Things Best Friends Don’t Do

Chapter 3: Avoiding Eye Contact

The first coherent thought that surfaced in the murky fog of sleep was not a thought at all, but a phantom sensation. A ghost of pressure, a memory of warmth, a lingering taste of cherry cola and mint. My eyes snapped open. For a blissful, fleeting second, there was only the familiar landscape of my bedroom ceiling. Then, the full weight of last night crashed down on me, a physical force that made me groan and roll over, pressing my face into the cool cotton of my pillow.

The kiss. The dare. Stacy’s triumphant glare. Jace’s stunned, dark eyes.

My lips still tingled. I ran my tongue over them, a nervous, involuntary habit, and the memory flared, vivid and unwelcome. It was like having a song stuck in your head, only instead of a song, it was the precise texture of my best friend’s mouth against mine.

Dread, cold and heavy, settled in the pit of my stomach. Monday. School. A seven-hour minefield where the primary explosive was a six-foot-two golden boy with honey-colored eyes I now felt fundamentally incapable of meeting.

Our routine was an intricate, unspoken dance perfected over years. He’d text me *‘5 mins’* at 7:45 AM. I’d be waiting on my porch steps, backpack at my feet. He’d pull up in his slightly beat-up but beloved Jeep, blasting some indie rock band I pretended to hate but secretly enjoyed. The ten-minute drive would be filled with easy chatter—complaints about homework, gossip about teachers, plans for the weekend. We’d walk in together, separating at the main hallway intersection to go to our lockers. It was the bedrock of my day.

Today, that bedrock was fractured. Today, the routine had to be obliterated.

Fueled by a surge of panic, I swung my legs out of bed. Operation: Avoid Jace Carter was officially underway. It required a level of strategic planning worthy of a military campaign.

**Phase One: The Morning.** I grabbed my phone, my thumb hovering over his contact photo—a goofy picture of us from sophomore year, both covered in mud after a failed attempt at hiking in the rain. A wave of guilt washed over me. I typed out a text, my fingers clumsy.

*Me: Hey, don’t worry about picking me up. I need to get to the library early to finish some AP English reading.*

It was a flimsy lie. We were in the same AP English class; he knew the reading wasn't that long. But it was the best I could do. I hit send before I could second-guess it.

His reply came back almost instantly.

*Jace: Everything okay?*

The question was simple, but I could read the subtext. He wasn’t asking about the reading. He was asking about last night. About the silence that had fallen between us after the kiss. About the way I had fled his house without a word.

*Me: Yep! Just swamped. See you around.*

‘See you around.’ The words felt like acid on my tongue. It was the kind of vague, dismissive phrase you’d say to a stranger, not your other half. I tossed my phone onto my bed as if it were on fire and forced myself into the shower, letting the hot water sluice over me, hoping it could wash away the lingering sensation of his touch.

I left the house twenty minutes early, the unfamiliar weight of the morning chill seeping through my sweater. The walk was quiet, lonely. The silence was usually filled with his voice, his laughter. Today, it was filled with the frantic thumping of my own heart.

**Phase Two: Navigating the Terrain.** School was a hornet’s nest of potential encounters. I clutched the straps of my backpack like a lifeline as I entered the main doors. The hallway was a river of bodies, loud and chaotic. Normally, I found comfort in the anonymity of the crowd. Today, it felt like a tactical map.

His locker was in the main west wing, right by the trophy case. I deliberately took the long way around, through the perpetually crowded arts and science hallway, my head down, my gaze fixed on the scuffed linoleum floor. I could feel him everywhere. Every laugh from a tall guy with dark hair made my head snap up in alarm. Every flash of a blue letterman jacket in my peripheral vision sent a jolt of adrenaline through me. I was a fugitive in my own school.

I made it to my locker, retrieved my books in record time, and practically sprinted to my first-period class, sinking into a desk in the back corner ten minutes before the bell. Safety. Temporary, but safety nonetheless.

The real test came third period. AP English. The one class we had together. The one class where avoidance was nearly impossible.

I got there early again, my stomach churning. Mrs. Davison had assigned us seats at the beginning of the year. I sat in the third row, by the window. Jace sat in the fourth row, one seat to my left. His proximity was a given.

