"We can still have the party at your house after the game. I promise I won't bail on that," Mercy continued. "I'll even come straight over now and help you set up, but I honestly can't deal with Britt the bitch and her gaggle of cloned cheerleaders at the game. It's bad enough that we have to see them at school, never mind–"

"Oh god, the party," I groaned, rubbing my hand down my face. "What the hell was I thinking?"

At lunch on Monday, when Mercy told the guys that I was throwing a party at my house after the first game of the season, I should have shut it down and told them she was joking.

I didn’t.

And now?

Oh god…

"Whoa, watch it, jackass!"

The sound of a car horn beeping filled my ears and I quickly flicked my attention to the Chevy truck that was pulling out of its parking spot and coming straight for us.

Freezing in place, I quickly threw my hands up in shock as the sound of brakes screeching echoed around us.

"Yo, Lewis freaking Hamilton; mind slowing your ass down!" Mercy hollered, slamming both palms down on the hood of the truck when it came to an abrupt stop right in front of us, with +44's When Your Heart Stops Beating blasting from the truck stereo.

Mercy's eyes narrowed when recognition dawned on her. I didn’t need to look at the windshield to know who owned the truck that had almost made pancakes of us.

I would know that red, secondhand pick-up anywhere.

It was one of the few vehicles in the school parking lot that was more than five years old and didn’t scream 'ostentatious affluence'.

It was also the only truck that I actively sought out on a daily basis.

Stop being so pathetic!

He doesn’t even remember you!

Yeah, the day I realized Daryl King didn’t remember me was the day I died a little bit inside. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting when I returned to Ocean Bay, but to go completely unrecognized by the boy I'd spent my childhood with wasn’t it.

When I returned to Ocean Bay for sophomore year, I had this ridiculous fantasy that my best friend in the entire world would be waiting for me with arms wide open.

That was not how it went down.

How was a person supposed to react when they realized that their best friend in the whole world had forgotten them?

And no, I wasn't talking about the occasional snub in the hallway between classes. I meant full-on forgotten-you-ever-existed kind of forgetting.

Did a person just dust themselves off and carry on? Did they cry? How did someone get over that kind of abandonment? That ferocity of a betrayal?

I wished I knew.

Two years had passed since the day Daryl snubbed me on his doorstep. Since he had ripped my heart clean out of my chest with his friendly smile and look of blank indifference. Followed by two years' worth of passing me blank-faced in the halls of school, and it was only now that I had become friends with his best friend's stepsister that I was suddenly on his radar.