Praise for ADI ALSAID

‘Captivating, mysterious, fun and deep … for readers of John Green’

—Fresh Fiction

‘If you’re looking for the perfect summer read, this is it.’

—Hannah Harrington, author of Speechless and Saving June

‘Five love stories, beautifully woven together by a special girl […] A do-not-miss.’

—Justine magazine

‘A captivating cross-country journey, where four strangers’ adventures collide into one riveting tale of finding yourself’

—YABooksCentral.com

‘Mesmerising. A story of love, loss, ambition and finding the true meaning of life’

—Glitter magazine

Never

Always

Sometimes

Adi Alsaid

www.miraink.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-03339-8

NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES

© 2015 Adi Alsaid

Published in Great Britain 2015

by MIRA Ink, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers,

1 London Bridge, London SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

MIRA Ink is a registered trademark of Harlequin Enterprises Limited, used under licence.

Version: 2018-10-26

For Sylas and Lucy

Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE: THE LIST

PART 1: DAVE

ALMOST FOUR YEARS LATER

FRIDAY AT THE KAPOORS’

EMPTY COLORING BOOKS

HOMEROOM & HAPPY HOUR

MAKING A MESS

PARTICULAR SHADES

VIRAL

SOLVE FOR X

TREE HOUSE

DATE

NUTELLA & CUPCAKES

CHEMISTRY

NEVERTHELESS BELONG

AGAINST THE CURRENT

PART 2: JULIA

WITHOUT KNOWING

APOLOGIES

CUE THE MONTAGE

JUST LIKE THIS

THE PROMPOSAL

ROAD TRIPPOSAL

THAT TEENAGE FEELING

PART 3: DAVE & JULIA

BECAUSE I’M DUMB

PERFECT

SUNRISE

RIDICULOUS

LAZY

ENERGY

OFF

WITHOUT HIM

MESS

MORE OR LESS

CEILINGS

FLOAT

PROM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Extract

Endpage

Copyright

PROLOGUE: THE LIST

DAVE DROPPED HIS backpack by his feet and slid onto the bench that overlooked the harbor at Morro Bay. He loved the view here: the ocean sprawling out like the future itself, interrupted only by the white tips of docked sailboats and the rusted railing people held on to to watch the sunset. He loved how far away it felt from San Luis Obispo, even though it was only fifteen minutes away. Most of all, he loved when Julia would appear in his periphery mock-frowning, how she would keep her eyes on him, trying not to smile as she walked up, then she would slide in right next to him like there was nowhere else she belonged.

“Hey, you goof. Sorry I’m late.”

Dave looked up just as Julia was sitting down. She was wearing her usual: shorts, a plaid blue shirt over a tank top, the pair of flip-flops she loved so much that they were now made up of more duct tape than the original rubbery material. Her light brown hair was in a loose ponytail, two perfect strands looped around her ears. If the lights ever went out in her presence, Dave was pretty sure the brightness of her eyes would be more useful than a flashlight.

“S’okay. How was hanging out with your mom this weekend?”

“Greatest thing ever. Don’t get me wrong, the dads are awesome. But my mom is the coolest person alive.”

“Hyperbole foul,” Dave said.

Julia crossed her legs at the ankles and looked around the harbor. “Did I miss anything interesting?”

“There was a couple breaking up by the ice cream shop. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the girl was such a sad crier. I wanted to go give her a hug, but that might have been a little weird.”

Julia gave him a smile and stole a sip from the bubble tea he’d been holding.

“Tell me more about your mom. What makes her so cool?”

“Everything,” Julia said. “She lives the kind of life that I didn’t even understand was an option. She once biked from Canada to Chile. On a bicycle. For, like, months. Other adults work from nine to five and then go home to watch TV. She bikes a whole continent.”

“Huh,” Dave said, impressed. “That is pretty cool. How come she’s never come by before?”

“She’s too busy being awesome,” Julia said. She glanced around for a little while, swirling the drink in her hand. Dave followed her gaze to a little boy riding his tricycle down the harbor, his parents walking calmly behind, beaming with pride. “So. High school tomorrow. Big day.”

“Yup,” Dave said with a shrug, reaching for his tea back.

He imagined what other kids might be doing in anticipation of starting high school. Picking out outfits, getting haircuts, quarreling with parents and siblings, texting each other messages that made more use of emoticons than proper punctuation.

“Any thoughts? Concerns? Schemes?”

“Oh, you know. Nothing specific to high school. Take over the world.”

She scrunched her mouth to one side of her face, then looked straight at him, which always made Dave feel like he was either lucky or about to turn into a puddle. A lucky puddle, that’s what he’d felt like ever since he’d met Julia. “We’re still gonna be us?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean...we’re kind of different from most people, right? We don’t do what everyone else does. We’re more likely to bike a continent than watch TV all afternoon.”

“I guess so.”

Julia drank from his bubble tea, aiming the fat straw at the dark spots of tapioca that settled on the bottom of the cup. When she’d sucked up a few and chewed on them thoughtfully, she looked down at the ground. “As long as we don’t get turned into something that looks more like high school, more like everybody else and less like us, I’ll be okay.”

She glanced at him, then looked across the harbor at the bay, where the water was starting to take on the color of the sun.

“So I’m not allowed to become the high school quarterback that dates the cheerleading captain?”

“I’m going to throw up this bubble tea right in your face.”

He bumped her lightly with his shoulder, thrilled as always at the weight of her next to him, the warmth of her skin beneath the plaid shirt. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You couldn’t be a cliché if you tried.”

Julia smiled at that, tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear. She grabbed the bottom of the bench with her hands and leaned forward a little, stretching, and the brown tress slipped back in front of her face. She kicked at the backpack by his feet. “You have any paper in there? I have an idea.”

PART 1 DAVE

ALMOST FOUR YEARS LATER

THE KIDS WALKING past Dave seemed to be in some other universe. They moved too quickly, they were too animated, they talked too loudly. They held on to their backpacks too tightly, checked themselves in tiny mirrors hanging on the inside of their lockers too often, acted as if everything mattered too much. Dave knew the truth: Nothing mattered. Nothing but the fact that when school was out for the day, he and Julia were going to spend the afternoon at Morro Bay.

No one had told him that March of senior year would feel like it was made of Jell-O. After he’d received his acceptance letter from UCLA, high school had morphed into something he could basically see through. When, two days later, Julia received her congratulations from UCSB, only an hour up the coastline, the whole world took on brighter notes, like the simple primary colors of Jell-O flavors. They giggled constantly.

Julia’s head appeared by his side, leaning against the locker next to his. It was strange how he could see her every day and still be surprised by how it felt to have her near. She knocked her head against the locker softly and combed her hair behind her ear. “It’s like time has ceased to advance. I swear I’ve been in Marroney’s class for a decade. I can’t believe it’s only lunch.”

“There is nothing in here I care about,” Dave announced into his locker. He reached into a crumpled heap of papers on top of a history textbook he hadn’t pulled out in weeks and grabbed a single, ripped page. “Apparently, I got a C on an art assignment last year.” He showed the drawing to Julia: a single palm tree growing out of a tiny half moon of an island in the middle of a turquoise ocean.

“Don’t show UCLA that. They’ll pull your scholarship.”

Dave crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it at a nearby garbage can. It careened off the edge and rolled back to his feet. He picked it up and shoved it back into the locker. “Any notable Marroney moments today?”

“I can’t even remember,” Julia said, moving aside to make room for Dave’s locker neighbor. “The whole day has barely registered.” She put her head on Dave’s shoulder and let out a sigh. “I think he ate a piece of chalk.”

It was pleasant torture, how casually she could touch him. Dave kept exploring the wasteland of his locker, tossing out a moldy, half-eaten bagel, occasionally unfolding a sheet of paper with mild curiosity, trying not to move too much so that Julia wouldn’t either. He made a pile of papers to throw out and a much smaller one of things to keep. So far, the small pile contained two in-class notes from Julia and a short story he’d read in AP English.

“Still on for the harbor today?”

“It’s the only thing that’s kept me sane,” Julia said, pulling away. “Come on, why are we still here? I’m starving. Marroney didn’t offer me any of his chalk.”

“I do not care about any of this,” Dave repeated. Liberated by the absence of her touch, he walked over to the trash can and dragged it toward his locker, then proceeded to shovel in the entirety of the contents except for the books. A USB memory stick was wrapped inside a candy wrapper, covered in chocolate, and he tossed that, too. A few sheets remained tucked into the corners, some ripped pieces stuck under the heavy history textbook.

But something caught his eye. One paper folded so neatly that for a second he thought it may have been a note he’d saved from his mom. She’d died when he was nine, and though he’d learned to live with that, he still treated the things she left behind like relics. But when he unfolded the sheet and realized what he was holding, a smile spread his lips. Dave’s eyes went down the list to number eight: Never pine silently after someone for the entirety of high school.

He looked at Julia, recalling the day they’d made the list, suddenly flushed with warmth at the thought that nothing had come between them in four years. She was holding on to her backpack’s straps, starting to get impatient. Everything about Julia was beautiful to him, but it was the side of her face that he loved the most. The slope of her neck, the slight jut of her chin, how the blue in her eyes popped. Her ears, which were the cutest ears on the planet, or maybe the only cute ones ever crafted.

“David Nathaniel O’Flannery, why are we still here?”

“How have we been best friends for this long and you still don’t know my full name?”

“I know most of your initials. Can we go, please?”

“Look at what I just found.”

“Is it Marroney’s mole from sophomore year?”

“Our Nevers list.”

Julia turned around to face him. A couple of football players passed between them talking about a party happening on Friday. She was quiet, studying Dave with a raised eyebrow. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, O’Flannery? I could never forgive you.”

“Gutierrez. My last name is Gutierrez.”

“Don’t change the subject. Did you really find it?” She motioned for him to hand the paper over, which he did, making sure their fingers would brush. The linoleum hallways were starting to empty out, people were settling into their lunch spots. “I was actually thinking about this the other day. I even wrote my mom about it,” Julia said, reading over the list. A smile shaped her lips, which were on the thin side, though Dave couldn’t imagine wishing for them to be any different. “We did a pretty good job of sticking to this.”

“Except for that time you hooked up with Marroney,” Dave said, moving to her side and reading the list with her.

“I wish. He’s such a dreamboat.”

Dave closed his locker and they peered into classrooms they passed by, watching the teachers settle into their lunchtime rituals, doing some grading as they picked at meals packed into Tupperware. Dave and Julia wordlessly stopped in front of Mr. Marroney’s room and watched him try to balance a pencil on the end of a yardstick.

