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Or… my mother

I was crossing off people like I crossed off types of alcohol, and I felt like I’d run out of good role le adult whose life I wished I could have? So many of them see them any joy

Still, hangover or no, my seventeenth birthday had been my best one yet

I ditched my first few classes of the day—because fuck Jacqueline—but made it to lunch and all my classes afterward

Unfortunately, that night turned out to be the last chance for fun before finals ca around the corner For the next teeks, schoolwork took over randparents ood education, and I knew it could be the key to opening doors for me later I just didn’t think school and dance should be mutually exclusive

I called Leah every day to see if she wanted to meet up and study, but shemy calls

One thing screa into the ocean had made me realize was that out of all the people I’d met in California, she was the one who’d offered the most and taken the least—who’d been my best supporter when I’d needed it I felt shitty that the price of ending the ith the Princes had been the slow death of my friendship with her It was supposed to be “ho’s before bros”, right?

So I’d resolved t

o fix it so the Princes didn’t feel like an option anymore, not because I was afraid of what they’d do, but because…

Well, reasons I couldn’t quite let myself think about

Reasons that made my heart beat too hard and too fast

Spring semester finals were even harder than the fall exams had been, but I scraped by in all my classes, even Chemistry

Jacqueline had texted me the day after my birthday with belated wishes and had mentioned that she and Philip would attend the end-of-year student awards cerelish Lit had been good enough to earn me an award

The cereht before the dorms would shut down and transition over for su forward to the event tooup in front of crowds, and also because it marked the official end of the school year

And sootten attached to this place