YOU KNOW THAT FEELING WHERE YOU'RE EMBARRASSED on someone else's behalf, and you want to dive under a blanket, thrash around, and yell, Why on earth would you do that?
I never thought I'd experience that sort of secondhand humiliation for Juniper, of all people. She's so put-together all the time, it's sometimes hard to believe she's real.
Not that she's perfect. Nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect.
Still. It's kind of reassuring when Juniper shows the world she's not. Yelling at two random girls in the middle of a crowded lunchroom is far from perfect. I've never done anything that embarrassing.
Go ahead and judge me for this, but her screwing up like that makes me feel as if I've won some sort of unstated competition.
"The hell was that?" Olivia says, staring after Juniper.
"No clue. I'm going to see if she wants to talk." I stand, crumpling my trash into my brown paper bag.
"She's not going to talk, dude," Olivia says. "Remember last winter's recital?"
I grimace. It'd be hard to forget Juniper's concert last December. In the middle of the final movement of a concerto, she fumbled a transition and stopped playing, to crushing silence from the audience and accompanist. She had to restart the movement, a grueling, seven-minute piece of technical wizardry. When the audience left, she locked herself in the bathroom, and nothing her parents, Olivia, or I said could coax her out.
After half an hour, she emerged, quiet and collected. She's still never mentioned it.
"Well, I can try," I say.
"Godspeed," Olivia says.
I head out, frowning as I hoist my backpack higher on my shoulders. Twenty pounds of textbooks and notebooks and overflowing binders. As I leave the lunchroom, a voice in the back of my head says, It wouldn't kill Olivia to try talking to her, at least. But Olivia never does that with me and Juni. She doesn't push us like that. In my opinion, she hates getting that close.
When Olivia's mom left Paloma, I did something for her every day. I texted, called, visited—I poured everything I had into her recovery. Back then, the summer before freshman year, I was too young to drive, so I cajoled my sister, Grace, into driving me wherever Olivia needed me to be. But when I went through my breakup in May, Olivia hid behind a bland, scared layer of sympathy, offering me platitudes like "It'll be okay soon," and "Tell me if I can do anything."
Looking back, I don't know if that was fair.
As I turn the corner, I catch a glimpse of Juni way down the hall, disappearing into the girls' bathroom. I hurry after her.
When I reach the door, I push against it with my shoulder. She's locked it. "Juniper?" I say. "It's Claire. Want to talk?"
"It's fine," she says, muffled. "Please. I need some time."
"Okay. Let me know." I back away, stifling a sigh. Olivia was right. Of course.
Sometimes I feel as if Olivia and Juni operate on a different plane than me. They love pretending everything's fine. They understand that about each other. Me, though—I hate keeping everything bottled up. I feel messy, compared with them. They're neatly printed arias, and I'm a sloppy sonatina, splattered across loose staff paper. Juniper is elegant; Olivia is stoic. And God knows what I am.
All this squabbling and silence among the three of us has me on edge. Are we drifting away from one another? We've been a trio, inseparable, since sixth grade—the thought of losing them makes my heart squeeze.
I gnaw on my pinky nail. "Losing them"—that's not quite right, is it? It's not that the three of us are moving apart. I'm trying as hard as ever. It's the two of them who are pulling away from me.
That's how it feels, anyway. Juni and Olivia are a matched set as always, and I'm some spectator growing more distant by the day.
I glance back at the bathroom door. The fact that Olivia was right about this makes me angry. She knows Juniper better than I do, is what that says. I was wrong, it says.
I hate being wrong.
