“No, I’m good. Catch you later, okay?” Again the words came out too rigid. But I’d already started pulling things out of Kori’s locker and if I stopped, even to apologize, I might never get started again.

“Okay, then.” He stood there for a minute, watching me turn old tests and worksheets into wadded balls, before walking away.

I threw myself into the process, not slowing down even after he was long gone. All the adrenaline-filled garbage can stuffing came to a screeching halt when I got to her notebooks, though. And once again my heart filled with an unbearable weight.

Almost every notebook had more doodles than notes, and a cold part of me wanted to throw them all away. An angry part. The part that blamed her for riding with Parker, for leaving me to clean out her locker like her bitch.

But I couldn’t bring myself to trash them. And I knew I shouldn’t keep them. Not all of them. Just one. I looked through them, my search stopping on the one with Doc Rocks! scrawled on the cover. Her social psych notebook. It slipped through my fingers, fluttering to the floor and landing on its spine. I bent to pick it up, but stopped short when I saw the page it was open to. Amidst all the various doodles was Kori’s Tempting Fate list.

I dropped to my knees to get a closer look.

Her words kept coming back to me. “I don’t want to leave anything undone.” But now it was as if she was talking directly to me. Daring me.

twelve

When we first became friends, Kori was obsessed with playing truth or dare. It was all we did. Kori, without fail, chose dare. There was nothing she wouldn’t do. Lexi would hem and haw and eventually decide on the lesser of the two evils. I always chose truths. And Cole usually did the dare and then would confess the truth anyway. I don’t think she really grasped the concept of the game.

I, on the other hand, learned very quickly how the game really works. How revealing truths can be more problematic in the long run. An unscrupulous player, say one who always takes dares and never truths, might … oh, I don’t know … use your truths to get you to do dares later. The ol’ “So you have a monster crush on Matt Wood? I’ll tell him, if you don’t cut in front of Chelsea in the lunch line” while all you’ve got to come back with is, “Oh, yeah? I’ll tell everyone you ate mayonnaise-covered ice cream.”

Um, yeah. No.