorgeous. Only I know the prick he is inside. He's a beast and a player and keeps a list on his phone of all the girls he's slept with. He rates them too, from one to five, marking the "irregular" ones with little stars.

I hope to never find out what irregular means.

We're complete strangers in school, but once a month, I have to endure the agony of interacting with him and bearing witness to all his dirty little secrets. I may not give the best example of filial piety, but I love my parents enough to do all this for them.

Let's get this over with.

"Fee!" he cries, his face the picture of delight—he even has his very own nickname for me. Then he turns his radiant smile over to my parents, and I have a moment to myself to make sure I'm not wearing a huge scowl.

It's only a split second, and then I go and do the hardest part of the evening.

I smile.

Smiling when you're unhappy is the worst. It's like being possessed by an evil spirit that wants to rip your facial muscles out of your head. But this is what I have to do. I have to play this game so my parents won't be embarrassed. I have to put on this show so I won't alarm anyone, so they won't find out who and what I really am.

It's not that I'm ashamed of it. I'm me. I love myself. I don't want to change. I've always managed to accept the way I am.

But other people can't. When they think you've got your head screwed on the wrong way, they can't help it—they'll try to straighten you out.

They don't understand that this is fundamentally me. No shrink can fix me—and believe me, they've tried. They all think that if you're different mentally from other people but otherwise appear overall normal, then that means you can be talked out of it.

Over time, I learned to pretend and follow the patterns of normalcy well enough to save the expenses of useless therapy. My parents are still worried sometimes. I get it, but the idea is to keep those levels of worry on a manageable scale.

The one thing they must never find out is that I, Sophie Green, hate the world.

"There's a bit of time before dinner," Cintia says on cue. "Why don't you kids run along to the den?"

"Sounds like a plan," I say as I struggle to keep my smile from turning into a grimace.

Shawn snakes his arm around my elbow, his face radiant. "We promise to behave," he announces with a wink as he begins leading me away.

Yeah, right. We promise to behave badly.