“This is your one regret from high school?”

“There’s a playful charm to him,” Julia said, in full volume, though the door was open. “I’m surprised you don’t see it.”

They stared on for a while, then made their way out toward the cafeteria. The line was at its peak, snaking all the way around the tables and reaching almost to the door. The tables inside the cafeteria and out on the blacktop had long since been claimed. “Kind of cool that we never did get a permanent lunch spot,” Dave said, gesturing with the list in hand. “I hadn’t even remembered that it was on the list. Had you?”

“No,” Julia said. “The subconscious is weird.” She reached into her bag and grabbed a Granny Smith apple, rubbing it halfheartedly on the hem of her shirt. “How do you feel about the gym today?”

He shrugged and they walked across the blacktop to the basketball gym tucked behind the soccer field. They had a handful of spots they sometimes went to, usually agreeing on a spot wordlessly, both of them headed in the same direction as if pulled by the same invisible string. They entered the old building, which used to smell of mold until a new court had been installed, so now it smelled like mold and new wood. The walls were painted the school colors: maroon and gold. Next to the banners hanging from the ceiling there was a deflated soccer ball pinned to the rafters.

Julia led them up the plastic bleachers. A group of kids was shooting around, and one of them looked at Dave and called out to him. “Hey, man, we need one more! You wanna run?”

“No, thanks,” Dave said. “I had a really bad dream about basketball once and I haven’t been able to play since.”

The kid frowned, then looked over at his friends who shook their heads and laughed. Dave took a seat next to Julia as the kids resumed their shooting. “I think you’ve used that one before,” Julia said, taking a bite out of her apple.

“I’m kind of offended on your behalf that they don’t ask you to play.”

“They did once.”

“Really?” Dave rummaged through his backpack for the Tupperware he’d packed himself in the morning. “Why don’t I remember that?”

“I was really good. Dunked on people. Scored more points than I did on the SAT. Every male in the room suppressed the memory immediately to keep their egos from disintegrating.”

Dave laughed as he scooped a plastic forkful of chicken and rice. It was a recipe he vaguely remembered from childhood, one he’d found in his mom’s old cookbooks and had taught himself to make. His dad and his older brother, Brett, never said anything about it, but the leftovers never lasted more than two days. “So, you’ve heard from your mom recently?” Julia had been raised by her adoptive fathers, but her biological mom had always lingered on the fringe, occasionally keeping in touch. Julia idolized her, and Dave, who’d been yearning for his mom for years, could never fault her for it.

“Yeah,” Julia said, unable to keep a smile from forming. “She’s even been calling. I heard the dads tell her the other day that she’s welcome anytime, so there’s a chance that a visit is in the works.”

Dave reached over and grabbed Julia’s head, shaking it from side to side. Long ago, in the awkward years of middle school, that had been established as his one gesture of affection when he didn’t know how else to touch her. “Julia! That’s great.”

“You goof, I’m gonna choke on my apple.” She shook him off. “I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

“Her hopes should be up. Her biological daughter is awesome.”

“She’s lived in eight countries and has worked with famous painters and sculptors. No offense, dear friend, but I think her standards for awesome are a little higher than yours.”

Dave took another forkful of rice and chewed it over slowly, watching the basketball players shoot free throws to decide on teams. “I don’t care how great of a life she’s led, if she doesn’t come visit you she’s a very poor judge of awesomeness.”

He glanced out the corner of his eye at Julia, who set her apple core aside and grabbed a napkin-wrapped sandwich out of her bag. He was waiting to catch that smile of hers, to know he had caused it. Instead, he only saw her eyes flick toward the Nevers list, which was resting folded on his knee. They turned their attention to the pickup game happening on the court, each eating their lunch languidly.

For the last two periods of the day, Dave could feel the seconds ticking by, like bugs crawling on his skin. He reread the Nevers list, smiling to himself at the memory of him and Julia stealing the pen away from each other to write the next item. He gazed out the window at the blue California sky, texted Julia beneath his desk, scowled at the two kids in the back of the room who somehow believed that what they were doing was quiet enough to be called whispering. Next to him, Anika Watson took diligent notes, and he wondered how she was mustering the energy. He wondered how many of the items on the Nevers list she’d done, whether she was going to the Kapoor party that he’d overheard was happening that Friday night. Looking around the room, he imagined a little number popping up above each person’s head depicting how many Nevers they’d done.

At the final releasing bell of the day, Dave and Julia met up in the hallway, silently making their way out to the parking lot, where Julia’s supposedly white Mazda Miata should have been glimmering in the California sun but was barely reflective thanks to the year-long layer of dust she’d never bothered to clean off.

Before Julia said anything, Dave knew what she’d been thinking about. He knew her well enough to read her silences, and there’d been only one thing on her mind since he’d found the list. He smiled as she spoke. “What if we did the list?”

Dave shrugged and tossed his backpack into her trunk. “Why would we?”

“Because two more months of this will drive me crazy,” Julia said. She unzipped her light blue hoodie and threw it into the car on top of his backpack, then stepped out of her sandals and slipped those into the trunk, too. “We’ve got nothing left to prove to ourselves. High school didn’t change us. Maybe it’s time to try out what everyone else has been doing. Just for kicks. God knows we could use some entertaining.”

It was one of those perfect seventy-five-degree days, more L.A. than San Francisco, though San Luis Obispo was perfectly in between the two cities. A breeze was blowing, and now that Julia was wearing only her tank top it almost tired him how beautiful she was. It’d been a long time of this, keeping his love for her subdued. It’d been a long time of letting her rest her head on his shoulder during their movie nights, of letting her prop her almost-always bare feet on his lap, his hands nonchalantly gripping her ankles. He’d been a cliché all four years of high school, in love with his best friend, pining silently.

He opened the passenger door and looked across the roof of Julia’s car, which was more brown than white, covered with raindrop-shaped streaks of dirt, though it hadn’t rained in weeks. “I hear there’s a party at the Kapoors’ on Friday.”

Julia beamed a smile at him. “Look at you. In the know.”

“I’m an influential man, Ms. Stokes. I’m expected to keep up with current events.”

Julia snorted and plopped herself down into the driver’s seat. “So, no Friday movie night, then? We’re going to a party? With beers in red plastic cups and Top 40 music being blasted and kids our age? People hooking up in upstairs bedrooms and throwing up in the bushes outside and at least one girl running out in tears?”

“Presumably,” Dave said. “I’ve never actually been to a party, so I have no idea if that’s what happens.”

Julia lowered the top of the car, then pulled out of the school’s parking lot and turned right, headed toward California One and the harbor at Morro Bay.

“So, we’re doing this?” Dave asked. “We’re gonna join in on what everyone else has been doing?”

“Why not?” Julia said, and Dave couldn’t help but smile at the side of her face, the way the sun made her eyes impossibly blue, how he could see her mom on her thoughts. “I’ll come over before the party so we can decide what we’re going to wear.”

“And we can talk about how drunk we’re gonna get,” Dave added.

“And who we’re gonna make out with.”

“Yup.”

Dave turned to face the road and sank into his seat. He lowered the mirror visor and stuck his arm out the side of the car, feeling the sun on his skin. He kept smiling, too experienced at hiding to let the tiny heartbreak show.

FRIDAY AT THE KAPOORS’

BY FRIDAY, DAVE had mostly forgotten about their plans to attend the party. It was only during homeroom when he asked Julia what movie she wanted to watch that night that she reminded him about their plans to attend the Kapoors’ party. A mild dread filled him as he pictured his night full of drunken jackasses and shitty music rather than sharing snacks with Julia in a darkened theater, getting coffee at a diner afterward.

At six, Julia came over to get ready. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn to school, shorts and a T-shirt with the logo of a bookstore in San Francisco. Her feet were bare, but she was holding a plastic bag through which Dave could see a pair of high heels and a few boxes.

“You’re joking with the shoes, right?”

“Hey, if I’m taking part in a cliché, I’m going all the way.” She entered the house, moving past him with a light touch to his ribs. “I can’t wait for that moment when all the other girls take their high heels off to go barefoot and they finally see what a genius I am for not wearing shoes in the first place.”

“I don’t think that’s a high school thing,” Dave said, following her into the kitchen. “I think high heels are more of a grown-up cliché.”

Julia plopped the bag down on the counter and scowled at him. “Don’t take this away from me, Dave. Tonight the universe vindicates my disdain for footwear.” She reached into the bag and took out cupcake mix, some eggs, and a container of rainbow sprinkles.

“What’s all this?”

“The dads said it’s rude to show up to a party empty-handed,” Julia said.

“So we’re gonna bake the Kapoors cupcakes?”

“If I’m being honest, I fully expect the two of us to eat most of these. But yes.”

Dave picked up the cupcake mix and examined it, uncertain about how the gesture would be received by their classmates, but finally deciding that if he was going to get made fun of for being considerate, as confusing as that would be, it was something he could live with. “If we’re going to this party, I guess there may as well be sweets involved.”

“Damn right,” Julia said, leaning over to preheat the oven.

“You are the only two high school seniors in the world that would be baking on a Friday night.” Brett stood at the entrance to the kitchen for a second, shaking his head before going to the fridge and grabbing himself a beer. Dave wasn’t a small guy, six feet and an above-average build, but when Brett stood at his full height, Dave couldn’t help but feel small. Dave was almost a carbon copy of his dad, but in Brett, their mom’s features lived on: the sharp nose and lighter eyes.

“For your information, Judgey McHigh Horse, we’re going to a Kapoor party tonight.” Julia opened a few cabinets until she found a mixing bowl.

“You two?” He looked at Dave, who could only shrug. “I wish I could see that.”

“I’m sure you would take any chance you got to hang out around high school girls again.”

“With you over all the time, I don’t really have a choice, do I?” Brett took a swig from his beer. He’d just turned twenty-one, which was a huge relief for their dad, who’d been letting Brett drink for a while now. After their mom had died, Brett had helped take care of Dave, and in his dad’s eyes, that earned him the right to do anything he wanted. “So what’s with the baking?”

“It’s rude to show up empty-handed,” Dave offered.

Brett laughed.

“Okay, then. Good luck with that.” He lingered by the fridge for a few minutes, finishing his beer. “How are there still Kapoor brothers going to that school? I thought the youngest one graduated the same year I did.”

