Chapter one

Act One

In Which a Bad Idea Is Born

One

At 6:43 p.m. on Football Friday, Corrine Baker is right on schedule for a pregame meltdown, and you bet your ass I have my camera ready for the freshman cheerleaders' reactions. This is a moment they'll remember for the rest of their lives. Something they'll want to cherish, look back onfondly— "Macy, a doctor's note means nothing to me," Corrine says to the sophomore newcomer. "Your mother is a doctor. You getting a doctor's note is as easy as a baby drooling on itself."

Four perfectly red-lined mouths pop open, jaws on the dirty locker room floor.

I'd feel bad about Macy's semipublic humiliation at the hands of Corrine, but Macy isn't actually sick, she's just hungover. We all know she was drinking last night, on aThursday, because her Instagram stories didn't end until about two in the morning or whenever she and her friends drained her father's liquor cabinet dry. One or the other.

I zoom in to Macy's face, her squad of freckles smotheredunder the blush creeping onto her cheeks. If Corrine makes her stand there any longer, Macy'll probably throw up on Corrine's perfectly white sneakers that she only wears for games, and then we'll see how annoyed my best friend can really get.

Corrine snatches the paper out of Macy's hand. "Get well soon."

My other best friend, Kayla Kishbaugh, slides onto the bench next to me, her dark brown curls loose over her uniform. "Corrine's being kind of a b-i-t-c-h, right?"

I turn my camera in her direction. She has no bad angles. "No, it's just... a pregame ritual. We all have them. I dissociate, you miss that tiny patch of hair above your ankle when shaving, and Corrine makes someone cry."

I get a whiff of her vanilla perfume when she pulls her leg onto the bench to check out her shave job. Sure enough, little specks of hair dot her brown skin in the curve of her calf. "How did you know?" she asks. "And more importantly, why did you never tell me? Have other people noticed?"

She's so used to me shoving my camera in her face that she's just now seeing that I have it pointed at her. She pushes it away with practiced gentleness—it was a gift from my mom and grandma for my seventeenth birthday. "Saine, don't you dare show this to anyone."

"Let's get out there!" Corrine cheers to the buzzing room. Coach Hartl stands proudly behind her, arms crossed over her faded red polo. "We have losers to support."

"Save the trash-talking for the other team, Corrine," Coach Hartl says, motioning for the cheerleaders to leave the locker room with her.

The four girls Corrine stunned with her earlier dressing-down leap to their feet and fly out of the room. Kayla stands, catching Corrine's Intense Eyes™.

"Kayla," she says, marching up to us, "you're going to fly in Macy's spot tonight."

Kayla gestures to me. "What, you expect Saine to hold me up by herself?"

"No," she says. "I'll be your base, too."

"Please don't let me die," Kayla says to me with a groan in her voice.

"You'll be fine," Corrine says with a laugh. All the humor slides off her face when she turns my way. "You, on the other hand. What's that on your mouth?"

"A smile?"

Her own cherry-red lips frown. "Black is not a cute or school-sanctioned lip color." Lying is a waste of energy, she always says. Better to just get straight to the point.

"It's one of our school colors, though."

"She has a point," Kayla says, pulling her hair into a sloppy but passable ponytail.

"We wear red lipstick and you know this," Corrine says.

"Shealsohas a point." Now Kayla slides her school-sanctioned, cherry-red bow from around her wrist and over her hair tie. This conversation feels ominously reminiscent of the one we had when Corrine convinced me to become a cheerleader sophomore year. Resistance was futile, and not that I'd ever admit it to her, but I had been pretty excited to be part of a team anyway. She didn't need to put in so much effort to make me join with her. I'd follow her to the ends of the earth if shepromised it would be a good time and I wouldn't be alone.

Corrine crosses her arms. "Thank you."

I've been trying to get black lipstick approved for two years now, but I guess this isn't the year either. "It's a lip stain. I'm sorry," I say, "but this sucker's not coming off until I'm cremated."

"Better start scrubbing." Corrine flips her strawberry-blonde ponytail over her shoulder and winks. "Rude."

"There's lipstick in my bag if you need it!" she says before disappearing.

"It's just herpregame ritual," Kayla whispers before following Corrine out.

After some intense scrubbing and reapplying, I fix my long, dark hair into a higher ponytail and head toward the Cedar Heights High School football field, cursing Corrine's name. I'm a firm believer that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission and all that, so I can't fault her too much. I knew she wouldn't let it fly. The wind whips at my bare legs, goose bumps appearing after one blow as I jog through the packed parking lot. To get to the front of the bleachers, I have to hustle around a bunch of people just standing around in useless clusters. The scent of fresh fries wafts toward me, stalling my progress just long enough for my stomach to growl—I had half a peanut butter and banana sandwich before the game, and it was filling enough, but it wasn'tfries.

