I’ve thought a lot about what happens when we die, and I’m pretty sure it’s not reincarnation. No loving and merciful God would put us through high school twice.

The first day of school this year, I’d finally forgiven Evan enough to sit next to him again in morning carpool. We were alone in the back of his mom’s Camry, surrounded by the smell of leather upholstery, and his hand brushed mine, a light tickle. Was that deliberate? Did it mean something? Hope bubbled up in me. Maybe I could fix things with Evan—and the rest of my friends—despite last year’s blow up. Then perspective slapped me with a ring tone.

“They’re admitting Beep,” Mom said through the scratchy cell phone reception, without even hello. She babbled white count and neutrophil numbers, blood labs awful enough to start my twelve-year-old brother on chemo. Again.

That was a soccer cleat kick in the stomach. After I hung up, my mouth wouldn’t work for a second.

It had just been a bruise. On his arm where I’d grabbed him three days ago.

“Beep’s cancer’s back.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Evan said, squirming. He raised an arm to put it around me. I gave him a look, and he plopped his hand back on his knee.

I looked ahead blankly at the elevated BART tracks past our high school, and then we pulled up at the drop off area. Evan scooted out of his side, but just stood, looking earnest and like he wanted to help. I was frozen. Clots of kids streamed by the open car door, barking words at each other.

Someone honked. I flinched, and Evan’s mom turned around in the driver’s seat. We were blocking the loading zone. “Should I take you somewhere else, Kat?”

Yes. To someone else’s life. I could have used a complete transplant. But since that wasn’t medically possible, I shook my head and stumbled out into sophomore year.

#

I just wanted to get home to pack Beep’s hospital kit. But after school Evan followed me out of our seventh-period French class, catching up at my locker. “Hey.” He touched me above my elbow. “I’ll walk you home.”

All the hairs on my arm stood at attention. I wasn’t sure what to say. The silence stretched over the hallway shuffling gabble and slamming of lockers. Evan’s serious brown eyes are so pretty they’re almost wasted on a guy. My arm tingled where he’d touched it. Lost freshmen streamed past us while I weighed the heart-hurt risks. I already ached, so how much worse could it get?

“I won’t try to make you talk,” Evan added.

So Evan walked me home, like we were best friends again, except I wasn’t in the mood to make him laugh, or even talk, and he wasn’t leaving gooey footprints of my stomped little heart like last year. I mostly looked down at the gray sidewalk and tugged on my backpack straps, worried about Beep, while red maple leaves swirled past in wind gusts. It was one of those perfect Bay Area September afternoons, with clear blue skies and just enough breeze to keep it from being too hot. Which made me mad, because it was the day Beep’s cancer was back.

Evan finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry about Beep. And also…about last year.”

“Me too.” I had a hollow misery pit inside. Walking with Evan helped. But enjoying his company had its own dangers. Like Beep’s latest cancer relapse, hanging out with Evan scared me and made me thinkI can’t go through this again.

We turned onto my block, and I half expected to see our house crushed into lumber scraps by the weight of Mom’s anxiety. But there it was, still perched between trees up the stairs from the sidewalk, in its two-tone brown. We both stood at the bottom of the stairs, so long it got awkward. Evan stuffed his hands into his front pockets, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them.

“So—” he looked down at my knees. “Could we get together and write songs again?”

“Evan, can you think of any worse possible time to ask that?”

“Yeah. Pretty much anytime, at the end of last year.”

That actually made me laugh. “Yeah.” He had me there.

He raised his eyebrows and his mouth twitched into a fragile smile.

“Thanks.” I shifted under the weight of my backpack. For walking me. And for joking with me again. Someone had to start that. “It was…nice.”

He gave me the warm flicker of a broader grin, as if the words were a present he’d keep. “Am I forgiven?”

Except for Calley Rose, my other ex-friends had still shunned me at lunch, even in the new school year. Thanks to Evan and his big mouth. “We’ll see.”

#

“Hey, Crazy Kat.” Tracie Walsh, my soccer teammate and least favorite person, blocked my path in the hall the next morning, between second and third period.

I was tired from being up so late the night before and seeing Beep in the hospital and not in the mood to deal with Tracie, but her hanger-on friend Ashley had me blocked too, so I stopped.

“This year, don’t be a flunktard.” Tracy looked down at me from under her blonde hair and over her California surfer-girl freckles. She’s the head of a little in crowd of self-congratulating girls everyone had called “The Tracies” since grade school.