“The triplets are juniors,” Dave said, pouring sugar and cream into a mixing bowl for the frosting. “And I think there was an oops baby that’s in junior high now.”

“I heard a rumor that the Kapoor parents only procreate because they’re building up an army,” Julia said. In the few minutes since they’d started working on the cupcakes, Julia had managed to get herself covered in cupcake mix. It coated her brown hair and the tip of her nose, and there was a smear of batter on her chin. Dave had to resist the urge to take a picture of her or call her adorable. “They’ve been planning to take over San Luis Obispo for generations.”

“I could actually see that,” Brett said, tossing his beer into the recycling bin and grabbing another can, letting loose a burp that sounded less like a burp and more like a bass line. “Dad, you want a beer?” he called out into the living room, where their dad was likely watching college basketball. There was a grunt of a response, so Brett grabbed another one and set it on the counter next to him.

“Don’t open that,” Dave said to Brett. “We need a ride to the party.”

Brett popped open the new beer defiantly, sucking up the foam that hissed out. “You really need to get your license already. You’re eighteen.”

“This is more of a situation where we intend to, as you and your brainless friends would call it, ‘get wasted,’ and less of a Dave-not-having-a-license thing,” Julia said. “I could have driven if I wanted to.”

Brett shook his head. “You two are so codependent.”

Dave blushed, but Julia kept on mixing cupcake batter without missing a beat. “It’s not codependence, it’s attachment,” she said.

“Attached at the hip, maybe,” Brett said, drinking from his beer. “You should take it easy on the booze; you two probably share a liver. You won’t last an hour at that party.”

Julia scowled at him, then clapped cupcake mix off her hands in front of his face. “Why the hell not?”

Brett coughed, brushing the white cloud away from his face. “You’re too... I don’t know. Artsy.”

Julia laughed. “I don’t paint, write, sculpt, or play any music. I don’t think you know what artsy means.”

“I think he’s trying to call you intelligent, but in a derogatory way,” Dave said.

“I mean that you go to parties ironically, barefoot, and you bring cupcakes.” He took another drink, mulling something over in his head. “You’re right, artsy was the wrong word. I should have said clueless. The Kapoor parties are legendary for being wild. I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourselves into.”

“I’m sure the beer-pong tournament will be really intimidating,” Julia said, turning back to the cupcake batter. “You know, I had second thoughts of going before you came in. But now I’m sure it’ll be a blast. I can’t wait until I see that glimmer in someone’s eyes when they start thinking high school days are the glory days. Like the look in your eyes, Brett.”

Brett looked around the kitchen, giving his derisive laugh that was more like a snort. Dave could tell he was trying to think of a comeback. After a while, Brett scowled, muttered something about cupcakes, and then went into the living room to rejoin their dad. Watching TV was their favorite thing to do. They did so silently, never acknowledging that it drew them together. Sometimes Dave felt like joining them, but it seemed to belong just to the two of them. Dave didn’t mind so much; he had his own silent way of feeling close to his dad: They cooked for each other, meals that Dave’s mom used to make for all of them.

“You have to teach me how to do that. I never get the last word with him,” Dave said, dipping a finger into the frosting to taste it. There was something delightful about watching Julia move about the kitchen recklessly, a trail of batter and eggshells in her wake. The tiled floor was a mess when she was done with it, polka-dotted with vanilla extract. Her fingerprints were all over the black cabinets and on the stove. A pile of dishes sat in the sink, way more of them than she had needed. On his own, Dave was a bit of a neat freak. But when Julia was nearby, messes seemed beautiful, life’s untidiness easier to comprehend.

“So this is how tradition falls,” he said, taking a seat on one of the stools at the breakfast counter. “With cupcakes and the Kapoor army.”

“Better a bang than a whimper,” she said, easing onto the stool next to him. She reached over and brushed something off his shoulder, as if he were the one covered in ingredients. “Plus, don’t be so dramatic. It doesn’t suit you. We’ll watch a movie next Friday, when we get bored of this. And them.”

Dave nodded, understanding what she was getting at, though maybe not in the exact way she’d meant it. Julia kept mostly to herself at school, and by extension he did, too. He was friendly enough with classmates, though, especially when Julia wasn’t around to draw his attention. There were a couple of guys he might even go so far as to call friends, though he never really spoke to them outside of school. Once or twice he’d hung out with them, gone to lunch and then played video games in a curtain-drawn den. There’d been dog hair on every surface, a stale smell of Doritos in the air. Their conversations had bored him, and within an hour or so he’d found himself longing for Julia’s company, an urge so sharp it felt like homesickness. He had no trouble being alone. But if he was around anyone, he wanted it to be Julia.

“You’re right,” Dave said, the worry over the party melting away. “I might even try breaking the promise to never go streaking while we’re at it.”

“I’ll make sure that the picture goes viral and you live the rest of your life in regret and shame.”

“You’re such a good friend.” Dave put a hand on top of her head and shook lightly. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Show up to parties empty-handed, for one.”

Dave chuckled, dipping another finger into the frosting. “You have to admit it’s kind of weird, though. Doing this after avoiding it for so long.”

Julia shrugged, using her pinky to steal the frosting from his finger before he could lick it away. “I don’t think it’ll be that bad. Just see it as a brief social experiment.” She hopped off the stool and went to the oven, peering in through the glass to check on the cupcakes. “My mom did this once.”

“Went to a Kapoor party?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “No, goof. She came back to the States, got a regular job. This was when I was around nine or so. She worked at a bank, tried to go back to school. She calls it her ‘social experiment with the sheep.’ Six months later, she’d taken off again, even happier to return to her unordinary life.”

Julia leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms in front of her chest, not really meeting Dave’s gaze. She knew she was being transparent, but she’d never been good at hiding her feelings when it came to her mom.

“I see what you’re doing. You’re drawing parallels between us and your mom so I will feel as cool as she is.”

Julia smiled and tossed a towel at him. “If it is too lame we’ll just leave. We can even have a secret signal.”

Dave groaned. “Why a secret signal? We could just turn to each other and say, ‘This sucks,’ and then leave.”

“Will you get into the spirit of this thing, please? Our secret signal will be to start a dance-off.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“And you love me for it,” she said, smirking.

o o o

The Kapoor house was near school, about a fifteen-minute walk away. It was a route they were deeply familiar with, having driven it, walked it, and ridden their bikes down it countless times. But the streets took on a strange feel that Friday night, like walking into your own house and finding the furniture rearranged. The trees looked funny somehow, leafier than usual, or taller, or ominous. Okay, they looked pretty normal, but it felt weird noticing them while on the way to the Kapoor house for a party. Even walking next to Julia joking around felt a little strange in this context.

When they arrived, Dave rang the doorbell, confused by the relative silence coming from inside the house. He’d expected the rhythmic thumping of what passed for pop music. He crinkled the tinfoil covering the tray of cupcakes as they waited for someone to answer. Julia leaned on his shoulder as she stepped into the high heels, the soles of her feet gray from the sidewalks. Once she was in them she grimaced at him. “Why,” she said, not a question, he knew, but a complaint.

One of the Kapoor triplets opened the door, the collar of his polo shirt popped up, the sight of which always caused a dull ache somewhere in Dave’s chest. Julia let out a short “Ha!” at the sight of the red plastic cup in his hand.

“Beer’s in the fridge, the sink, and the bathtub. We’ve got a game of beer pong going if you guys want next. Shots of tequila start once someone brings tequila.” He closed the door behind them and then peeked under the tinfoil of the cupcake tray. “You guys made cupcakes?”

“Um,” Dave said, eyeing the closed door with an increasing sense of regret.

“Cool,” the Kapoor said, letting the tinfoil drop back down. Then he walked past them through the empty living room and toward the kitchen.

“I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” Dave whispered.

“Of course we have,” Julia said. “That was the point.” Then she started making her way across the shag carpet, gingerly stepping ahead as if tiptoeing through poisonous bushes. She held out her arms for balance, and Dave walked by her side so she’d have him to lean against.

“I’ll have you know that I’m about to start a dance-off.”

“Oh, shush. We’ve only had one interaction. And he wasn’t all that amusing.”

Dave stopped walking, nearly causing Julia to tip over. “Julia. A red plastic cup full of beer and a popped collar. On a polo shirt. The only thing that would have topped that introduction to the party was if he WOOHed at us.”

“Your standards are too low. This might be the only high school party I ever go to. I want to see plenty of it.”

“So you can look back fondly at the glory days?”

Julia poked him in the stomach, which he kind of took as the equivalent of when he grabbed her head and shook. “Goof.”

They stood there in the empty living room for a second, mostly just smiling at each other. Dave imagined that if anyone walked into the room at that point it might look like they loved each other in the same way.

“Come on,” Julia said. “The night is young. We have a lot of people to make fun of.”

In the kitchen, the two other Kapoor triplets stood at one end of a plastic lawn table. They were setting up red plastic cups into a triangle on the table, pouring little measures of beer into each one. They, too, wore polo shirts, though each a different color and with the collars blissfully kept down. Three other guys, vaguely recognizable from school, lingered by the table, arguing about who had called “next.” A girl was at the speaker system choosing songs. She was wearing sneakers, not high heels, but Dave decided not to point that out.

“Not exactly what I’d imagined,” Dave whispered to Julia.

“Pretty underwhelming,” Julia agreed.

They waved hello to the six people at the party, and after casually obliterating a couple of cupcakes, they each grabbed a beer and stood near the beer-pong table, listening to the Kapoors trash-talk the two guys who’d won the argument and taken next game. Every now and then Dave would help by picking up the Ping-Pong ball and handing it over, then wiping the dirt-flecked remnants of beer against his jeans.

“What about this did Brett feel we couldn’t handle?” Dave asked.

“The excitement, I’m sure.” Julia sipped from her beer can and looked around the room, disappointed. Good, Dave thought. Next week they’d be back to their movie night.

It wasn’t long before more people started showing up and the Top 40 hits started blasting. The beer-pong players kept getting louder, the trash talk unraveling into something a little more ridiculous but, Dave had to admit, a lot funnier (“My mom could have hit that shot while conceiving me!”). In came Grant Stephens, wearing of all things his letterman jacket. “I didn’t even know those existed in real life,” Julia said. The rest of the football team showed up, too, some of them hulking inside their striped polo shirts. Juan and Abby, the longtime basketball couple, arrived with their arms around each other. Dave had always thought that they pushed the limits of the school’s PDA policies, but in comparison to their performance that evening, they apparently held back quite a bit of affection on a day-to-day basis.

