I snag my backpack, put on my headphones, lock the door, and walk. At the end of the block, my once-white sneakers lean left like a dog pulling hopefully toward the park. I shake my head no and move past Kelly’s street. I’m late enough that I should be able to avoid my second-least-favorite part of Kelly’s new status as a girl with a boyfriend: the moment when she and Ben zoom right past me in his VW Bug, the windows already clouded with smoke. Like most of the popular guys, Ben believes in wake-and-bake. I tell myself this is why they don’t stop for me. Kelly knows I hate the armpit smell of it.

I hit play on my Walkman, but the batteries are dead. Didn’t I just change them? But no, that was yesterday morning. And yesterday had been bad enough that I wore them as much as possible, playing my saddest mix over and over. Headphones in the hall aren’t allowed, but the teachers left me alone. It was as if, without Kelly beside me, I’d become invisible even to them.

Kelly-and-Ben. I hear them paired everywhere now in the mouths of people in the hall, Jolly Rancher sweet. Even I see the perfection of them, their combined shades of gold creating an aura of sainthood, like the statues lining the wall of the cathedral where my mom’s best friend was married—the only time I’ve ever set foot in a church.

“You must really love Camilla,” I remember saying to my mom’s tight neck from the back seat of the car. If she’d been a cat, her fur would have been sticking straight out.

My mom is an atheist. She doesn’t believe in God or Hallmark holidays or True Love. “All love is work,” she says. “And that’s okay.”

But it was never work with Kelly. Not till now.

Without her the halls at school are grayscale dim like those famous photographs of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. I remember sitting in history class the week after the Kelly-and-Ben convergence, thinking that perhaps this was my Great Depression. My time of natural disaster and desperate lack.

That first week of hand-holding official couple-hood, Kelly had dragged me to lunch on the quad with Ben’s friends. “Alex is cute,” Kelly said. “Maybe we could double date.” Like her, I wanted to believe our story could be a light romantic comedy where everything turned out great. I smiled, tried to flirt. The boys were nice the way you’d be nice to someone’s sister.