I buried my face in *Wuthering Heights*, pretending to be engrossed in Catherine and Heathcliff’s tortured romance. The irony was not lost on me. I heard him before I saw him. The familiar sound of his worn leather boots on the tile, the low murmur of his voice as he greeted a friend. I didn’t look up. I could feel his presence as he passed my desk, a warm shadow that smelled of his clean, woodsy cologne. The scent ambushed me, and I had to physically grip my book to stop my hands from shaking.

He settled into his seat. I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel the weight of his stare on the side of my head, on my neck. It was a tangible pressure, a silent question that screamed across the small distance between us. *Layla, look at me.*

I couldn't.

If I looked at him, I would see his eyes, and I would remember the confusion and shock and that other, unreadable emotion that had flared in their depths. If I looked at him, he would see the panic in my own, and he would know. He would know that it wasn’t just a dare. He would know that when he kissed me, he had rearranged the entire galaxy of my universe.

So I stared harder at the page. The words blurred into meaningless inkblots. I could hear every small sound he made—the scratch of his pen on paper, the soft sigh as he leaned back in his chair, the tap of his fingers on his desk. Each sound was a tug on a string that connected us, and I was pulling against it with all my might.

Mrs. Davison’s voice cut through my internal monologue. “Alright, class, for your midterm project on thematic parallels, I want you to work with your table partner…”

My blood ran cold. My table partner. My partner for every project since the beginning of the year was Jace. It was an unspoken, easy arrangement.

I risked a glance up at our teacher, my heart hammering. But she continued, “...however, to shake things up a bit, I’m going to have you count off by fours. All the ones will work together, all the twos, and so on.”

A wave of relief so potent it made me dizzy washed over me. A reprieve. A stay of execution from the universe. I was a three. I heard Jace, from behind me, call out “Four.” We were safe. Separated by the arbitrary luck of the draw.

The rest of the class passed in a haze of feigned concentration. When the bell rang, I was out of my seat before anyone else, shoving my book into my bag and practically bolting for the door, not daring to look back.

**Phase Three: The Retreat.** Lunchtime. Usually, I’d claim a corner of the massive table Jace and the rest of the popular crowd occupied in the loud, sprawling cafeteria. I was an accepted anomaly, the quiet moon orbiting their boisterous sun. Today, the thought of facing that table, of facing Stacy’s inevitable smugness and Jace’s questioning eyes, was unbearable.

I retreated to my true sanctuary: the library.

The hushed quiet and the smell of old paper and bookbinding glue were an immediate balm to my frayed nerves. I found Ryan, my only other real friend, tucked away in a carrel in the nonfiction section, sketching furiously in his notebook. With his perpetually ink-stained fingers, perpetually messy brown hair, and perpetually sarcastic worldview, Ryan was the antithesis of Jace’s crowd. He was my island of nerdy, cynical normalcy.

“Hiding from the plebeians?” he asked without looking up, his pencil scratching across the page.

“Something like that,” I mumbled, slumping into the chair opposite him.

He finally glanced up, his sharp green eyes taking in my disheveled state. “Whoa. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Worse,” I said. “I think I’ve become one.”

He raised an eyebrow but didn’t press. That was the good thing about Ryan. He knew when to push and when to let things lie. I spent the rest of the lunch period in blessed, comfortable silence, letting the library’s quiet seep into my bones, even as my mind continued to race.

The final bell was a starting gun for the last leg of my escape. I knew he might wait by my locker. I knew he might try to catch me on the way out. I fled my last class and navigated the exiting throng like a salmon swimming upstream, heading for the side exit by the gym, a route I never took.

I was almost there. Almost free. The heavy glass doors were just feet away.

“Layla!”

His voice. It cut through the din of the hallway like a thunderclap. It was closer than I expected. My name, in his mouth, sounded different now. Not the easy, familiar call of a friend, but a plea. A summons.

My entire body froze. Every instinct screamed at me to turn around. To face him. To end this torturous charade.

But fear won.

I hunched my shoulders, tucked my chin to my chest, and pushed through the door into the afternoon sun, pretending I hadn’t heard him. The lie felt heavy and sour in my gut. I didn’t look back, but I could feel his eyes on me, watching me walk away. Each step was an apology. Each step was a betrayal. I had successfully avoided eye contact all day, but in doing so, I had avoided him completely, and the victory felt utterly, devastatingly hollow.