All the recognizable cliques came by, and so did those ungroupable stragglers who were known by their little circles of two or three, friendships that were fairly similar to Dave and Julia’s; people they knew the names of but not much more. Every one of them was pulled in the direction of the beer, then they regrouped into their little planets of social comfort, slowly orbiting around the room and briefly interacting with other planets before making it back to the beer and then hurtling away from it again, their voices louder and their arm gestures more erratic with every trip. Here they were, all these people gathering to drink in abundance and in a variety of ways, chugging beers, taking Jell-O shots from tiny cups like the kind they gave you in the nurse’s office, writing with Sharpies on Melvin Olnyck’s face as soon as he passed out on the couch, Alexandra and Louise from Dave’s economics class making out against the wall right by family photos of the innumerable Kapoor children, even though Dave had never guessed that they were friends, much less a couple.

“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?”

Julia nodded. “I can’t believe this has been happening the whole time we were in high school.”

“I was just thinking that,” Dave said. He finished off his beer and took a few steps to place it atop one of the many beer can pyramids that had started popping up around the house. “I’m gonna try to find the bathroom. Don’t get swallowed up by this madness.”

“Wait, Dave, before you go.”

“Yeah?”

God, she was beautiful. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from the alcohol and the warmth of so many people inside the house. She stepped out of her high heels, suddenly the height he’d always known her to be. Relief visibly washed over her. She closed her eyes for a second, her toes curling and uncurling against the sticky kitchen floor. “That felt so good I might start wearing high heels just for the pleasure of removing them.” She sighed with a smile. “Okay, I just wanted you to witness that. You can go pee now.”

He smiled at her, then made his way through the groups of increasingly drunken classmates to find the bathroom.

EMPTY COLORING BOOKS

DAVE FLUSHED AND washed his hands, drying them off on his jeans since the single hand towel was clearly soaked through. He glanced briefly at himself in the mirror, wondering what he would look like in a polo shirt and then shaking off the thought, or more like shuddering it away the way he did with nightmares. This had been an interesting experiment, but now it was time to find Julia and go back to their little world of two.

Except that the party had rearranged itself while Dave was in the bathroom. The number of people in the kitchen had doubled. Beer pong was over and now there was a new game being played, one he’d seen Brett and his friends play, though he’d never really cared enough to try to understand it. Julia wasn’t where they’d been standing for most of the night.

He surveyed the room but couldn’t spot her, which surprised him. He was so used to looking for her that he felt unreasonably skillful at it, as if no matter how many people were around his eyes would easily land on her. Her presence called out to him like a beacon.

“Dave!” Vince Staffert shouted on his approach, clearly drunk. “Yo!”

“Hey, Vince.”

“Come play flip cup with us. We need one more.” He put his arm around Dave’s shoulders and started pulling him away from the wall.

“Uh, I don’t really know how to play,” Dave said, trying to hold his ground.

“Dave, you got into UCLA. I’m sure you can figure out a drinking game.”

Caught off guard by Vince knowing that about him, Dave stammered, “I—I shouldn’t. Julia and I were just about to go.”

Vince sometimes asked Dave for help in math class, and from those few interactions, Dave had always thought of him as a nice guy. He knew there was another side to Vince, football player that he was, but all he’d ever seen was someone big and quiet and not so good at math.

“This house is not that big. She’ll find you.” Vince pulled him to the kitchen table. Cups were scattered and stacked across the surface, little puddles of beer pooling together. The other team consisted of two guys and two girls, none of whom Dave knew on a first-name basis, though he’d seen them around school.

“Guys, I’m not sure you want me on your team.”

“Yeah, I agree,” one of the other football players said to Vince.

“AJ, don’t be a dick. Here,” Vince said, pouring some beer in a cup, which by the looks of it had been used many a time throughout the night. “The game’s easy,” he declared and explained the rules in a few seconds. “Got it?” Once, Dave and Julia had misread a flyer and, thinking they were about to see an author they loved, had accidentally attended a reading at the library by the West Coast’s leading researcher on menopause. So it’d be hard to say that this was the most out of place Dave had ever felt. But it was close enough.

Dave sighed. He and Julia had avoided all of this because they’d wanted their high school years to be a little more unique than everyone else’s. And yeah, they were here to see what they’d successfully avoided, but Dave had meant to just be an observer.

Dave surveyed the room one last time for Julia. The blue of her eyes, those three freckles on her neck. But she was nowhere around, and so he checked his phone. A text from her was waiting on his screen. Went off to explore the craziness on my own. Best story at the end of the night wins. Godspeed.

He smiled at the words, at what a great idea it was. Julia could turn any situation into something inherently more interesting. You’re on, he wrote back, already looking forward to reuniting with her, though he had no doubts she would have the better story.

Then he gave Vince a nod and turned his attention to the game.

o o o

Seventeen wins in a row later, Dave could feel the alcohol practically bubbling in his veins. It felt a little like doing a somersault underwater and then coming up really quickly, your head spinning and sending a warm tingle down your spine. Dave, it turned out, was prodigiously good at flip cup. He’d yet to fail at flipping a cup over. Every time it was his turn, he’d swallow the beer down in a second or two, and with one deft move of his hand, the cup would be upside down on the table without so much as a wobble.

Vince was nearly in hysterics, throwing a meaty arm around Dave’s neck, high-fiving everyone in the vicinity with his other hand, yelling about them being the world champions until no one else wanted to play them.

He and Vince walked outside without discussion, as if they were magnetically drawn to the fresh air. Dave looked around for Julia, wanting her to be nearby, longing to just exchange stupid jokes back and forth like they’d been doing for so long. He was going to break away and look for her, but then he noticed the briskness of the air and the way everyone seemed to be smiling and he took a seat with Vince on a bench.

“How come we’ve never hung out before, Dave?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. He burped, then chuckled at the thought of two dudes drinking beers and burping together. “Probably ’cause of Julia,” he added. “I’m usually trying to spend my time with her.”

“I’ve always wondered, are you two dating?”

“Nah. Just friends,” Dave said, a line he was used to delivering with as little emotion as possible, as if he were a spy trying not to be discovered.

Vince crushed his beer can in his hand and placed it by his feet. He put his hands on his knees—smaller hands than Dave would have expected from someone Vince’s size. “Since the truth serum known as Keystone Light is coursing through my veins, I’m gonna open up a bit here. You ready for it?”

“I’m ready,” Dave said, wondering what Julia would make of the conversation.

“You can handle it? Peering deep into my soul?”

“To be honest, right now it kind of feels like I can peer into everyone’s soul.”

“That sounds pretty scary to me,” Vince said with a smile. He ran a hand over his head, which was shaved recently, only the thinnest layer of fuzz starting to show through. “I am so in love,” he groaned, putting his elbows on his knees and slouching over. “Two years, man. She’s like some sickness I can’t get rid of.”

“Who?”

“Carly,” he said quietly, though no one was paying enough attention to them to hear. “She’s all I think about.” Vince looked so sad all of a sudden.

“Does she know?”

“I was always waiting for the right time to tell her, then she met some guy from Pacific Beach. At one of our games, no less. She’s been dating him for over a year, and I’ve barely been able to sleep since. I wake up at four a.m. thinking of things to say to her, and I repeat them to myself until my alarm goes off and it’s time to go to school to stop myself from saying it.”

Dave made a little hum of agreement in the back of his throat. Inside the house, people were taking pictures of themselves on their phones, making faces, kissing each other on the cheek. Their eyes were glazed over, and everyone seemed to be either shouting across the room or whispering into someone else’s ear. He couldn’t remember who Carly was. “You could tell her anyway. Just to get it off your chest.”

“I don’t want it off my chest, though. It keeps me close to her. Plus, she’s happy, and it’s not my place to disturb that.” He sat back against the bench and smiled sadly. “Is that weird?”

“Nah, it’s not weird. Actually, Julia and I have this list...” He stopped himself when he couldn’t think of how to phrase what he wanted to say without calling Vince a cliché. So many people were quietly in love that he and Julia considered it part of a normal high school experience and had therefore sworn it off. But Dave hadn’t really thought about it in those terms in a long time. Pining silently was a cliché, which meant that people were constantly in love with each other without saying a thing about it. How much unrequited, unspoken love filled up the halls every day? How many kids in class felt exactly like Dave did on a day-to-day basis? “You’re probably not alone,” Dave finally settled for. “I’m sure most of us are thinking about someone else when we’re in class.”

“Yeah, but that’s mostly horniness.”

They chuckled, then Dave finished his beer and crumpled it like Vince had. “Do you want to talk more about Carly?”

“Nah,” Vince said, standing up. “Just saying it out loud every now and then makes it more bearable. Thanks for listening. Let’s go inside and get drunker and talk to other people who are being gently eaten alive by longing.”

Dave smiled, and then took the hand Vince was offering to help him off the bench. Dave strolled around the house, reveling in everyone’s drunkenness, and how different it was than he’d imagined. It made him think of the title of one of his favorite albums, You Forgot It in People by Broken Social Scene, and he was a little embarrassed that he’d assumed all of his classmates were cartoons of teenagers.

When he couldn’t spot Julia anywhere, he checked his phone again and saw that the battery had died. There was a flutter of worry when the screen didn’t click on, Dave feeling like a shitty friend for being unreachable, for maybe causing her to worry. Then the mood of the party settled back into his bones and he pocketed the phone, sure that Julia was elsewhere in the house, enjoying herself in just the same way he was.

He’d ended up in the den, where he stared at the hundreds of books in the Kapoors’ library, turning his head slightly to read the spines.

“I do that, too,” a girl’s voice said.

He looked up to find Gretchen, a girl from his AP Chemistry class. Her back was to him, but he could recognize her by her hair, which was wavy enough to maybe be considered curly. It was dark blond, lightening up toward the ends, though he didn’t know enough about her or her hair to know if the blonder tips were natural or the evidence of a past dye job.

She turned to look at him, big brown eyes and the hint of a smile. At a glimpse, he could tell that her bottom teeth were slightly crooked. The world was full of details he’d failed to notice before.

“Do what?” he said.

“Check out bookshelves at strangers’ houses,” she answered, stepping up next to him and looking at the books as if to prove she wasn’t lying. “I’m usually a bit awkward in houses that I haven’t been to before, so it’s a way to not look weird. If I find something I’ve read before it automatically makes me more comfortable.”

