We only had the relay to go when a girl with long, straight blond hair and a pointy face I vaguely recognized sat next to me out of nowhere. I didn’t mean to give her such a startled look, but to be fair, random people who don’t know you didn’t usually come up and sit in your personal space with several feet of bleachers free for the sitting.

“Hey, you’re Darcy, right?” she asked.

My shoulders tensed of their own accord. Straight away my gut told me this was locker related. I’d finally gotten to a point where I didn’t feel judged by half the school, and now someone was here to bring it all back up. “Yeah, I am.”

“I’m Hadley. My brother’s on the team with your boyfriend.”

“Oh, nice. They’re killing it today.” Hadley, Hadley … I vaguely recognized the name, but I couldn’t match it to a letter. Or maybe she was one of the unlucky few who got her letter snatched during Lockergate.

“Yeah, I’m really proud.” Hadley hesitated, and Brooke looked over in interest to eavesdrop. “Hey, I came over because you helped me out a while ago. I wrote in about my ex-boyfriend … the orbiting…?”

I blinked, then it all came back to me. “Oh, he was liking all your posts, right?”

“Yes! I loved your response so much. Especially the line about deserving to be courted with fervor. So Jane Austen. It’s, like, my life motto now.”

Okay. This didn’t seem to be going the route of righteous indignation. The tension flurried out of my limbs. “What ended up happening?”

“Well.” Hadley folded her arms and leaned forward, storyteller mode activated. “About a month after that he started texting me all like ‘I miss you, I’ve been thinking about you, I saw your photo with the Rollerblades and I haven’t gotten your smile out of my mind all night.’” She pulled a face.

“Too little too late?” I asked.

“Oh, completely. By that point I’d started realizing he was kind of shitty as a boyfriend, you know, like he wanted to talk about himself all the time, but if the conversation came to me I might as well have been talking to a Magic 8 Ball. ‘Yeah, nope, maybe, hmm, wow that’s craaaaazyyy,’” she said in a flat-toned, robotic voice.

“I’m proud of you!”

“Thanks. You helped a lot. I was losing it by the time I wrote to you, I was about five minutes away from bursting in on him in class and demanding an explanation. But, um, I wanted to ask. With the locker broken, no one seems to know how to send you a letter anymore?”

Brooke and Ray were listening in now, leaning forward blatantly.

“They can’t.” I shrugged. “The school said I can’t run a business on campus.”