‘Well, that was the thing. I wanted to. But you don’t come to lunch any more, and you always rush out of English, and I tried seeing if you were here a few times, but you were never in – or you were, and were pretending like you weren’t, so –’

‘Liv.’ I ground my molars. ‘Did you just come here to – I don’t know. Be passive-aggressive?’

Olivia wrapped her arms over her stomach and fixed her eyes on her feet. ‘No. I wanted to ask you to do something that will probably cause me to re-evaluate our relationship, based on your answer.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Skip Spring Fling. I can’t go, because I’m sure as heck not going by myself, and I don’t want to see Miles there, and I thought we could just stay in and catch each other up, or whatever, because I honestly have no idea what’s going on with you right now, and we can, I don’t know. Just watch YouTube and order pizza and … act … normal.’

‘Act normal,’ I repeated.

‘Yeah,’ Olivia said.

‘You know I can’t.’ Act normal. Call off the dance. It really didn’t even matter which one I was talking about.

Her face didn’t change. She didn’t even flinch. ‘Why do I know you can’t?’

‘Because you’re just asking me now,’ I said, ‘and we already made plans. It’s in three days. It wouldn’t be fair to Leo, or –’

‘To June, right? It wouldn’t be fair to June?’

I frowned. ‘Yeah, I guess, I – is that why you’re mad? Are you seriously mad about this? What am I supposed to do? It would be rude of me to –’

‘We both know you’re not worried about being rude. God. Sydney Whitaker worried about being rude. That’s new. I’m really not an idiot, even though you think I am, for some reason, even though I’ve gotten consistently higher grades than you since we were eight –’

‘I don’t think you’re an idiot.’

‘It’s about June. It’s all about her, isn’t it? It’s all about her, and you’re willing to go to some dance you and I both know you don’t want to go to just so you can buzz around her like some desperate little fly.’

I didn’t let her know how much that hurt. ‘I already said yes.’