I never saw this coming when Miguel and I were best friends. We met when I was in sixth grade and he was in seventh, constantly playing Pokémon GO on our walks to the beach to bodysurf, going home after to binge Avatar or My Little Pony. We were inseparable, even going so far as to plan life when we grew up where he would make cartoons and I would direct them. But then he became a freshman while I was stuck in junior high, and everything changed. He hit a growth spurt and a personality spurt in which he somehow knew how to talk to everyone about everything and not just the shows we geeked out over. Plus, his mom got promoted to senior vice president of scripted Spanish programming at a streaming giant the summer before high school started, and it was just the perfect storm of popularity.

It wasn’t really Miguel’s fault we grew apart. He always asked me to sit with his new friends at lunch when I finally joined him at Shoreline High, but between jock sports talk and the stress of fitting in, I couldn’t keep up. So I kept to myself, and Miguel’s texts to hang out came less and less, until Kavya and I met a few weeks into the school year at a fateful swim tryout. I moved on from cartoons to rom-coms, while Miguel moved on from cartoons to . . . I don’t know what. Something that made him a shoo-in for homecoming king and prom king and class president. And for being Dominic’s perfect replacement for me, apparently.

The only thing for me to do now is delete the Love Shot List I’ve got glaring at me from my phone.