I moved my hand away and crossed my arms.

“We’re not enemies, Izzy,” I said lightly, like it didn’t bother me enough to get annoyed. “We’re not anything. You kept something really important from me.”

“It wasn’t my place to tell you,” she said. For the four hundredth time. I knew she really believed it too, but it was less than meaningless.

“I’m not mad,” I lied. “I don’t care anymore.”

You can’t go around letting people know they hurt your feelings. It gives them too much power.

“So, what, you’re going to spend the rest of the year alone? Sitting in an empty classroom playing on your phone?”

There it was. The pity.

I shrugged my best IDGAF shrug and put my earbuds back in my ears even though she didn’t seem to be finished talking. Her forehead creased and her bottom lip quivered. The kind of face a child might make if you chopped the head off their favorite toy.

I pressed the back button until I got to the place in the podcast where I’d stopped paying attention. Izzy waited a second. Keep fighting or give up? It was written all over her face. I pictured her finally getting annoyed with me and telling me to grow up, telling me that friendships don’t end just like that.

But she didn’t. Because they do.

I got annoyed with Izzy all over again just thinking about it. When Hannah and I broke up, I lost Izzy too, and it was all her fault. But in the intervening months I’d learned a neat trick for managing all those pesky feelings. I pretended it never happened and focused on something else.

Even if I didn’t have any close friends left, it didn’t mean I was a complete hermit who had to stay locked up in her room like an outcast. I scrolled through the messages on my phone and found the details of the after-party I hadn’t planned on going to. The combination of cheap vodka shots and girls feeling post-exam relief who may or may not want to experiment was now my best option for avoiding staring at my bedroom wall all night, avoiding awkwardness with Dad, and avoiding being stuck in an endless loop of my own thoughts.