I woke to the sound of my grandmother unloading the dishwasher. Her early morning ritual had been my alarm clock for as long as I could remember.

I should have felt like a million bucks. It was going to be an interesting summer, that's for sure. Even Spencer Pearce hadn't thrown that much of a wrench into my reign of the two-piece.

I was still excited. I should have been. But my stomach flipped when I replayed those blue eyes burning into mine for the hundredth time since last night. Relax! It's not like I would bump into Adrian in the hallway. Honesty, I wished I would.

Passing by him with no nod of recognition over what we'd done... as if all were normal under the umbrella of Pure Pines' would have honestly felt better. It would have given me a catch and release, the way I imagine people addicted to pain must feel. The idea of the devil-you-know, or some messed up shit like that. Ugh!

Not knowing if what happened in his room between us meant anything, or if it mattered to him was pure agony.

That, and how do you go from being the most innocent of all your friends to an act that curiously teetered on slutty? He wasn't my boyfriend. What base even was that? Third? I had been on proper dates sure, not many, but none had ended in so much as a good night's kiss, much less that position.

Was it weird or worse of me that I never wondered if he did this with anyone else?

Maybe I was just naïve to think it was something reserved for the two of us. Was it odd that I wasn't ashamed or didn't feel like a freak? It felt natural with him, even though basic human requirements like a conversation or general respect didn't.

I made it through my first exam period. It was AP English, and I already had an "A" plus. Again, I should be happy.

"Hello! Earth to July! My God you're hard to track down. I looked all over for you this morning at break." Lynn joined my maneuver through the hallway with the enthusiasm I should have had this morning.

"I went straight to the English hall when I got here."

"Well, spill! What happened?!" I stopped— dumbstruck— staring back at her. It was all I could do to keep from saying, which part?

"Reagan said you got the two piece and they let you vote with the other head girl guards! Way to make a baller impression! Also, was he there?"

Again, who?

"Spencer Pearce?! Last night I heard he was home for the summer and would be working with you."

"He was there."

"Sorry I couldn't warn you. Did he recognize you?"

I opened my locker and tried to focus on the rest of the day as I answered idle questions. I had to admit, I was relieved she knew nothing about yesterday. It was closer to home and more interesting than the elusive washed-up Spencer Pearce.

"I don't think he did, or if he did, it was no more than knowing I'm from Pure Pines as a face he'd passed in the hallway."

"Oh BS! You're so dismissive, I'm sure he knew exactly who you were." Lynn adjusted one of her books about to fall. I tried to change the subject.

"Do you have more exams today? Oh, wait! How did calculus go?! Did you guys kill it?!" At that moment, a wave of students poured out of the math hall, and I couldn't help but look over Lynn's shoulder as the double glass doors pushed open. It was a pathetic habit.

"He's not here." Lynn's dry tone and unenthused look made me suddenly aware of just how pathetic and telling of a habit it was. "They let Samuel drive him home immediately after the test."

"I wasn't looking for—I was looking for Mrs. Keagan."

"Um hmm. For this?" Lynn held up a familiar "F" circled in red.

Oh my God! Wait. Did I drop it in the math lab, and Keagan found it? No. I absolutely looked at it between leaving the school and the truck. Oh my God! 

"How did you get that?! Did Keagan give it to you?"

"No, Adrian. He said he reworked your mistakes and wrote notes on the back. He said you'd know what he meant on the last problem. Why didn't you tell me you needed help? I gave you my notes from last year, I could have explained everything to you." Lynn seemed surprised or offended.

I was somewhere between confused and mortified, thinking of every remote possibility of how my epic fail had ended up in her hands and more over the hands that had passed it to her.

"Well if you must know, I sure as hell didn't ask Adrian for help either! How did you guys get this?" I took the paper from her and stuffed it in my notebook.

"You didn't give it to him yesterday when you stopped by?"

"No." It suddenly dawned on me. One, I must have left it attached to Adrian's assignments, and two... stopped by. Good, she knew nothing of our encounter. He had shared nothing except my "F," apparently. I didn't know if that was a huge relief or an insult to the act itself. However, what did he say that had her all riled up over my final trig grade?

"I must have not realized it was stuck to his assignments when I stuffed everything from Mrs. Keagan in your notebook for him."

"Well, either way, July, you should have told me you were struggling. This was the last quiz before your final. Are you going to be able to bring your grade up to passing?"

"First off, you don't know how good or bad I've done on every other quiz. I can't believe you would assume it's as bad as it looks! I'll be fine. I always am."

