“Well, she was sad.”

“It was more than that. She was pissed on New Year’s, and then after you guys got into that fight at the movies…she didn’t want anything to do with any of us. She said her mother might move them away to live with family in Massachusetts, and she wanted to go. To be rid of us all.”

“But…why?”

He shrugs.

Luisa’s family never moved. They stayed, and eventually, somehow, she and Kane had patched things up, rising to become the untouchable power couple of our senior class. “You guys got back together.”

“Not for a long time,” he says. “We only started going out again in September. She didn’t want anything to do with me for months.”

“Why?”

He rolls his eyes. “Because she’s Luisa. She needed her”—he makes quotation signs at his ears—“space.”

I pull out of the driveway, heading for school, deep in my own head. Kane always thinks every relationship woe he’s ever had with Luisa boils down to her wild, unexplained mood swings, but I don’t believe it. There’s got to be more to their fights than that.

“I’m breaking up with her, though. Today,” he says.

Keeping my eyes on the road ahead, I see him in the periphery of my vision, studying me, waiting for my reaction. I don’t have one.

“You have anything to say about that?” he prompts.

“Nope.” I told him that’s the last thing I want. He thinks I’m so interested in having a boyfriend. After the way everything turned out with the last one? I don’t look at him, but I can tell from the way he clenches his fists in his lap that he’s pissed.

We don’t say anything more due to the roar of the wind outside.

By the time we arrive at the senior parking lot, I know what I need to do. “Don’t break up with her yet, okay?” I say to him as I find one of the last open spaces. “Please?”

He was trying to zip his coat higher to his chin, but he stops, staring at me. “Why?”

“Just don’t. Okay?”

I don’t tell him what I’m planning, because I know he’ll try to talk me out of it. But I need to talk to Luisa. She already hates me. I don’t need to give her another reason to.

45 Days Before

The party was raging before ten. Mr. and Mrs. Weeks were gone, and my parents had gone to New York to see the ball drop, so all of Fox Court was choked with teen cars. They parked on the lawns, in the woods, backed up against one another like in a used car lot. Music pumped and light blared from every window.