He looked over at Gretchen, who fixed her eyes on the books. She was in a simple blue dress and—Dave couldn’t help the thought—looked lovely. “Is that what you’re doing now?”

She met his eyes for just a moment and turned them away again, trying to hide a grin. “Oh, I don’t know how to read.”

She was laughing as she said it, showing another glimpse of her crooked lower teeth. They weren’t unsightly, just imperfect. Dave liked the look of them, for some reason.

Dave chuckled. “That was one of the worst attempts at a lie I’ve ever seen.”

“Dammit, I know.” She blushed a little and rolled her eyes at herself. “I’ve been trying to get better, but I smile every time. I think I could be one of the greatest pranksters of our generation, but my mouth just doesn’t want any part of it. Stupid smile.”

“I’m Dave. We have AP—”

“AP Chem, I know. Come on, Dave, I live, like, a block away from you. We were in the same lab group that one time.”

“Right. Sorry, I just usually assume people don’t know me.”

“I know you,” she said. A lock of blond hair fell in front of her face and she pulled on it, examining the lighter ends for a few seconds before letting it drop against her dress. “So, have you read any of these?”

“All of them,” Dave said. A silent, funny look passed between them, acknowledging the fact that he’d delivered the line with a straight face.

Gretchen reached over and pulled a maroon book out at random. “What’s this one about?” She turned the book over and pretended to read the back copy, though there wasn’t any. She furrowed her brow and concentrated, but the corners of her mouth twitched anyway, begging to smile.

He took a step closer to her and pulled the book up to read the title, California Real Estate Law 1987–1992. At this distance, it was hard not to notice Gretchen in her entirety. He’d always seen her out of the corner of his eyes, blond locks and not much more, talkative, active at school in the way that he and Julia inherently disapproved of. Her legs were tan from soccer practices in the sun, and she wore scuffed beige sneakers that didn’t really go with her dress. “This one’s an adventure-slash-love story,” he said, looking at the faint dimple in her chin.

“Ooh, that’s my favorite genre! And here I was judging the book by its cover.”

“What was your guess? Judging by the cover.”

“Erotica,” she said, nodding. “I would have definitely thought hard-core erotica.”

He laughed, the image of her reforming itself, starting to fill up with color.

“So tell me about this adventure-slash-love story.”

Maybe for the first time, he looked at her and saw more than just her face. The words that he would have used to describe her yesterday—that she was just another popular pretty girl, a soccer player who maybe ran for student council or worked on the yearbook or something like that—suddenly seemed to lack any real description. That was true of many of the people at the party, he realized. It was like he’d been carrying around a coloring book that hadn’t yet been drawn in. He and Julia knew the outlines of people, but not much more.

“Well,” he said, and he took a seat on the leather couch behind them. Gretchen sat down next to him, the space between them hard to distinguish because of how her dress fell onto his jeans. “It’s about this guy named...” He struggled for a name, then grabbed the book from Gretchen’s hand and flipped to a random page. “A guy named Californian Tort Law.”

“He sounds cute.”

“So cute.”

“Is there a girl?”

Dave smiled at her, at the way she’d positioned herself to face him, at the way she was smiling back, at all the unexpected turns his night had taken, normal as it may have been to everyone else at the Kapoor house. He wondered only briefly about how Julia’s night had gone since they’d split, whether she’d discovered some of the same things he had about their classmates.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to give it away. You’ll just have to read it yourself.”

“No! Don’t be like that. I want to hear the whole story tonight.”

“I don’t think there’s much left of tonight,” Dave said, looking back toward the living room, which had definitely quieted down. The party was emptying out. Julia must have left to go home by now, and he should probably do the same soon.

“Come on. Tell me about the girl. What was her name?”

“Her name,” Dave said, looking down at the open book in his lap, “was Section 16520 of the Family Code.”

“Interesting name.”

“Swedish,” Dave explained.

Gretchen beamed a smile at him and gave him a head nod to continue. With a quick, appreciative thought for the Nevers list he’d found stuck in his locker, Dave continued his story.

o o o

When Dave walked out of the Kapoor house, it was past three in the morning. Tiredness was starting to dull the edges around the thrill of the night, a faint headache building up as payback for all that beer. He was so ready to go to bed that he almost missed Julia sitting on the curb in front of the house, her head on her knees, arms curled around herself. He leaned over and could hear her softly breathing, asleep.

“Julia,” he said, putting an arm on her shoulder. When she stirred, eyes darting, confused, he asked her how long she’d been waiting for him.

“I don’t know. An hour, maybe. Where the hell did you run off to?”

“Nowhere. I was in the den downstairs.”

“You weren’t answering my calls.” She put her hands on either side of her and stretched her back out. “What gives?”

“My phone died, sorry.”

“Fuck, Dave, you couldn’t have come to tell me that?”

“I tried.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, not knowing what else to do with them. He hated making her upset. “I couldn’t find you anywhere, so I thought you’d left.”

“Without you? Please.” She yawned. “You know you’re an awful human being for letting your phone run out of battery. Come on, David Montgomery Burns, it’s the twenty-first century. Stay plugged in. You made your friend worry.”

“Why didn’t you go home?”

“Again. Without you?” She let out a groan and then reached her hand out. “Help me up, you forsaken supposed friend.”

“I’m sorry,” Dave said, pulling her up gently. “I feel like shit.”

“Good. Wallow in that for a second.”

They started walking down the middle of the road, the streetlights casting hazy shadows. Earlier in the night, it had felt so bizarre to be walking toward a party. Now the fog was starting to roll in and the trees looked beautiful. Julia’s arms were crossed in front of her chest, her jaw tense. He tried to read her silence, just how angry she was at him. But the booze was interfering, making his mind return to the wonders of street lighting at three a.m. Feeling guilty, Dave cast his eyes down at his shoes.

“Well, don’t look so freakin’ glum,” Julia said, rolling her eyes when he looked up. “Come on, let’s go have coffee at the diner.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Julia said. “If you buy me a slice of pie, all is forgiven. We still have to exchange stories from the night.”

Dave thought of Gretchen, the strange appeal of those crooked teeth. It felt weird to bring her up, though; he’d never talked to Julia about girls. She’d talked to him about the few guys she’d fleetingly dated, and had on occasion tried to pry out from him some admittance of a crush on anyone. But for obvious reasons he’d always said there was no one he was interested in. Bringing it up now felt somehow wrong. Plus “a girl and I talked for a while” was not much of a story, so the next thing that came to mind was the flip-cup tournament. He chuckled to himself, though a distinct feeling of shame goose-bumped up his arms. “Embarrassing is good, right? We were here to fit in in an almost gross way?”

“Oh God, what’d you do?”

“Let’s say I really embraced the spirit of the Kapoor party.”

“Eww, Dave, did you buy a polo shirt? I’m going to have to cut you out of my life, aren’t I?”

Dave put his hands in his pockets, turning the corner toward the street where the diner stood, lit up against all the darkened storefronts. “I don’t think I’m ready for that,” Dave said, adding a chuckle.

HOMEROOM & HAPPY HOUR

THERE WAS NO greater proof of an underlying human connection than the universal hatred of Monday mornings. Everyone wore it on their faces: students with hair sticking out in every direction, as if trying to get away. Teachers sat at their desks scowling at their lesson plans. The principal looked as if he was suffering a nervous breakdown. The halls were practically an obstacle course with people lying down with their legs sprawled out, backpacks tossed in front of their lockers as pillows.

Dave had slept in most of the day Saturday and then stayed up on Sunday night supposedly trying to do homework, but really just rebelling against the thought that they were still assigning homework to seniors in March. He’d gotten into college—couldn’t they just accept that he’d succeeded at this whole high school thing and leave him alone?

He’d slept less than four hours, and when Ms. Romero took attendance in homeroom, saying “here” physically hurt. Julia arrived a couple of minutes late, her earphones still in, a yellow tardy sheet from the office in hand. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her pajama pants, and her hastily combed hair made Dave think of what it would be like to wake up next to her. She gave the tardy slip to Ms. Romero wordlessly and then plopped down next to Dave, pulling one of the earphones out and handing it over, as per tradition.

Julia hated talking in the mornings, and so Dave knew to listen to the music until she was ready. Neko Case crooned beautifully for a while as Ms. Romero struggled to put the morning’s announcements up on the projector. This was how to combat the awfulness of Monday mornings. The PA went off, but no one cared to listen. A succession of yawns made its way across the room, knocking a couple of heads down to rest on their desks.

“I’ll be right back,” Ms. Romero said, at which point the silence in the room started coming apart. Bouts of isolated whispering grew into all-out conversations that filled the room.

Neko Case’s voice stopped abruptly, and Dave heard Julia’s sandals fall to the floor. He kept the muted earphone in, always happy to be tied together to her.

“How was Carmel?” Dave asked. She’d left early Saturday morning with her dads to go visit her grandparents, returning on Sunday when Dave was knee-deep in unjust homework assignments.

“Pretty. It’s always pretty.” She put her arms on her desk and lowered her head down, looking up at Dave with tired eyes. “I was thinking more about the party.”

Dave raised an eyebrow at her. At the diner after the party, Julia had told him about her misadventures while they were split: a couple of guys’ awful attempts to make out with her, their worse attempts at interesting conversation. She’d ended up playing video games in the basement with a group of juniors—stoner clichés that she hadn’t expected to run into at the party, but clichés nonetheless. They’d joked about Dave’s embarrassing flip-cup skills. Throughout the weekend, Dave’s thoughts had returned to Gretchen, how he’d kind of fallen in love with the mood of the party. He’d assumed Julia had talked it all out of her system, though.

“Really? What were you thinking? How much fun you had?”

He smirked, but Julia surprised him by answering, “God, yes. It was so awful, I couldn’t help but enjoy myself.”

She pulled out her earphone and then plucked Dave’s out, wrapping the cord around her phone. “There were so many clichés, I don’t think we even touched on all of them at the diner. Did you see the girl puking in the bushes? I thought it was you for a second and I was really proud of you, but then I realized that she was five feet tall and had red curly hair and way bigger boobs than you do.”

“You mean April Holmes? She was in a miniskirt.”

“You could have been in a miniskirt. I think you have the legs for it.” She sat up and put her phone away in her bag, which was this hand-stitched, colorful knapsack thing that her mom had sent her as a gift from Ecuador. “Anyway! I think we should do more.” She’d talked herself fully awake now. In the background, Ms. Romero had finally succeeded in getting the projector to work and was asking if anyone had any questions about the bulletin. She said it in a way that made it sound like she had no interest in answering any of those questions.