"Adrian seems to think so as well."

"What?!!"

"He says if you just go over the rework and understand the note on the back you'll get all the others right, no problem. Still, as your smartest friend..."

I cut my eyes at her.

"Okay, fine, as the best one of us at math, can you see how this makes me look bad that you would go to Adrian for help instead of yours truly."

"I didn't go to him for help!!!"

"Relax. You should have, with a grade like that. You know any of us would have helped you, right?" She ducked her face down to mine to observe my response. She was sincere, but I knew the question was more than that.

Lynn was always the most conscious of my silent crush and the bizarre friendship she and Reagan had with her neighbor. The bond outside of our girls' group had grown more and more exclusive since Adrian's knee injury, thanks to Keagan's university-level calculous antics.

Lynn was honest to a fault. I knew it was hard for her to spend time with Reagan and Adrian apart from me. It made sense they'd have their own version of math club-like hangouts to study with him. He was missing entire lectures Lynn and Reagan would have to relay to him. In tern they benefited from the automatic study group.

They were like three super-hot nerds who could exchange notes without even talking math shop. They ended up putting their heads together about everything else instead, and it didn't bother me that their friendship grew as a trio. How could it? Three of the people that interested me most in the world growing closer. It was kind of unique if you looked at it from a distance.

However, standing right outside it, you couldn't help but feel the distance, which stung a little.

I knew Lynn felt the burden of the situation excluding me. Of all people, she was his best friend, so she had the least to feel guilty about. Still, she was the first to eighty-six inside jokes she and Reagan would recall out of the blue that they had shared with Adrian.

I think Reagan often blurted them out purposely in an attempt to include me. Explaining them was awkward; the reality would be the looming pink elephant in the room ... July and Adrian. Reagan dealt with my absence on those occasions by making it up to me after. You had to love friends like that. From what I could tell, they never infringed on either of our privacies. I think they were aware how difficult it must have been for me that they got to see him outside of school, when I didn't get to see him at all.

As much as I appreciated that, I often wondered if it wasn't because they knew something I didn't. Maybe Adrian had declared to them that he had no interest in me whatsoever. Maybe he had simply said enough for them to know he didn't.

The bell rang, and we both realized we were late for our next testing cycle. Lynn slapped me on the rear, pushing me toward history. "Luck! I'm out after Chemistry. Talk to me later!" I turned over my shoulder and gave a half smile as she sashayed away.

"Maybe." I gave her an entire smile and turned back down the hall.

"Oh, hey! Adrian said Keagan wants you to stop by and see her after classes today. She's got a final tutorial session, and bring the quiz with his notes, he said!"

I halted, listening to her shout after me, but I did not look back or respond. Now my mind was racing back and forth between the humiliation of leaving my big shiny "F" for Adrian to see and know that of me, and how it had gone from him to Mrs. Keagan to Lynn???

Since when have I taken his orders via our mutual friends and faculty? What the entire "F"?! Did the whole student body know of my Trig quiz? Were they all rooting for me, or waiting for me to fail in the background.

This was ridiculous! He had no right to talk to Mrs. Keagan about me! I was angry. I already felt sub-par in our friendship for all the obvious reasons, and I certainly felt beneath anyone Adrian desired to date publicly, or at all for that matter.

What was this? Sorry we dry-humped for no reason, but then I found out you were stupider than I thought, so I'm trying to help??? Is that what his note on the back would say? The note.

I retrieved the infamous quiz from my backpack as I raced into history and slid into my seat, nodding as politely as possible to Coach Bartlett. He frowned at me but continued his pre-exam speech.

I quickly flipped the front "F" page to reveal the last stapled page. I needed to go through the motions to maintain some dignity of keeping my math failures from prying eyes... although at that point, who hadn't seen my "F" of a fucking quiz?!

My heart sank into the pit of my stomach when I saw that the last page had been folded in half and stapled into itself. Across the clean white folded part of the page was familiar handwriting with July gingerly written across it. I closed my eyes and saw Adrian's face, his eyes burning into mine from the evening before, and I froze.

It took me a long moment to peel the folded page away from the attached staple. I saw all of Adrian's math written in a blue pen beside my original work. He showed each step of how he arrived at the correct answer and the order in which one would HAVE to work the equation to get the right result.

