Paige nods, looking ahead. “Yeah,” she says, “okay. Sure. Seems like maybe you lied about that, but I guess I’m wrong.”

This isn’t how I thought it would go. She is different. Pissed off. There is a chill between us, and we say little the rest of the way to my house.

In my room, I sit nervously on my bed. Mom is out with Reg again, but that’s a small comfort. This is awkward.

“What do you want to do?”

“Hmm?” Paige is looking around my room like she’s at a zoo exhibit. “What is all this shit?” She’s staring at all my old tech: TV, VCR, DVD player, and piles of old movies.

“Oh, it’s just a bunch of junk I keep around.”

She looks at me, unconvinced.

“Remember how I like old movies? So … this is how I watch them. I like the, uh, authentic experience.” Oh God. I roll my eyes at myself.

She crouches down, looking at the stack of movies that starts at the floor. “I’ve never even heard of any of these.”

She looks over her shoulder at me, and I say, “Well, they used to be my mom’s.”

She says, “No wonder you like that media class so much. I thought it was just because Lottie’s mom—well, ‘dad’—teaches it.”

I don’t like how she says that: “dad.” It makes my skin itch, makes me want to push or bite.

“Yeah, no,” I mumble, “I have a thing for old films.”

“‘Films’? Wow, you are hard-core.” She notices a light set up behind my laptop, and touching it, she says, “Do you make your own ‘films’?”

“No, no,” I say, and the actors in all my movie posters look the other way. “I just sometimes do videos and stuff. Like, just on YouTube.” I aim this shot thinking it will hit a mark, something she knows and likes, but it finds the wrong target.

She raises an eyebrow at me. “Oh yeah? You have your own channel?”

“Kind of,” I mumble.

She is looking at some papers beside my laptop, where I write scripts for my channel, and I hop off my bed and say, “Let’s go. Get something to eat or something.”

Paige nods distractedly and follows me. Some kind of animal instinct in me feels her behind me. My hackles are up, my senses honed. There is blood in her nose, and I’m in her sights; I can feel it.

We go to Tim Hortons, and I grab a doughnut and she gets a coffee. We sit awkwardly for a while, Paige looking at her phone, and finally she says, “Look, I’ve gotta go.”

“Sure, no problem. Um, I’ll talk to you later?”

“Yep,” she says, throwing her cup in the garbage as she leaves me sitting there. “See you.”