“More parties?”

“No. Well, yes. But I was thinking of more Nevers. Do you have the list?”

Dave rummaged through his backpack until he found the folded sheet of paper, a little bent at the corners from whatever it is that happens inside backpacks that ensures all papers get ruined. He pulled out a chocolate muffin as well and peeled off the Saran Wrap while Julia looked at the Nevers. His mom had loved those chocolate muffins, and now his dad kept them stocked in the house, making trips to Costco specifically to get them. Dave made eye contact with Nicky Marquez across the room, whom he had talked to at some point at the party. He hadn’t known a thing about Nicky before, but now he knew that his parents were migrant workers, and that he hadn’t learned English until he was nine.

Julia drew a red line across Never number three. “We can have so much fun with these.” She brought the paper closer to Dave, so he could read with her. It always drove him crazy how easily she minimized the distance between them, as if it didn’t mean anything. And then, almost out of nowhere, he thought about sitting next to Gretchen, how he was looking forward to seeing her in chemistry third period.

“We’re definitely dying our hair crazy colors.”

“We are?”

“This week,” she said, folding both hands on the desk and resting her chin on top of them, continuing to read the list, the matter not up for discussion. “Actually, we’re doing all of them.” She sat back up quickly, smiling. “It’s the perfect way to end the year,” she said. “It’s been so boring; this’ll be the perfect end-of-high-school celebration. Embrace the clichés so tightly they’ll suffocate. I think my mom would approve.”

Dave eyed the clock. Homeroom was almost over. His tired brain tried to process doing all the Nevers, and the first thing he could think of was the chance at running into Gretchen more often. He grabbed a chunk of his muffin and chewed on it.

Julia was eyeing the list, chewing on her lip. He did one of those mouth-shrug-raised-eyebrow things that meant, “Sure, why not?” Which he immediately regretted when Julia spoke again.

“Mom’ll probably want to be here to see her daughter go to the prom with the prom king. Side note: You’re definitely running for prom king.”

Muffin crumbs fell out of his mouth. “Is that so?”

“Yeah. That hasn’t happened yet, right?” She tapped the girl next to her on the arm. “When do we vote for prom king stuff?”

Margot—petite, nerdy, shy—had never looked so confused in her life. “Uhh, prom, I think?”

Julia turned back to Dave. “We’ll have to research with Brett. I’m already seeing big things for your campaign. Fund-raising galas.” Her leg started racing up and down under the table. She was radiant when she got excited about something. Her mouth scrunched over to one side of her face but somehow remained a smile. It was indescribably cute.

He watched her eyes go wide, a smile that was about ninety-five percent mischief spreading her thin lips. “Marroney. Number seven.” Her finger pointed at the line. Never hook up with a teacher.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Julia, the man collects food in his mustache. He wears pocket protectors, which I’m pretty certain have been out of production since the eighties, right around the time his kind-of-sometimes mullet-hairdo thing went out of style. He makes jokes about irrational numbers. He’s a total cliché of a math teacher. I’m almost certain that he’s not a real person; he’s Frankenstein’s monster but made up of math-teacher clichés. I heard a rumor that he’s got all the known numbers of pi tattooed on his ass.”

“That’s a stupid rumor. And I can’t wait until I undress him and dispel it once and for all.”

Dave was mostly sure the comment was a joke, but he still felt a pang of jealousy. The bell rang, and everyone gathered their belongings, rushing toward the door as if already free for the day. Jenny Owens said, “Shit,” and tried to scribble in a few last-second answers.

Julia stood up, folding the Nevers list neatly and grabbing her belongings. She stepped into her sandals and gave Ms. Romero a little wave as they walked out into the hallway. Dave followed behind, still trying to figure out if Julia was joking.

o o o

“I’ve never been a stalker before,” Dave said. They waited for the Chili’s hostess to find them a table near where Marroney and a handful of other teachers had gathered to enjoy a Friday afternoon happy hour.

“This isn’t stalking. This is organizing a coincidental run-in.”

“That’s a stalkerish way to put it.”

After obsessing for the rest of the week over how to best seduce Marroney (Dave shuddered every time she said it), Julia declared Friday to be a Never day. After school, they’d go to Julia’s house and dye their hair in a bright display of their individuality—individuality purchased from a box at the CVS. But before they could do that, Julia and Marroney had to have their meet-cute. “Prepare for a lot of flirtatious giggling and some charming repartee,” Julia had said when they were outside the school, waiting for Marroney to leave so they could follow him. “And that’ll just be coming from him.”

Now Dave watched Marroney struggle to find the straw in his margarita, his tongue flicking out blindly. He wondered if Julia would call her own bluff anytime soon. Marroney was wearing a mustard-colored short-sleeved button-up shirt with a coffee stain on his collar. His tie had little calculators on it. Five other teachers were at the table, including Ms. Romero and Dave’s AP Chem teacher, Mr. Kahn. Each of them had a giant fluorescent-colored frozen margarita in front of them.

Dave and Julia sat in a booth perpendicular to the teachers so they could both see as the teachers delved into a bottomless basket of chips and salsa. On his first attempt, a fat blob of red salsa fell from Marroney’s chips and landed squarely on his tie.

“You know, I didn’t get it at first,” Dave said, turning to look at Julia, who was smiling in Marroney’s direction, “but you’re right. This has the makings of a great seduction.”

“Your tone says you’re trying to be sarcastic, but I’m failing to understand the joke.”

“Julia, he’s hideous.”

“That’s an ugly thing to say.” Julia picked up her menu and propped it up so she could stare without being caught. “Okay, so here’s the plan.” She leaned across the table conspiratorially, refusing to speak until Dave leaned down, too. It was their classic pose for plotting mischief; they’d done it when figuring out which movie to go to, or when planning the surprise party for Julia’s dads. They’d huddled together like this when they wrote the Nevers on their bench in Morro Bay. Dave loved seeing the details on her fingers when she put them flat on the table in front of her, the way her orangey smell seemed stronger in just those instances. They always adopted a tone more serious than was called for, whispering to each other, craning their necks around, pretending to study the room skittishly, as if someone was after them. The rest of the world felt exterior to them, like their friendship was some idyllic cove only they had access to.

“We wait until he gets up to use the bathroom.”

“You are getting creepier by the minute,” Dave whispered.

“Listen,” she hissed. “When the romantic interest has been isolated—”

“You mean the victim.”

“David Gostkowski, you interrupt me again and I’ll dye your hair bright green.”

“Isn’t that happening anyway?”

“We wait until he gets up to use the bathroom,” Julia said, her eyes getting big, warning Dave to keep quiet. “At which point, we follow.” She stole a glance over the menu to look in Marroney’s direction again. He was halfway done with his margarita, sprinkles of salt on his mustache catching the light and shimmering. The table was already getting louder, breaking up into a couple of conversations. It was curious to see them behave so much like students in a classroom. “Your job,” Julia continued, “will be to go into the men’s room and make sure no one else is there. When you’ve cleared it, you give me the signal by starting a dance-off, and I go in.”

“What happens once you corner him in the bathroom?”

“Flirtation,” Julia said, drawing the word out long under her breath. It was easy to forget what she was talking about. No one could make him laugh like she could, even if it was hidden away like this, the laughter quiet but understood between them. How had he not learned to be happy with just this? How had he not managed to stifle the desire for more?

“This is by far one of your best plans.”

“I appreciate that,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm. “But you’re clearly forgetting the snow fort I designed freshman year.”

“We live in California, Jules.”

“Just because it never snowed doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fantastic fort. The planning itself was pitch-perfect; it was the execution that, at no fault of mine, fell short.” She smacked her palms down on the table and looked over at the teachers. “We’re getting away from the point. I need to do what many a teenage girl has done before and seduce the sexy older man.”

Dave stole a glance at the side of her face and then joined in spying on them. They’d decimated the chips and were raising their hands, looking around for their waitress to ask for refills. Mr. Kahn was polishing off his first margarita and grimacing from a brain freeze. “Shocking that none of them have had to use the bathroom yet,” Dave said.

“I know, right? Those are some sizeable drinks. Maybe Marroney is much younger than he appears. God, he must be so virile.”

“I’m going to puke all over you. Good luck with the seduction covered in my puke.”

“The stench of another man on me will only make him jealous.”

For the next twenty minutes, after they’d placed an order with their waitress, they watched the teachers. At first they attempted to be inconspicuous, but the teachers seemed to be in their own little world, and once their drinks were refilled, they didn’t care much for anything on the outside. Julia refined her strategy, and despite the dull ache in his chest at the thought of her seducing anyone at all, Dave helped. By the time Marroney stood up, Julia’s plan had been tweaked to perfection. Or at least that’s what she said when she stood up and pulled Dave by the arm, motioning for him to follow.

As per their revised plan, Dave sped up past Marroney and cut him off before he got to the bathroom. No one else was in there. He checked the two stalls for feet, just in case. Then he went to the faucets and pretended to wash his hands as Marroney came in. Dave tried to hide his face so that Marroney wouldn’t recognize him, then said, “Urinals aren’t working. Gotta use a stall.”

“Thank you,” Marroney said. He entered the first stall without so much as a glance at the functioning urinals. As soon as he shut the door, Dave walked out of the bathroom, where Julia was waiting. She was so excited, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, her hands balled up into little fists.

“Okay, phase one complete,” he said. He put his hand on the back of his neck, a nervous habit. “You realize this is insane, right?”

“You’re mispronouncing ‘genius.’”

She took a breath, like someone about to attempt swimming the length of a pool underwater. And with that she walked into the men’s bathroom.

Dave anxiously watched the door close behind her, casting a glance to make sure no one had noticed. The hostess was on her phone; a waitress was waiting at the window for a dish; the manager stood by the bar, looking at something on a clipboard. Chili’s was probably the best place for covert operations; no one cared enough to look around.

It was only about thirty seconds later that she came back out, a huge, goofy grin on her face, color in her cheeks. She put her hands on Dave and urged him back to the booth. “Retreat! Retreat!”

“What happened?”

“Dammit, man, fall back!” Julia cried, laughter on the edge of her voice. When they slipped back into the booth, back in their conspiratorial hunch, she erupted into cackles while Dave could only sit there and watch.

“I take it the meet-cute didn’t go as planned.”

“We should get the bill before the cops arrive.”

“Julia, what the hell happened in there?”

“I may have tickled him,” she said, still red and laughing, looking over her shoulder toward the bathroom. “Accidentally.”