I read it to understand and then stared at the meticulously written numbers. Even using ink, he hadn't missed a beat. His handwriting was perfect. That somehow made me angrier. My eyes raced to the very bottom of the page where he had written an explanation of the exception to the rule and when and when not it applied to the history of those two numbers used together in the equation. It was finite, textbook as if he'd copied it from Keagan's mouth and regurgitated it onto my quiz as impersonally as possible.

I flipped the entire quiz over to the back, where there was nothing but blank space. No note. No "Hi, "bye" or "kiss my ass." Nothing.

I warned myself to relax and prep for the current exam being passed out. Come on, what did I expect? A profession of love, an apology, a dirty joke... something as filthy as what we did? We were on school property; the quiz was Mrs. Keagan's property. What would he do, write something to incriminate me more than the big red "F" seen by all he passed the test through?

Couldn't an "F" just mean an "F" and this was just an exchange for me trying to help him? And, maybe he felt like he owed me for dropping his assignments by. Couldn't that be all it was? Why did I need an actual note from him? Why did I need an explanation of us or him, or why we did that? I had never gotten one before.

Forty-five minutes later, the last one in the room was the first one out. I grabbed my Scantron and test booklet and headed to the back of the classroom, where Coach Bartlett leaned against a stool, bored to tears.

"Really? Edwards, are you sure? I hope you didn't skip on the essay section."

I tilted my head and gave him a look. History was my favorite subject, which showed even on my worst day.

"Who am I kidding? I HOPE this means you did me a favor and didn't write a novel over the Dust Bowl."

I raised an eyebrow and confidently handed him his test booklet back.

"Get out-a-here!" He slapped my arm with the test booklet. "And, have a great summer, kid!!"

"You too, Coach!" I whispered over my shoulder as I bolted out of the room. The hallways were mainly empty. A few dispersed students who had completed exams or were coming early for their next one wandered between the lockers and classrooms. No note?

I couldn't help replaying the messed-up situation in my head. Stupid. How could I expect one? I went from humiliation to letting myself believe there would be an apology. Or a 'meet me somewhere, I have to see you'. I felt ignorant for thinking there would be anything from him other than what it had always been. No phone call. No note. He returned the test to Lynn, not to me.

What did he want from me? I paused by my locker. From a distance, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Natalie Hilliard heading down the hallway with a few of the varsity cheerleaders. The image of the uniquely polite sophomore locking arms and giggling toward the gym with the juniors and seniors who had been my former best friends since the 8th grade was more nostalgic than I had bargained for at that moment.

That was it. That was what Adrian wanted from me. Nothing. He did nothing to pursue me. He asked nothing of me. I could continue through graduation and leave the godforsaken Palomino water tower behind. He would want nothing from me nor know where I went.

My great-aunt used to say that if someone is not asking anything of you, it is fair to assume they want nothing from you. There it was. The answer I longed for all this time had always been this clear. I slammed my locker door as the cheerleaders exited, Natalie's strawberry blonde hair blowing when the breeze hit it. When he wanted to date her, he did. And those few and far between moments with me could only mean only one thing. Was I his dirty little secret?

I walked mechanically toward the math lab in a daze, almost forgetting why I was going and who sent me there. I felt cold inside and stunned. The butterflies that haunted my core for the past twenty-four hours had fled. Adrian truly did not want me. I must have been convenient, around at a moment of weakness, or potentially his dirty little secret, as I had just deduced. Much worse than that... I was an unintended one. I wasn't even worth pursuing consistently as an indiscretion.

I just happened to strike his fancy once or twice, and he acted on it when he could. Wow. I couldn't even suggest he was using me. Again, he didn't want or attempt to do that on a regular basis. To make matters much worse, anyone in their right mind would think that of the situation. It was the appropriate assumption, and I must have known it. Otherwise, I would have told my two best friends about it.

I often wondered why I never told them. Was it because they wouldn't understand this freakish tryst we had the same way I didn't? Or because I knew they would think me pathetic or being used by him? Maybe I feared they'd push him to make good on it, then I'd never know if it was by his own accord that he chose me or something he felt obligated to oblige for a while.

As I approached Mrs. Keagan's open door, the sight of the familiar hallway and the smells of the dreaded classroom, yet beloved teacher, wafted toward me. I felt warmer, although a room that could give me an "F" should make me feel entirely on edge. Instead, I was struck with a feeling of comfort. I couldn't allow myself to leave yesterday's encounter at the dirty little secret assessment. That wasn't the truth. Even I had to admit, as I walked into his academic domain, it was more than that. I knew that much. At this point, I just had to be okay with not knowing what.