“What?” I said. Some guy bumped me hard in the back then went around us.

“I hear you’re ineligible for volleyball this fall.” Her expression was vague disgust.

I was, in fact, because of my grades, at least until the first quarter ended, on November1. It was annoying, though, to have Tracie remind me. With the prior go-around of Beep’s cancer, losing all my friends, and my “major depressive episode,” the end of the year had turned into a handed-in homework-free zone. “What’s it to you?”

“You’re not a dumbshit.” She shook her head. “Pull your grades up before soccer season.”

I frowned at her. Her interest almost made sense. I was one of the best players on the soccer team, and because of years of playing club-league soccer with Tracie, I could practically read her mind, so when she strips the ball and inevitably dribbles up field instead of passing, I’d cover her position.

“Saw you with Evan yesterday,” Tracie said. She crinkled her lips as if she had a sour taste in her mouth.

Ah. The real reason for our motivational chat.

“Maybe this year you should concentrate on your schoolwork,” she said. “Instead of musicians. So we can have a decent soccer season.”

If that advice had come from anyone else, I might have paid more attention. “Maybe you should learn how to pass the ball. That might help, too.” But I wasn’t done being annoyed. “You threw Evan away. Three times.” Last year, when Tracie broke up with Evan the first time, it was all he wanted to talk about—how sad he was. A topic, weirdly, I hadn’t been super interested in. Then they got back together. Then she drop-kicked him away again. Twice.

She smirked. That was part of her ultimate in-girl mystique: She always broke up with the guy first, even the hot, talented guy. “So?”

“So you don’t get to decide who he talks to anymore.” Even I knew that much about how the boyfriend thing works.

She frowned at me. “He only hangs out with you out of pity.”

Ouch. Had Evan told her that, along with everything else, back when she was his girlfriend? My insides felt scooped out, but I didn’t let that show. “He doesn’t hang out with you at all. Maybe he’s over you.”

Tracie’s eyes narrowed, her expression fierce. “Ha. If I wanted Evan, I could get him back like that.” She snapped her fingers, annoyingly close to my face, a quick flash of pink nail polish. She stepped forward, crowding me.

I didn’t back up, and I don’t do intimidated. I put my left shoulder forward, like we were on a soccer field, and drove between her and Ashley, bumping them both, hard.

Ashley dropped her binder. “Watch it!”

“Get your grades up,” Tracie’s voice followed me, loud over the hallway noise. “Or there’ll be consequences.”

Ooh. Consequences. What was she going to do now? She’d already wrecked everything, last year. And whatever she had in mind, it wasn’t as bad as cancer.

The next morning, what with a visit to Beep in the hospital and the worry, I hadn’t managed to get any actual homework done, so at breakfast I peeled off the label from my Yoplait container at breakfast, blotted off the pink strawberry yogurt spillover glop, and stapled that label to a sheet of binder paper. I wrote my name at the top, with the heading Culture Française.

In afternoon French class, I set it on Mme. Yves’ desk. “Voilà!”

Mme Yves even looks French—dark-haired and skinny, wearing a belted black dress that made it look like she was headed to a cocktail party instead of serving her latest nine-month sentence with bored high school students. “Quelle?” She knitted her brows.

How do you say stroke of genius in French? “Un coup de brilliance!” I announced. 

“C’est quoi?”

I gave up on French entirely for the rest. I needed to sell this. “Yogurt is cultured milk. And Yoplait is a French name. And the wrapper is thin, a symbol of shallow American consumer culture.” I gave her what I hoped was a winning smile. “By comparison.”

She crossed her arms and frowned.

“See,” I babbled on. “You’re essentially French, Mme Y.” Although, technically, she was born in Montreal. “And you’re looking down on the wrapper right now—that’s exactly how the French view American culture and our limited understanding of theirs.”

“Non.”She shook her head at my little offering. “Je suis Canadienne.”

She lifted the paper, holding it disdainfully with two fingers as if it still dripped pink yogurt blobs, and dropped it in the trash. “Zero.” She pronounced the no credit the French way, all swirled with derision and gargled in the back of her throat.

Well, merde.

Tracie scowled at me from her seat, like I was trying to deliberately wreck my grade, instead of desperately trying to save it.

“Imbécile,”she whispered as I passed. “I’ll get you for this.”

I stopped and leaned down like I had a secret to tell her. “Merci, cochon égoïste avec le ballon.” (Thanks, ball hog.)

She just smiled back, like she had already figured out some payback. Then she glanced over at Evan.