Dave stopped looking for the waitress to signal for the check. He slouched closer to Julia. “How do you accidentally tickle someone?”

“I froze up, okay. He walked out of the stall and I was standing there trying to figure out how to break the ice. We stared at each other and then I just kind of...tickled him.” She reached for her glass of water and took a long swallow. “Which, by the way, was an awful plan. Cornering him in the bathroom and expecting flirtation to just happen naturally? That’s sloppy planning. I expect more from you.”

“It was your plan!”

“Don’t split hairs now; it’s too late to apologize. Just do better next time.” She looked over her shoulder again and gave a little gasp when she saw Marroney coming out of the bathroom. “I may have yelled something inappropriate, too.”

Dave held his breath as Marroney walked past the table, his eyes fixed on Julia’s. “I told him I wanted to lick his face,” Julia whispered quickly, right before Marroney’s mustard shirt passed by their lowered heads.

MAKING A MESS

WHEN THEY LEFT Chili’s, Dave felt wonderful. Things had gone wrong, but in the exact way they should have. Now he had the evening with Julia to look forward to. He sincerely doubted bright green hair would look good on him, but he had succumbed to Julia’s rationale about the Nevers making the end of the year more interesting. So what if it was some insane attempt to prove herself original, probably in an attempt to win her mom’s approval; the Nevers brought out a joy in Julia that he loved being a part of. As long as nothing between them changed, he didn’t have much to complain about.

“Why’d we add this to the list anyway?” Dave asked after they’d left the CVS and were parking at Julia’s house. He was holding the boxes of green and pink dye in a plastic bag in his lap.

“My mom,” Julia said. “She’s always told me that changing looks has nothing to do with leading a unique life. It’s usually the sign of a pretty ordinary inner self.”

They walked up the driveway to Julia’s house, a modest two-story with the garage open, her dad’s workstation glistening with tools. The lawn was lush, almost overgrown. A porch swing hung slightly off-balance and in need of a paint job. Julia pushed open the door, placing her bag on the little entry table, which held a basket for keys and loose change and which was often piled up with unopened mail. A pleasant smell wafted toward them from the kitchen.

“Hey, homies,” Julia said when she entered the kitchen. Tom and Ethan were sitting at the kitchen island hunched over a couple of notebooks. Someone Dave didn’t know was standing by the stove, tending to about a million different things: a wok, two saucepans, a cutting board stockpiled with vegetables. He turned over his shoulder to glance at Dave and Julia, then wiped the sweat off his forehead with a dish towel before returning to cooking.

“Hello, hello,” Tom said, moving to kiss Julia on the cheek and hug Dave. “How was your day?”

“Impossible to summarize in small talk,” Julia said, walking over to Ethan, who was frowning at his notebook and tapping his pen against the counter of the kitchen island. Julia gave his back a hug. “You look stressed, Dad.”

“Restaurant stuff.” He sighed and tossed the pen down, sitting up and rubbing a hand through his graying hair. He almost always wore checkered shirts with the top button undone. He kept a cigarette tucked into his ear, though Dave had never seen him smoke. He’d started an Internet company before they’d adopted Julia, then sold it to start a string of businesses in the last two decades, none of them quite as successful as the first one. The latest venture was a restaurant. “Say hi to Chef Mike. We’re doing menu testing.”

“Hi, Chef Mike!” Julia and Dave said at the same time.

Julia walked over to Chef Mike to see him work while deflecting her dads’ questions about her day, probably since the only mentionable thing about it was tickling a possibly middle-aged (it was hard to tell exactly how old Marroney was) teacher. Meanwhile, Dave sorted their mail into little piles on the counter: bills, junk, personal/miscellaneous. Dave never got any regular mail himself, save for last year’s college recruiting packets. Aside from that, he was convinced that ninety percent of the mail in the world was credit-card offers. He came across a postcard mailed from Mexico, the handwriting familiar and addressed to Julia.

“Postcard for you,” Dave said, holding it out to her. Her bare feet pitter-pattered against the kitchen tiles and she snatched it from his hand.

Julia read quickly, almost breathing the words out loud. Then she laughed and said, “She sends her love,” to Tom and Ethan. The postcards didn’t come often, so when they did, Dave knew, Julia read them over and over again, as if they were poetry. Then she’d put them up in her room connected by strings to pushpins on a map indicating where they’d been sent from. Ecuador, China, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Mexico. Julia traced her mom’s journeys around the world and used the few details she knew to imagine the days when she would be able to travel as well. Without question, the best night in Dave’s life was the night he and Julia sat staring at the map, splitting a bottle of wine stolen from the garage and planning travels the two of them would go on together.

“Is she still in Mexico City?” Tom asked, dipping a spoon into one of the sauces simmering on the stove to take a taste. “More ginger?” he said to Chef Mike, who shook his head.

“Yup,” Julia said. “Working at an art gallery and part-time at a bar-slash-restaurant-slash-art-house movie theater.”

“That sounds about right,” Tom said with a smile. “That’s gotta be the longest she’s spent in one place since you were born.”

“She says it might be her favorite place she’s lived in. Although I’m sure she says that about everywhere she’s been, because she only picks amazing places.” She slipped the postcard into her shirt pocket. “We’re gonna go upstairs to dye our hair. Call us when some of this amazing-smelling food is ready.”

“That’s funny, I thought I heard you say you were dying your hair,” Ethan said, looking up from his notebook. Julia nodded with a smirk and Ethan looked over at Dave.

“I’m going with green,” Dave said with a nod.

“Don’t you have to ask permission from us to do something like this?” Tom said.

“I’m a college acceptee,” Julia said. “That pretty much grants me freedom to do whatever I want, except for felonies.”

“How’d you get talked into this?” Tom asked Dave.

“Your daughter has a talent for corrupting the youth.”

“Don’t I know it,” Tom said. He crossed his muscular arms in front of his chest and appraised the two of them. “I don’t think I’m ready to let go of my iron fist of authority in this household.”

“Don’t worry,” Julia said, grabbing the CVS bag with the hair dye off the counter and kissing him on the cheek. “You can still tell Dad what to do all the time.”

“Hey,” Ethan called halfheartedly, his attention slipping back into his work, “I resemble that remark.”

“Resemble? What, are you having a stroke, old man? Don’t you mean resent?”

“It’s a Three Stooges reference,” Dave explained.

“There is hope yet,” Ethan said, giving Dave a smile as Julia dragged him out of the kitchen by the arm. “Don’t make a mess,” he called out after them.

“We are definitely making a mess,” Julia whispered to Dave as they went up the stairs toward her room.

“Which of us is going first?” Dave said, reading the tiny print on the side of the box.

“Let’s do yours first. Your hair’s darker, so we should probably let the bleach sink in longer for you.”

They grabbed some old towels from the linen closet and spread them around the bathroom in Julia’s room. Julia snapped on the gloves that came in the box, and Dave sat on a stool in front of the sink, watching Julia go over the instructions again. She had the most hilariously exaggerated reactions to every step of the process, and Dave sat back and watched, relishing each expression. Just as she was about to dab a bit of the dye on Dave’s arm to test for skin allergies, Debbie the cat jumped onto Dave’s lap, getting a green streak down her back.

“Oops. Dad’s not going to be a fan of that.”

As the bleach began to do its thing, whatever it was bleach actually did to lighten hair, they swapped spots. Dave draped a towel over Julia’s shoulders and she undid her ponytail, her hair a light brown cascade that brushed against his fingers. “Have we sufficiently researched this process?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘sufficiently.’”

“Um.”

“It might not look like a professional dye job but I won’t get us killed.”

“I guess that’s reassuring?” Dave said, making sure the question mark was understood. After the bleach had magically transformed them into blondes—Julia pulling off the look much better than Dave ever could, though he admitted he was biased—Dave took a seat in the chair and watched a slightly different version of his best friend pour out the dye into a little container provided in the kit.

“This stuff smells great,” Dave said.

“Don’t you dare get high off the fumes. Sit still,” she said, straightening his head and focusing on the dye job.

It didn’t take her long to finish, since Dave didn’t have all that much hair. The instructions said to let it sit for at least twenty-five minutes, though the Internet suggested much longer, so while they waited for his hair to really grab hold of the green, they changed spots again. He tested the dye against her arm, then mixed the two liquids together as she had. He shook the bottle, careful not to spill. When he took his finger off the top, though, a single pink drop that clung to his gloved hand dripped off and landed right in the middle of Debbie’s forehead.

“That’s what she gets for being so in love with you,” Julia said, looking down at her cat rubbing her side against Dave’s leg, unaware of the splotchy dye job she was receiving.

Dave squeezed out the dye onto his fingers, and for the next twenty minutes he became lost in the task. He worked slowly, not because he wanted to stretch out the time, but because it was Julia’s hair, and everything to do with Julia he did with care. When he was done, he decided to wait with Julia, so that they would rinse the dye off at the same time. They tried to wipe Debbie clean, but she kept moving around and the drops of pink and green she’d absorbed spread across her fur.

“She looks like a tie-dyed shirt gone wrong,” Julia said.

“That doesn’t bode well for our hair.”

Julia sat on the counter and looked at herself in the mirror, leaning in to examine the pink stains by her hairline. “The genius in this is that if it turns out shitty it’s even more of a cliché.”

“That’ll be a comfort when everyone’s laughing at us.”

“Look at you worrying about what others think. Way to get into the spirit.” She smiled, then gave him a friendly tap with her foot. “I think that’s long enough. Time for the big reveal.” She hopped off the counter and turned on her shower, grabbing the removable head and waiting for the water to warm up a bit.

They helped each other rinse the excess dye from their hair, which resulted in more dye getting all over the bathroom. “It looks like a couple of cartoon animals were blown up in here,” Dave said.

They turned to face each other, and when Julia asked how her hair had turned out he had to swallow down the word sexy. “It looks pretty good,” he said. “How’s mine?”

She cast her eyes up at his hairline and bit her bottom lip. “I couldn’t have hoped for better,” she said, then laughed. “Maybe you should just look for yourself.” She moved aside to let him step in front of the mirror.

“My God.”

“I think the lighting in here is bad,” Julia said, suppressing another laugh.

“Julia, it looks like someone vomited on my head.”

Dave looked at her in the mirror, petrified. She brought her hands up to her mouth, her perfectly pink hair framing that lovely face of hers as the laughter tore through her.

