“Hey!” J.P. protested. “I didn’t dump her! I told her I thought it would be better if we were just friends.”
“Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around. Second,” I informed Lana, “Lilly’s upset because I refused to run for student council president. Even though I never wanted to be student council president in the first place,she did. Third, she—”
“I don’t mean how long have you two been fighting,” Lana said, rolling her eyes. “I meant, how long have she and the Beanpole been banging?”
Sometimes it’s quite difficult to understand what Lana is saying, because she uses a type of slang with which no one else at our lunch table (aside from Trisha Hayes and Shameeka, who has also come back into the fold) is familiar.
“Beanpole?” I echoed.
“Banging?” Tina added.
Lana rolled her eyes again and said, “How long has Lilly Moscovitz been sleeping with Mr. Rocket Science?”
I dropped my beef and cheese taquito.
“WHAT?” I cried. “Lilly andKenny ?”
But Lana just blinked her super long, volume-enhanced, mascaraed lashes and went, “Duh. I told you I saw them sucking face at Around the Clock this past weekend.”
“You said you saw Lilly and a NINJA making out,” I said. “Not KENNY. Kenny Showalter is not a ninja.”
“No,” Lana said as she chewed her tuna-avocado roll—which she has specially delivered every day for lunch since the caf doesn’t do sushi. “It was definitely that guy over there.”
“Totally,” Trisha said. “I’d recognize that bulbous Adam’s apple anywhere. It was bobbing all over the place.”
Tina and I looked at each other in shock. Then Tina swung an accusing glare at her boyfriend.
“Boris,” she said. “Was the guy Lilly was making out with in her kitchen KENNY?”
Boris looked uncomfortable. “It was hard to tell,” he said. “His back was to me. And all those muay thai fighters looked the same with their shirts off.”
“Oh my God!” Tina cried. “Itwas Kenny! Boris! You got Mia all upset for nothing, thinking Lilly was hooking up with a random strange muay thai fighter in her despair over J.P. dumping her, when really it was Kenny all along!”
“I didn’t dump her!” J.P. insisted.
But Boris just looked bored. “Who cares?” he wanted to know. “When are things going to go back tonormal around here?”
On the wordnormal , he looked over at Lana and Trisha.
No one, of course, noticed. Except for J.P., who smiled at me. J.P. reallydoes have a nice smile.
Not that that has anything to do with any of this.
Anyway, at first I was like, “But Lilly could so easily break Kenny’s neck with her thighs, like Daryl Hannah inBlade Runner .”
But then I remembered how Kenny’s been bulking up with all that muay thai fighting.
So. I’m happy for her. I really am. I mean, if she’s happy, I’m happy.
But still. KENNY SHOWALTER????????
Wednesday, September 22, Chemistry
I don’t care about the ban on my writing in class: I HAVE to get this down.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I HAD to ask Kenny what was going on with him and Lilly.
So I just went, “Kenny. Is it true about you and Lilly going out? Because if so I want you to know, I think you guys make a really nice couple.”
(Lie. But since when do I ever tell the truth?)
Anyway, Kenny totally didn’t seem to appreciate my kind remarks. He went, “Mia! Do you mind? I’m in the acid neutralization phase!”
So then I was like, “Fine, sorry I said anything,” and went back to my stool to write this.
And then a second ago J.P. sat down next to me and was like, “So, am I in the clear now?”
And I was like, “In the clear for what?”
And he was like, “Breaking Lilly’s heart. Now that she’s learned to love again, as Tina would put it.”
So I laughed and said, “J.P., whatever, I never blamed you for what happened between you and Lilly. You can’t help it if you didn’t feel the same way about her that she felt about you.”
Although he could probably have helped by not leading her on for so long. But I didn’t add that part out loud.
“I’m glad you feel that way, Mia,” J.P. said. “Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time now, and every time I start to, something seems to happen to interrupt me, so I’m just going to say it now, even though this might not be the ideal mo———————————————————”
Wednesday, September 22, East Seventy-fifth Street AEHS evacuation rendezvous
Oh my God.
Oh my God. J.P. is in love with me.
And we blew up the school.
Wednesday, September 22, Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room
To tell you the truth, I didn’t know which to write first back then.
I mean, I don’t know which is more upsetting—that it turns out J.P. has fallen in love with me, or that we all nearly died from Kenny’s experiment, in which he was trying to recreate—unbeknownst to the rest of us—a substance formerly used as filler in hand grenades during World War II, with a very high deflagration point, which means, in English, that it’s very unstable and BLOWS UP A LOT.
And we weren’t even supposed to be making it! Mr. Hipskin didn’t realize that’s what we were doing because Kenny told him we were making nitrocellulose, which is flash paper similar to what’s used in film.
Not nitrostarch, which is an EXPLOSIVE!
The emergency room nurse keeps assuring me that Kenny’s eyebrows will grow back someday.
I was much luckier. I’m here in the ER under protest—there’s nothing actually wrong with me. They just sent me here to avoid a lawsuit, I’m sure. I mean, I only had the wind knocked out of me. That’s because just before deflagration occurred, when Kenny yelled, “Everybody get down!” J.P. threw me off my stool and flattened his body over mine, so all the flaming debris landed on him and not me.
Which, I might add, was right after he’d said, “Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time now, and every time I start to, something seems to happen to interrupt me, so I’m just going to say it now, even though this might not be the ideal moment. And I know you’re going to freak out now, because that’s what you do. So put down your pen and take a deep breath.”
This is when his blue eyes locked on to my gray ones and he said, super intently and without looking away, “Mia, I’m in love with you. I know up until now we’ve just been friends—good friends—but I want more than that. And I think you do, too.”
It was right then that Kenny yelled to get down. And that J.P. threw himself at me.
Fortunately for J.P., Lars was ON IT with the fire extinguisher—I guess to make up for not being the one to throw himself over me, which is, after all, his job, and not J.P.’s—and put out the flames that erupted on the back of J.P.’s sweater. He didn’t even get burned, because our school uniforms are made of so many unnatural fibers, most of which are flame retardant.
So no flames actually ever touched J.P.’s skin. Just his V-neck.
All of us had to flee a cloud of billowing nitrogen dioxide vapor, though. And not just in our Chem class, either. The whole school.
Good thing it wasn’t freezing outside (some kind of cold front has come down from Canada, making the city unseasonably cool for September), and none of us had our coats, or anything. Not.
One of the nurses just came in and said the whole thing was on New York One—a live shot from a helicopter of everyone standing outside Albert Einstein High shivering, with the fire trucks and ambulances all flashing their lights and everything.
Only three people were actually taken to the hospital, though: J.P., Kenny, and me.
Principal Gupta caught me just before they closed the ambulance doors. She was all, “Mia, I want to give you my sincerest assurances that I intend to get to the bottom of this matter. Mr. Showalter willnot go unpunished….”