Caught redhanded, Nate Cross leaves senior formal without Becca Matthews. What could those two possibly be arguing about? Is something finally wrong in lovers' paradise?

yours truly,
Queen B.

***

       I felt like everyone was staring at me as I stepped foot into fourth period, the bell signaling the start of class thirty seconds later. The speakers buzzed for a moment afterwards, allowing students an extra ten seconds to sprint to their classes before attendance was taken. On the way to my seat, I heard the rumble of shoes scuffing the ground and teachers shutting their doors outside in the hallway. The day had started off like any other normal Wednesday.

Even as my classmates dispersed from their social circles and returned to their assigned seats, eyes followed my shadow to the back of the room. Their curiosity burned craters into my skin, creating a sense of vulnerability that circulated in my bloodstream. The feeling that all of them could see beneath my shirtsleeves, read the ridges in my bones, and derive secrets from the rhythm of my accelerating heartbeat washed over me.

Setting my bag down on the ground against the leg post of the table, I pulled out my physics notebook. The seat next to me was vacant, as expected. Erik was always late. For most of my classes, I sat to the side of the classroom in the middle, the geographical area teachers glossed over when addressing their students during lectures. Physics was the one exception.

Dr. Khan believed that assigned seats were necessary because he needed them more than we did. Even after almost three whole weeks of school, our names were still a collection of letters with mismatched faces. He was one of those teachers that mandated we call him Dr. Khan instead of Mr. Khan, as if the only way to justify his P.h.D. in physics was a prefix before his last name -- the replacement of one letter for another.

A couple heads turned when the door to the storeroom in the back of the classroom opened. Dr. Khan walked to the front with a mug of hot coffee in his hands, steam ascending from the dark liquid. The only word to describe his dark but desolate eyes was hollow. Even though he was dressed in a freshly pressed suit, the way his shoulders slumped forward as he moved hinted at sleepless nights.

All roads pointed to a struggling teacher trying to balance his research and a crap salary. Dr. Khan couldn't be more than thirty-five years old. It had taken him less than thirty-five years to realize that he had spent more than eight years in college only to accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and realize that doing what he loved wasn't sufficient to survive in New York. So, he had to learn to love something else.

"Grab a textbook from the back of the room, turn to page 259, and work on exercise number 16 with your seat partner," Dr. Khan instructed after taking a sip of his coffee. "You'll be turning it in for a grade. Remember that if I can't follow your work, you will get no credit whatsoever."

"I can't believe he's doing this to us," Liana, who was sitting two tables away for mine, groaned. "We just had a quiz last class."

"At least we get to work together," Fabian, her seat partner, replied empathetically.

As I scribbled the basic kinematical equations onto the top of the page, I wondered when and if I would hear Erik's footsteps in the hall outside. I fastened the buttons of my blazer, gazing out the window at the cloudless blue sky. Somehow, the physics classrooms were always ten times colder than the rest of the school.

I shifted my attention to the door briefly one more time before returning to the textbook problem. Fingers tapped against the ash black tables we all sat at around me, the swift movements similar to how the lights in the ceiling flickered when the switch flipped from on to off or vice versa. The room was neither loud nor quiet, but a blanket of whispers hovered over the students constantly, growing and louder and louder by the minute.

It wasn't until I heard my name being passed around like a game of hot tomato that I realized there were multiple exclusive conversations going on, each saturated with side glares and discrete hand gestures. I placed my pencil down and turned my head from left to right, trying to make sense of the lost puzzle pieces.

That was when Samira Patel turned around in her seat, flipping her dark brown hair behind her shoulder. "I hope you don't mind that we decided to use that picture, Kennedy. It's just that everyone thought it was perfect for coverage on senior formal. You looked amazing by the way. Where did you get that dress?"

Even though Samira was born on Indian soil, she had spent the majority of her childhood with umbrellas and cloudy skies in London before moving to the United States. There were times where I could still hear the remnants of a British accent in her voice.

"Althea's," I answered thoroughly even though I knew she was only paying attention to my facial reaction, not my words. "Wait, what picture are you talking about?"

"You haven't seen it yet?" Surprise coated her voice from the first syllable to the question mark. Her jaw dropped slightly, revealing her perfectly straight and whitened teeth. "Kennedy, you made the front page."

Samira swiveled in her sheet and pulled out a copy of the newspaper from her backpack. "Well, you and Griffin did. You two look really great together. I'm really glad you've moved on from-"

"Is this it?" I strategically interrupted her with a forced smile, motioning toward the stack of paper in her hands. Samira had a tendency to ramble, the habit structurally engineered in her DNA.

She nodded, placing one of the copies on my desk. "You can keep this if you want. I think Ms. Rutherford can spare a copy."

"Thanks, Samira."

My eyes roamed the front page, jumping from the headline straight to the picture centered in the middle of the article. As I held the newspaper in between my fingers, I analyzed the picture of Griffin and I. It wasn't the picture we posed for, rather a transition to that moment. Neither of us were looking directly at the camera, my eyes falling to the ground and his focused on me. He had a bright smile on his face, the kind that was capable of shattering hearts into smithereens.

After a couple more seconds, I moved to the words below.