“This is seriously the worst shade of green I’ve ever seen.” Dave turned on the faucet and ran water through his hair, and the pretty shade of green water that poured into the sink only made the joke crueler. “There’s no way I’m walking around with this on my head.”

“Oh, come on. You really pull it off.” Julia was doubled over in laughter, trying to catch her breath.

“I’m shaving it off.”

“No, don’t! The Nevers!” She dropped to the floor, not taking her eyes off of him, her hand clutching at her stomach. “Oww, Dave, the laughter hurts.”

“The Nevers just said dye your hair. They didn’t say anything about keeping vomit on my head for the rest of the school year. I’m gonna go to the mall to get this cut. Right now.”

“If I keep looking at it, I might pee myself.” She laughed again, either pretending to wipe a tear from her eye or actually doing it, Dave couldn’t tell at this point. “Wait until the morning. Maybe it’ll look better in daylight.”

Dave grimaced but stayed put. “Only because I’m such a good friend and you’re clearly enjoying this.” He lingered by the mirror for a second, looking down at Julia, who was trying to fight off another giggling fit. It was hard not to want this to go on, whatever his hair looked like, hard not to chase after the idea of the Nevers, too, when the result was a whole day spent with Julia laughing at his side, her cheeks as pink as her hair, her eyes suffused with joy. “It’s going to be a strange end of the year, isn’t it?”

o o o

The next morning Dave’s hair not only looked like puke, but like puke that had been allowed to sit out overnight.

Julia practically woke up laughing, and she refused to let Dave go until her dads saw his hair. They made their way downstairs, where Tom, Ethan, and Chef Mike seemed to have never left the spots they’d been at the day before.

“Good timing, we’re just about to test the Sunday brunch menu,” Ethan said when he heard them entering the kitchen. He was typing on his computer while Tom peeked over Chef Mike’s shoulder, watching him crack an egg into a steaming pot of water. Julia held her laughter, waiting for them to look up. She took a seat at one of the stools positioned by the kitchen island, and finally Ethan looked away from his screen and gasped.

The other two men turned to look at Dave. Tom immediately broke out in laughter. Chef Mike just said, “Yikes,” before returning to poaching eggs.

“Yup, going to the mall right now,” Dave said.

“You probably should, I might lose my appetite otherwise.”

“Ouch,” Dave said, though he took a seat next to Julia and Ethan.

Ethan pulled his glasses off and reached over to touch Julia’s hair. “This actually suits you.”

Dave loved sitting in the kitchen with Julia and her dads, loved the ease with which they talked and laughed with each other. He wished him and Brett and their dad had it, too. Dave had always wondered how Tom and Ethan handled Julia’s infatuation with her mom, whether they were ever hurt by it. But when he sat with them in their kitchen, it became clear that there was plenty of love to go around. No matter how much she longed for her mom, Julia never neglected her dads.

“How does your bathroom look?” Tom said, pouring a mug of coffee and offering it to Dave.

Julia quickly cupped her hand over Dave’s mouth. “Spotless.”

“You’re grounded,” Tom said, shaking his head.

“We had this discussion yesterday. Your reign of terror over me is done. Let it go.” Julia pulled her hand back and reached for Dave’s mug, blowing slightly at the surface. There was a hint of a chemical smell around the two of them from the hair dye, and Dave was thankful for the aromatic tendrils of steam rising from the coffee. He rose from his chair and went to the fridge to grab the milk, adding just a splash, the way Julia liked it. “So how’s the restaurant going? When do I get to see the dream come true?”

“More like a nightmare,” Ethan muttered. He put his glasses back on, then looked over at Julia. “Just kidding. Don’t panic.”

“Julia panics?” Dave asked, sitting back down.

Julia gave Ethan a light smack on the arm. “I have a rep to live up to; don’t tell people stuff like that.”

“Is there really anything this kid doesn’t know about you?”

“Not the point.” Julia drank from her mug, then slid it across the marble top to Dave.

They spent the morning in the comforts of the kitchen and the joys of the banter that Julia had learned from her dads. She filled them in vaguely on the Nevers, stating that she and Dave were conducting important sociological research into the world of the modern teenager. It sometimes felt like Dave belonged in that kitchen, though he knew he was just using Tom and Ethan’s warmth as a reason to think he and Julia were meant for more than friendship. When the afternoon started looming, Dave forced himself to leave the house, to cut his hair and maybe see his own family for a bit.

The mall was a slight detour on the way home, and throughout the walk he wished he were the kind of guy who wore hats. There weren’t a lot of people around, but it was still embarrassing to be out in public. He imagined even the squirrels, usually nonchalant about human hairstyles, staring down at him from the trees and making disgusted faces.

When he walked through the glass doors of the mall, he knew right away he was going to run into someone he knew, someone from school, someone who would be witness to the atrocity he and Julia had committed on his head. The mall was swarming with families, couples in their twenties, packs of middle school girls sharing cups of lemonade. Huge banners hung from the rafters announcing a special weekend-only sale.

He sighed and kept his eyes cast down on the floor, trying to maneuver his way around the crowd without running into too many people. Before he knew it, he was at the Supercuts, and the hipster girl with the red hair and the half sleeve of tattoos had written his name down on her clipboard and told him to take a seat in the waiting area.

Just as he was sighing in relief, he saw that the only chair available was right next to Gretchen. She was reading, but almost as soon as his eyes landed on her, she looked up at him. She smiled at him—all lips, though, no imperfect lower teeth—and raised her hand in a wave.

He raised his hand up and mouthed hello, hoping she’d somehow missed his hair. Which, of course, she hadn’t.

“Wow. What happened there?”

His stomach clenched as he took a seat next to her. “I know, I know.”

“That couldn’t have been by choice.”

“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known it would end up looking like...” He motioned with his hands, pointing at the hair and trying to find a word that accurately described the fiasco sitting on his head.

“Like a wound festering in the eighteenth century before antibiotics were discovered?”

“That’s very specific. But yes.”

Gretchen smiled wide. She was in a simple white T-shirt and jeans, the beige sneakers that, he’d noticed lately, she wore most days. Dave felt his face flush and hoped she’d get called up to get her haircut soon, so she wouldn’t have time to memorize what he looked like. He didn’t know what to say, but was saved from a comment by a blow-dryer that went off nearby. Dave tried to seem casual as he looked around the Supercuts—two other guys waiting for their turn were on their phones, a woman sat with tinfoil in her hair reading a magazine, an old lady had one of those silver dome things over her head—but his eyes kept flicking back toward Gretchen. She kept her book on her lap, picked at a split end, smiled at him whenever their eyes would meet, looked away as shyly as he did.

“Sorry I haven’t talked to you in class this week,” Dave said once the hair dryer stopped. “I kept wanting to. But the more I thought about it, the more the other night at the Kapoors’ felt like a dream and I wasn’t really sure it happened. It did happen, right?”

Gretchen brought her book up to her face like she was smelling it, but Dave had the notion that she was just trying to hide a smile. He could see it in her eyes. “It happened,” she said.

“Okay.” Dave watched as a woman came in with her baby stroller and argued about the wait for an appointment. “I’m gonna talk to you in class, is what I’m trying to say,” Dave said, feeling strange that he had the urge to tell her such a thing. “If you’re okay with that.”

“Good. You can help me improve my prank skills.”

“You really feel strongly about keeping a straight face, huh?”

Gretchen shrugged and crossed her feet at her ankles. “I’ve got two older brothers. I was the butt of too many jokes when I was younger, and now I’m basically bitter at life and seeking revenge.”

“You sound really bitter.”

“Good, that’s the whole shtick I’m going for.” She motioned the length of her body, as if she was clearly exuding bitterness, as if she was dripping with anything other than sweetness.

Whoa. Where did that thought come from?

“It’s working,” Dave said, and the two of them smiled at each other for a second until Gretchen was called up by one of the stylists. He watched her lean her head back into the shampooing faucet and close her eyes as the water washed over her blond locks. She played with the book in her hands, flipping the cover over. Her nails were flecked with baby-blue polish.

Dave waited for his turn, trying not to get caught looking in Gretchen’s direction as she got a trim. The two guys waiting next to him were still on their phones, occasionally glancing up at his hair. Dave was pretty sure one of them took a photo while pretending to search for a signal. But the embarrassment he’d felt only a few moments ago had faded some.

When it was his turn, the only open spot was once again right next to Gretchen. She was reading and this time she didn’t notice him right away. The hair stylist—tall, black, wearing a tight shirt that showed off his sleek muscles—draped one of those protective sheets over Dave and then Velcroed it at the back. “What are we doing with this?” He asked, bravely running a hand through Dave’s hair.

“For the love of God, take it all off.”

“Wise choice,” the stylist said. He grabbed an electric razor from his tools on the counter. “You kids never learn to let a professional do it.”

Gretchen stopped reading and smiled at Dave through the mirror. Dave had never understood why people associated cheekbones with beauty, but now that he noticed Gretchen’s, he got it. “You should save all of the hair in a bag,” Gretchen said. “I don’t know exactly what you’d do with it, but there’s a prank in there somewhere.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to be the guy that collects hair in a bag.”

Gretchen laughed in a way he hadn’t seen before, this goofy laugh that showed off her front teeth and sounded like it came from a cartoon character.

“When I hit rock bottom, that’s when I start collecting hair.”

“What do you think people who collect hair do with it?”

“I don’t know if those people actually exist. I think that’s just something TV shows and movies made up for the creepiness factor and to get some laughs.”

“Oh, they exist. I’m sure of it.”

“You think?” Dave said. Just then, the redheaded hipster girl who’d been cutting Gretchen’s hair brushed off the clippings from Gretchen’s shoulder and said they were all done. Dave found himself thinking, Don’t go.

Then his stylist turned on the razor and kept his head still, and Gretchen disappeared from Dave’s sight. It was an abrupt and disappointing good-bye. Still, it was a little thrilling having a good conversation with someone who wasn’t Julia. It was a little liberating, truth be told, to think of someone else for a while. When Dave stood up to pay, now sporting a completely shaved head, he saw that it hadn’t been a good-bye at all; Gretchen was waiting for him at the front.

“I don’t know if you drove here,” Gretchen said, “but I can give you a ride home, if you want. Since we live so close.” Without waiting for an answer, she reached up and ran a hand over his shaved head. “This feels nice.”

“Thanks,” he said, wondering if she could spot the goose bumps she’d given him. “I’d love a ride.”

“Good.” She smiled, then motioned with her head. “It’s this way.”

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