Unfortunately, It's you

Chapter 5: Not Actually About Soccer Practice — Jace’s POV

Dre had a rule about talking during practice, which was that he didn’t, ever, not even a little, and so it said something that he brought up Lena Osei entirely unprompted while we were running suicides at Tuesday practice, both of us too out of breath to be having this conversation at all.

“So,” he said, between breaths, “the lab partner thing.”

“We’re not doing this right now.”

“I’m not doing anything. I’m asking a question.” He caught up to my pace, infuriatingly not as winded as he should’ve been. “Milo said you got a good grade on the last report.”

“We both know biology. It’s not a whole thing.”

“I didn’t say it was a whole thing.”

“You’re saying it like it’s a whole thing.”

“I’m saying it,” Dre said, “like a guy who’s noticed you’ve mentioned this girl in four separate conversations over the last week, which is objectively nothing, and I’m bad at hiding when I’ve noticed things, so here we are.”

I didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because I was busy trying not to trip over a cone, and by the time I’d caught my breath enough to argue, Coach had blown the whistle for the next drill, and the conversation died there. It didn’t stay dead, though — Dre had a way of planting something and letting it sit, unaddressed, until you circled back to it yourself days later, which was exactly what happened Thursday at lunch when Milo brought it up again, this time with an actual plan attached.

“Okay, hear me out,” Milo said, sliding into the seat across from me with the specific energy he got when he’d had an idea he considered brilliant. “Fall festival’s in three weeks. The whole school goes. What if — and I want you to really sit with this before you say no — what if we just happened to be in the same friend group as her and her friends for the night?”

“Why would that happen?”

“Because Sable’s in my art elective, and Sable is apparently Lena’s best friend, and Sable already thinks this whole thing is hilarious, so if I just casually suggest we all go together—”

“Absolutely not.”

“You didn’t even let me finish.”

“I don’t need you to finish. I know exactly where this is going, and the answer is no.”

“Dre, back me up,” Milo said, turning to Dre, who was very deliberately staying out of it by focusing intensely on his lunch tray.

“I’m not getting involved.”

“You’re already involved, you’re sitting right here.”

“I’m involved in lunch. I’m not involved in whatever this is.”

Milo turned back to me, undeterred, which was his default state regardless of how many times people told him no. “All I’m saying is, you’ve got a semester-long lab partnership with this girl, you clearly think about her enough to bring her up unprompted, and the fall festival is a low-stakes, completely normal way for our friend groups to overlap without it being weird. I’m not saying it’s a date. I’m saying it’s six people going to a festival that the entire school goes to anyway.”

“It’s a terrible idea.”

“It’s a great idea and you know it.”

I did not know it, or rather, I refused to admit that I knew it, because admitting it would mean acknowledging that some part of me had already, against my own better judgment, wondered what it would be like to see Lena Osei outside of a classroom or a grocery store parking lot — in a context where neither of us was required to be annoyed at the other, where the annoyance might, theoretically, wear thin enough to see what was underneath it.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, which was as close to agreement as Milo was going to get out of me that day, and he took it like a victory anyway, grinning the whole rest of lunch as if he’d already won something.

He had, as it turned out. He just didn’t know how right he was yet.