"One of Nouveau's longstanding traditions if the senior formal. This year, the theme was Once Upon a Fairytale. With magical lights, castles, and fantasies, seniors Griffin King and Kennedy Marx stand in the center of it all. Griffin King is Nouveau's newest addition, a transfer from Kingston Preparatory and the son of Governor King. He's also..."

I was halfway through the article when Erik walked through the door with a pass in his hand, a magenta sticky note with a scribbled explanation from his football coach. Coach Roy taught personal fitness at Nouveau, a class reserved mostly for the school's top tier athletes. I personally didn't know anyone else who voluntarily agreed to intensive conditioning five days a week.

"I'm glad your coach thinks your athletic career is much more important than your education," Dr. Khan told Erik, sarcasm hidden in between his syllables. He crumbled the note in the palm of his hand and tossed it into the trash can.

The rest of the class turned back around and started finalizing their answers as Erik continued to walk to the back with his head down. When he got to the table, he dropped his backpack onto the table and plopped down into the seat right next to me. Dr. Khan had disguised daggers for eyes.

"So, what did I miss?" Erik asked, adjusting  the collar of his white polo. With broad shoulders and a chiseled jaw line, he was one of the few people in this school who could actually make Nouveau's uniform look worthy of a magazine cover.

I pointed to the problem in the textbook, pushing the newspaper to the corner of the desk. "We have to turn it in for a grade."

"It's Dr. Khan, so," he sighed, threading his fingers through his dark hair, "of course we do. I would've skipped the last set if I had known."

Erik unzipped his backpack and pulled out his notebook, writing the date in the upper right hand corner. Instead of talking about the problem in the textbook, he asked, "So, you and Griffin?"

"How is this relevant to physics?" I responded while I plugged the numbers into the calculator, taking significant digits into account before I wrote down my final answer. "That's like me asking about you and Molly."

"It's not really relevant, I guess." He laughed, adding a subtle shrug. "Everyone knows that Molly and I have something going on, but you and Griffin are kind of a mystery. And if I remember correctly, mysteries were your thing."

I dropped my pen, my eyes shifting from the textbook to Erik's face. His caramel eyes watched me passively as he reclined in his seat, folding his arms over his defined chest. The sleeves of his polo hugged the ridges in his arms.

"Did you get this for the answer?" I asked and leaned over, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. Every part of me knew I was purposely avoiding his interrogative gaze. Some questions were just better left answered.

My eyes glossed over his paper, searching the blue lines for the answer. A wave of relief ushered over me after I saw that we had the same number boxed. The only difference between our two papers was that he had used fewer steps to derive the solution. For someone who was only known for throwing a football on the field, Erik was exceptionally good at physics.

The last ten minutes of fourth period felt like an eternity. When the bell finally rang, I packed up my things and headed for the senior courtyard. I stepped onto the stone pathway, hearing the mating calls of birds sitting in the trees framing the courtyard. The sun had reached at its maximum height in the sky, wispy clouds drifting by. Becca and Alden were already in our usual spot underneath the arch.

"Is this what I missed after I left on Saturday?" Becca asked me as I sat down, pointing to the newspaper in between her and Alden. "Why is that something always happens every time I decide to leave early?"

"You didn't miss anything," I assured her. "Just the opportunity to have your picture taken by Samira. You and Nate would've made a better front page story."

She didn't seem to agree in that moment, her eyes falling down to her mostly untouched salad. With a fork, she poked at the spinach leaves and twirled the utensil around in the vinaigrette.

Two tables down from us, the Elites sat in a circle. There were more bodies than there were seats now that Nate had returned from California. As far as I knew, he and Becca still hadn't found the eye of the hurricane. They were running in polar directions instead of together, their fate determined by the strength of the impending storm.

Opposite of Nate sat Griffin who was squished between Erik and Tessa. Elspeth was too busy copying down the answer key for the calculus homework to realize that Connor was practically falling off the bench next to her. The only reason they all fit at that table was because Molly was nowhere to be seen.

"Is it just me or has Molly disappeared lately?" I wondered aloud, glancing at the time on my watch. There were only fifteen more minutes of lunch.

"I've noticed that too," Alden responded, adjusting the scarf around his neck. "Maybe she's having lunch with Erik in the cafeteria. That table looks pretty crowded."

"Erik is at the table, you idiot," Becca said. "It's probably nothing, you guys. You know how things are around here."

For the remainder of the lunch period, I occupied myself by counting the number of clouds in the sky. I noticed Griffin watching me from the corner of my eye, my field of vision just wide enough that I could make out the grin on his face.

"What are you smiling about, King?" Erik, who was sitting adjacent to him, asked, bumping his side into Griffin's arm. "Is there something we should know about?"

Griffin and I made eye contact for a short second, his smile widening by a fraction as he said, "Nothing."

I took the long way to fifth period after lunch, using all the back hallways that students considered long abandoned. As I turned into the hallway connecting the science and math classrooms, I heard voices bouncing off walls down the corridor. Faint sounds of laughter filtered through the thin walls. Exchanged fragments of sentences between a girl and boy were all I could make out in conjunction with my footsteps.

At the end of the hallway, I poked my head around the corner and caught a blonde girl pressed against the wall with her lips locked to a boy with light brown hair. The monogram on her handbag was instantly recognizable, the three letters belonging none other than Molly Peterson. I tilted my head, trying to change the angle, but the boy opposite of her remained a mystery.

All I knew was that he was definitely not Erik Alexander.