I scoot my chair forward, and without even looking up, he tilts the book a fraction, ensuring I can’t see what he’s up to.

Finally, I break.

“Is that today’s assignment?” I ask him.

My voice is too loud, or it just seems that way because it has been too long since any of us has spoken.

Dylan doesn’t bother answering me, but James turns to watch me attempt to break through this invisible wall that Dylan has put up around himself.

“I asked you if that was today’s assignment,” I say quieter this time, but my words are still sharp.

He’s concentrating on ignoring me. I’ve stared at his side profile enough times to know when he’s reading and when he’s avoiding, and he’s definitely doing the latter right now, which only further infuriates me.

I wish I could gut him with a neutral, bored tone like he has mastered, but I’m angry and not as emotionally stunted into hiding myself like he is.

“Or is that one of your makeup assignments that you got permission from Miss Delway to do?” I say the words through gritted teeth. “That you so desperately needed my help to fulfill?”

He stops focusing on the words in front of him as I speak.

“The ones that she seemed to have no recollection of this morning, funny enough. Absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Imagine that.”

He grips his pen and sucks in his bottom lip, trying to figure out the best way to talk his way out of this. I won’t let him.

“Tell me why you lied,” I demand.

He finally looks over at me, but he tilts his head toward James to remind me that we’re not alone.

“I want the truth,” I say evenly. “And I don’t care if James is here and has to hear this. I certainly don’t give a crap about your petty schoolyard rivalry and how mad you still are that he stood up to your bullying—”

“My bullying?” Dylan says incredulously. “That’s a joke, right?”

“What part of this is funny?” I ask.

Dylan’s gaze flickers up to the ceiling as if he’s calling up to someone in the sky for reinforcements. “Your perception is so skewed.”

I hate how he turned this conversation away from me getting answers on him lying to me, but I’m curious enough to hear him out. Dylan doesn’t do anything unintentionally.

In fact, if these past few months have proved anything, it’s that I should hear him out. “What makes you say that?”

“Tell me what you remember about that day,” Dylan suggests. “Recess, fourth grade, the punch.”

“Are you insinuating I’m an unreliable narrator in my own head?”

Dylan levels with me. “Don’t you want to write fiction? Just humor me.”

I run a frustrated hand through my curls, and my fingers graze the little rebellious lotus flowers when I do.

“I remember you and James arguing,” I recall, picturing the now somewhat fuzzy scene in my mind. “I watched it happen from my spot across the playground until it looked like you two were about to start fighting. I walked over and caught the tail end of you insulting him, saying something about him being an idiot and then when you started to turn it around on me—”

“You punched me,” Dylan says sourly. “That part is accurate.”

“And the rest isn’t?”

James watches us banter with a hard expression on his face. He refuses to meet my eyes, causing a pit to form in my stomach.

“James?” I say hesitantly.

Dylan sighs. “James and his little gang of tough guys wouldn’t leave me alone because I didn’t want to play with them. Apparently it was a slight that I’d rather sit by myself instead of getting filthy with them. When I attempted to ask him why it was perfectly acceptable for his best friend to be a lonely bookworm and not me—”

“I thought you were making fun of me,” I say, piecing it together.

It’s not often in life you can pinpoint a moment that caused a domino effect of decisions, but this is one of them.

Without hesitation, I took James’s side. That one instance colored my perception of Dylan for the years to come, viewing him as nothing but an entitled jerk who hated us because we weren’t good enough by his standards.

I wish I could go back and rethink every single thing James told me about Dylan, but I can’t even begin to think about how wrong I was.

“I’m so sorry, Dylan,” I tell him, purposely using his first name to reach him on some sort of deep emotional level.

Whatever response he expected me to have, it was not an apology.

A rare flicker of surprise crosses his face, and he doesn’t know what to do with it other than suppress it and fix his mask of indifference on it once again.

“Oh, come on, H, you’re letting him play with your emotions,” James says. “A sob story from elementary school and suddenly you feel bad for him?”

I can’t even begin to unpack all of my baggage with James right now, so I keep my focus on Dylan.

“But it doesn’t make sense…why did you lie to me?” I ask him. “You don’t need my help. Was it, I don’t know, a game or something? Coming full circle somehow?”

He works his jaw. “It’s not like that,” he insists, and I believe him.

Given what I know about his family and upbringing, he views self-preservation as a necessity.

I’m slowly realizing that he made up this entire ruse to spend time with me. I don’t know why, exactly, but I have a hunch, and it’s not one I want explained to me right now during in-school suspension.

He opens his mouth to speak, to be vulnerable to me in front of someone who he deeply hates, but as annoyed as I am, I’m not cruel.

Now is not the time for his grand gesture—and I’m not even sure I want one of those; I just want him to make it right between us.

“It’s fine,” I say before he can begin.

The look of relief is instant.

“You’re kidding me, right?” James groans.

I turn to him, and although my insides are boiling, I’m calm on the surface. “James, I’ve spent the last six years supporting you at every single one of your track events, which are ridiculously boring about ninety percent of the time. I’ve consoled you after your relationships ended. I’ve listened to you complain about Dylan. I’ve been the best friend I could be. And you know what? You haven’t been.”

“You’re mad so you’re just going to take it out on me by leaving me high and dry at Cornell? And having me find this out from him?”

“You’ve just assumed I’ll follow you around, supporting you and defending you and will just constantly be there for you, but you know what? I’m not doing it anymore.”

“Finally,” Dylan says under his breath.

“You’re not involved with this,” James nearly shouts. “Keep your little comments to yourself.”

Dylan laughs. “Not involved? If it weren’t for me, she’d still be trailing you around like a little puppy on a leash.”

“Will both of you just shut the hell up?” I snap.

That stuns them both into angry, tense silence.

I spend the rest of the day willing the minutes to go by faster.