Great.

#

“You, uh, still want to eat lunch together?” Evan said the next day, after fourth period English. He had his scrunched brown paper sack in hand, but for some reason, was making eye contact with the locker below mine instead of with me.

“Of course.” After carpool that morning, Evan had asked if we could have lunch together. I’d jumped at that, a chance to go back to how things used to be, and way less lonely than the end of last year. But now Evan’s shoulders were slumped, and he looked unhappy about it. I retrieved my sandwich and fruit from behind my books, with a sinking feeling. I followed him out toward our old spot by the tennis courts. Evan looked like he was shuffling to a funeral. “Why? You get a better offer?” It would be just like Tracie to invite him, trying to sink her hooks into him again.

“No. I thought you might not want to, now that you have a boyfriend.”

“What?” I stopped. We’d just gone out the back door into the concrete by the steps. Was this some joke? “Who?”

Evan turned around. “I heard you got back together with Curtis Warren—”

“Back? I’ve never been together with Curtis.” My mood exploded in a ball of anger. “Wait. You believed the slut-shaming fiction Curtis wrote about me?” That wonderfully detailed little note had circulated last year, during Beep’s prior cancer relapse and just before Evan got together with Tracie and abandoned me the first time. Evan opened his mouth to say something, but I kept going. “He even made up half the spellings.”

“No!” Evan said. “’Course I didn’t. But I heard you kissed him…”

I put my hands on my hips, one of them holding my now-squished lunch. “I did not—and will not ever—kiss Curtis Warren.” I was glaring at Evan so hard, it was amazing that his straight, perfect teeth didn’t catch fire. “Who told you that?”

“Ashley said you got back togeth—”

“Ashley. Tracie’s friend. Who hates me. Who always does what Tracie tells her to do. Hello? She lies.”

“Oh,” Evan said, like this was the first time he’d thought of that. Guys. So dense. I don’t know why we let them run anything when they grow up, let alone whole companies.

Great. This is just what I need. More talk about me and Curtis. “I hope you didn’t pass on that wonderful rumor.”

“I’d never do that.”

“Excuse me?” I was breathing hard, and somehow my eyes were wet at the fresh memory of a sharp hurt. “You did. Last year.”

“What?” He gave me a blank stare.

“When you became your own wreck-my-life-media? When—better than telephone and television—the best way to get my snarky comments to everyone was tell-an-Evan?”

At the end of last year, during my hundreds of hours with Evan, I’d vented some of my anger about Beep’s prior cancer bout, joking just between the two of us. I might have been a teensy sarcastic when I talked about Amber’s shopping obsession and Elizabeth’s endlessly-repeated dramatic hair flip. But after Tracie started using Evan as her yo-yo boy toy, Evan apparently thought my lines were so funny, he repeated them to her. She scuttled over to Calley Rose, Amber, and even Elizabeth to pass on the semi-horrible funny jokes I’d made about them. “Not being friends anymore,” it turned out, was the punch line.

“Oh. Right.” Evan’s shoulders sank. “I don’t know why Tracie passed those on—”

“That’s what she does, Evan. Excluding people is her best sport.”

“I’m sorry.” He looked miserable. “I didn’t mean to mess up your life. I know you’re mad at me.”

It wasn’t just that. “I thought I could count on you.”

To be my friend. To be my BFF. Or maybe actual boyfriend. Or all of those. At least someone to lean on, when things got bad for my brother and everyone in my family was leaning on me.

“You can.” Now he was making those big eyes at me. “Count on me.”

Humph. I shook my head, thinking about the stupid lies about me and Curtis Warren. “I’m probably the only slut-shamed girl in America who’s never even been kissed full on the lips.”

“You’ve never been kissed?”

“No, Evan,” I said tiredly. “Or anything.” At least if you don’t count a spin the bottle game in sixth grade, which I don’t, because it wasn’t exactly romance. “Once Curtis lunged at me with his tongue out. But if that counts as a human kiss, I’m dating outside my species.”

We shuffled over to our old lunch spot and sat on the bench, but in silence. When I pulled it out, my peanut butter and jam sandwich was mashed so hard from my clutching it through my lunch bag, it was oozing purple jam from four finger-dent wounds.

Evan finally broke the silence. “I have a chocolate bar. You should eat it instead. It has your name on it.” He set a Kit-Kat bar next to me, a little peace offering.

I laughed. That wasn’t a cure-all, but it was something. Which was nice, because the day got worse from there.