Page 38 of Lonely Hearts Day

And I’ve faced my greatest fear

Of living in a world without you.

“Oh wow, that’s the cheesiest thing I’ve ever read,” Laney said at lunch, handing the paper back to me and opening a bag of chips.

We sat in a corner of the cafeteria. It was cold outside today and we didn’t want to sit on the courtyard steps where we normally ate.

“And terrible, right? It has to be terrible for it to be worthy of our inside joke.”

I only had two more periods to buy a rose and have the leadership students deliver it to him. They were walking around the cafeteria now with their basket and their cash box, trying to drum up business. I was starting to think this was a bad idea. I wondered if I was really just chickening out, letting my fear take over.

“You might need to add a color or two,” Laney said. “The school poems always have colors.”

“True.” I squeezed my eyes closed, thinking, then took a pen to the last two lines, scratching them out. “How about instead of the greatest fear line:the sky is no longer blue/ In this world I’ve been living without you.” I jotted those down.

She laughed. “Yes. How are you going to finish it? It needs a call to action. Putting the ball in his court and all that.”

“Let’s redo spin the bottle/ And this time you have to kiss me,” Troy said. I hadn’t thought he was listening. He’d been sitting across from us on his phone, his elbows on the table, his hands clasped around the back of his neck, but with his suggestion, he looked up.

“That doesn’t rhyme,” I said.

“Let’s have a spin the bottle redo/ And this time I want to kiss you,” he said then raised his hands in the air. “I’m a genius.”

I laughed. “You are, but I’m not going to tell him I want to kiss him in a terrible poem.”

“You want to do that face to face?” Laney asked.

“Maybe.” I put pen to paper again. “How about just,Can we have a redo/ There’s so much I need to tell you.”

“He really is an idiot,” Troy said. “I told him last year you wanted to kiss him.”

“Wait, what?”

Laney reached over the table to shove his shoulder.

“You knew too?” I asked, turning to her.

“Troy let it slip at your party before Micah showed up,” Laney said.

“He knew I wanted to kiss himbeforeMicah showed up?” I practically screamed, then clamped my mouth shut and looked around to see if anyone had heard me. And here I’d been thinking for an entire year that Micah showing up had been the problem. That it had made Jack jealous, or angry with me. “Then why did he think I wanted to kiss Micah?”

“Because guys are idiots,” Troy said.

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe this. “Wait, so has he been avoiding me because he was jealous over Micah or because he found out I wanted to kisshimand didn’t want me to?” Either of those reasons made my stomach hurt.

“I’m not sure,” Troy said with a shrug, not helping at all. “He liked you for a while so I would think he’d want you to kiss him.”

“All this time he knew how I felt?”

“No, he couldn’t have known the extent of it,” Laney said.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “This is a mistake. I’m just going to get hurt, aren’t I? He had all the time in the world to talk this out with me and he didn’t.” I crumbled the piece of paper in my fist, got up, and threw it away with my half-eaten lunch. “I’m going for a walk so you two can enjoy your Valentine’s Day.”

“We’re spending it with you!” Troy yelled as I walked away. “It’s tradition now!”

Chapter 15

I was doodling in the margins of my paper during seventh period when the door swung open and the rose crew walked in. I barely glanced up, bracing myself for the horrible poem that I’d already heard six times today. It was way worse than mine. They rhymedfreesiawithplease ya.