How It Ends Read Free

her. Unlike the rest of our classmates, who wear their coolness like a mask, this girl is beautifully uncool. She’s perched on the edge of her seat, so caught up in what Miss Donaghue is saying that she’s somehow managed to scratch her cheek with the wrong end of her pen, leaving a line of blue across it. She has frizzy brown hair bursting out of a thick blue elastic, no makeup, and she’s wearing a sweater that’s at least two sizes too big for her. And yet she’s stunning. She has these huge brown eyes and the softest features. She’s so painfully real that it almost hurts to look at her.
    I take a last look at the picture of my Highland friends and then turn off my phone and stash it in my bag. I have a mission now, and it makes me feel better. Today, somehow, I will get to know this beautifully uncool girl.

Jessie
    When people call you Lezzie, you learn to fear the whole locker-room experience. So when I saw gym on my schedule this morning, I broke out in a cold sweat.
    If not for the long line snaking out of the guidance office, I’d have dropped that class faster than you could say
Team sports give me hives
. God bless the inefficiency of our guidance counselors, though, because in the kind of plot twist that just doesn’t happen to girls like me, my whole world changed inside the sweaty confines of the girls’ locker room.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself.
    At the beginning of class, I was sitting on the gym floor feeling like the answer to one of those which-of-these-things-doesn’t-belong puzzles, when the coolest girl to ever walk through the doors of our school actually came and sat next to
me.
The whole school had been talking about Annie Miller all day. She moved here from the city, and she’s like some kind of exotic animal plunked into the middle of our boring lives. I’d first noticed her in English. She was dressed all in black, with thick eyeliner rimming her eyes, and I’d pegged her as a stoner before I got a good look at her. She defies categorization. Under all that black, she was luminous. With bright red hair that fell in shiny waves down her back and green eyes so bright they didn’t even look real, no one could possibly confuse her with a waste case.
    In gym, Annie plopped down next to me and smiled like we were old buddies. “You’re in my English class, right?”
    Let me just take a moment to marvel over the fact that Annie noticed
me.
I almost checked behind me to make sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.
    â€œY-yes. I think so. Miss Donaghue?”
    Annie smiled so wide I could see her back teeth. “Isn’t she
great?
” She leaned toward me. “I was thinking we should sit together at lunch.”
    I felt like I was going to explode right out of my skin. It was one of those moments that feel so good they’re almost painful. Sweat prickled my palms and my heart raced, but not in the bad I-think-I’m-going-to-die way. It was . . .
pleasurable panic.
I guess normal people would call that excitement.
    We spent the rest of gym class earning detentions for our poor attitudes, and I didn’t even worry about getting into trouble, which is so not like me. It all started with Annie insisting that she was the worst gym student ever. I took one look at her athletic build and called her bluff. Hilarity ensued. We fell over ourselves trying to be the most uncoordinated, and we failed miserably at hiding our laughter from our overzealous teacher, who apparently thinks she’s training future Olympians rather than teaching gym to a bunch of apathetic teenagers.
    By the time we headed into the locker room after class, I was so recklessly happy that I forgot to keep my head down and not attract attention. It was an oversight that did not go unpunished.
    â€œLooks like Lezzie Longbottom has a girlfriend,” Emily Watson sang.
    My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe. Being humiliated was