She spins. “Dude. C’mon. Just trying to go to class here.”

“I need your help.”

“Oh,” she says. “Here.” Then she musses up his hair. “High school makeover, complete. Now you don’t look like some kind of golf-playing real-estate agent. We’ll call that one a freebie. Bye-bye.”

She turns, but he steps in front of her, desperately trying to smooth his hair back into its well-ordered place.

“No,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I need you for something else.”

“Because me helping you the other day wasn’t good enough?”

“You’ll get paid,” he says.

Through her teeth, she hisses: “What is it you think I’ll do for money, exactly? Just because—”

“Oh! No. No.” A genuine look of panic hits his face like a bucket of ice water. Flustered, he holds up both hands. “I wouldn’t—I don’t—no, no, that’s not what I mean—”

“Calm down,” she says, voice low. Others are starting to look as Shane continues babbling. She says it louder: “I said, calm down. Just go. I’ll follow. I said, go!”

She recognizes the boy waiting for her at the alcove’s end, sitting there on the lip of a planter where a plastic tree “grows.” Chris Coyne. One of the school’s self-proclaimed Gay Mafia—La Cozy Nostra. Each of them gayer and more fabulous than the last. She knows a few of them—or, knew them once, since nobody seems all that interested in talking to her anymore—and they seem nice enough, if a little gossipy.

Coyne’s all pretty eyelashes and pursed lips. He sits there with his legs crossed. Hands steepled in front of him. His chin is up as if to say, I don’t give a fuck.

But when he sees her, that look vanishes in a powder flash. His face lights up when she enters the alcove, trailed by Shane. Atlanta’s not used to this kind of attention.

She is, of course, immediately suspicious. “Oh, God,” she says. “What?”

Coyne leaps up, beaming. He starts to move in for a hug, but she recoils as if he’s coming at her with a pair of gory stumps instead of hands. He retreats, but the beaming doesn’t quit.

“It’s the Get-Shit-Done Girl,” Coyne says. An eager, excited little clap follows.

“The who?” she asks, incredulous. “The hell does that mean?”

“I told him what you did for me,” Shane says.

“And we all know what you did before that,” Coyne says, laying it out there bold and bright as day, putting it on the table the way someone might drop a microphone and then walk off stage. As if she doesn’t understand, he goes above and beyond to clarify: “The thing you did to your stepfather.”

Ugh. Is that the story going around? Stepfather? Jesus.

“It wasn’t my—” she begins, but then says, “You know what, hell with this. I gotta go.”