I'm about to swing onto the track where the rest of my teamcheers on our very unsuccessful football players as they enter the field, but there's a lanky pain in the ass in my way. I'm late, and not in the mood, but Holden Michaels, Corrine's ex-boyfriend as of about four months ago, either doesn't feel me tap him on the shoulder, or he doesn't care. Probably the latter.

I clear my throat.

"Oh, hi, Saine," he says in a bored voice, his face scrunched up behind his DSLR as he snaps at the players running in front of him. "I exist today?"

"You're in my way and I was trying to politely hint at that." And it's true, this is about as polite as I get with Holden since I don't have to be around him for Corrine's sake anymore. We occasionally spoke when they dated, with Corrine as a referee, but since the breakup, our communication has practically been on mute, and for good reason. Corrine never explicitly said she broke up with him because he was cheating, but when she said there was another girl, I put two and two together myself.

"Oh, of course. You just needed something from me." He drops his hands so I can see his face: red, wind-thrashed cheeks; bushy black eyebrows over icy blue eyes; deep pink lips in the shade of "First Kiss" forming an annoying, heartbreaking smirk. "That makes more sense."

Coach Hartl calls my name, so I shove past him. Despite his light coat, he still radiates heat, and I hate him for it as another ten thousand goose bumps invade my skin.

"What, no funny business?" he taunts. "Ran out of witty comebacks?"

I walk backward so I can face him when I say, "Sorry, butI can't always be your source of amusement. Maybe invest in a mirror." I snap. "Look at that. I guess Ididn'trun out."

No amount ofrah-rah-rass, kick 'em in the asscould encourage the Cedar Heights Hawks to complete any successful plays. We're speeding toward another loss when Corrine can sense I'm itching to film the team. She allows me to, as long as I capture her good side, which, like Kayla, is every side. She'd have at least seven good sides even if she were two-dimensional.

I run up the metal bleacher stairs to film the team front and center, but just as I'm positioning myself behind the guardrail, Holden appears and nudges me off-center.

"I'm taking photos for the yearbook," he says by way of explanation, not even bothering to look at me.

"I'm takingvideofor the yearbook." I try to nudge him back, but he's like a wall. A lean, skin-and-clothes-covered wall. I miss when he was shorter than me in elementary school.

"Thedigitalyearbook.TikTokcounts as the digital yearbook as long as you use the right hashtag. This is for the real yearbook." He lifts his camera, poised to take a photo of the girls mid-toe-touch, but I place my hand in front of the lens.

"I was here first."

He faces me. "Why aren't you down there with the other cheerleaders? I think there are some pom-poms missing your hands right about now."

"Well, they'll just have to wait so I can do this." I flick him off with a tight smile. "Don't think the girl who dumped you gave you permission to photograph her."

"Oh, please." He snaps a picture of me, my vision exploding into orbs and negatives. "Corrine loves having her picture taken."I, on the other hand, donot."And this is a public, school event."

I reach for his camera, already imagining the terrible things he could do with a double-chinned photo of me in Photoshop. "Delete that."

He pulls a face at the display screen. "Don't worry. I will." He faces the field again and snaps a few photos in quick succession, each crunch of the shutter increasing my chances of a headache.

I film what I can, getting really dramatic close-ups and shifting the focus from girls in the front row to the whole way in the back, but my shots are fucking off-center, just because he's taller than me with bonier elbows. How does he expect me to get a filming gig one day with off-center footage in my reel?

With less than four minutes on the clock in the last quarter and no need for going into overtime, I abandon my shitty spot and deliver an acidic smile to Holden. "I hope all your files are corrupt when you transfer them."

"The ones with you in them will be," he says in the same sarcastic tone.

It's so weird to think we were ever friends. Like before he and Corrine got together. I was a naive seven-year-old and he was just the first kid to laugh at my extremely hilarious joke:A guy walks into a bar. Ouch.(My grandma taught me this crowd-pleaser.) He was also the only kid to even get it, so you have to understand that the bar was set pretty low. No pun intended.

But despite being inseparable until sixth grade, when we tried to maintain a friendship after starting different middle schools, an unspeakable and embarrassing spin the bottle mishap caused those five years of inseparable best friendship to dissolve like my hopes of wearing black lipstick to football games as soon as I laid eyes on Corrine Baker. I knew I needed to be her best friend. Sorry not sorry, Holden. He just didn't laugh as much or make his own tie-dyed T-shirts and banana nut muffins, didn't like happy music, didn't write me notes about each teacher that read like villain origin stories explaining why they chose to teach the subject they taught.

Holden Michaels simply could not compare to Corrine Baker.