Free Being Friends With Boys by Terra Elan McVoy Page A

maybe? What do you want to do?”
    “Is it cheating,” I ask him, genuinely unsure, “if we work on it together?”
    He stops walking, stares after me in disbelief.
    “Sugarcakes,” he says, “Campbell doesn’t care how we find the answers. He knows these tests are both easy and impossible. He just wants to see if we can do it. That’s the game to him— if we can do it. He doesn’t care how.”
    I consider this. Consider the delighted look on Benji’s face while he talks.
    “That doesn’t really seem like, you know, real teaching, if you ask me.” I head toward my locker.
    Benji follows. “Man’s got a PhD. He doesn’t care.”
    “So I should not at all feel guilty that I’m about to agree to collaborate with you?”
    I open my locker, and Benji sticks his head around the edge.
    “Of course not. The real thing you need to be thinking about is: your place or mine?”
    I roll my eyes, grab my lunch, and try to catch the side of his face as I slam the metal door shut.
    He sniffs. “What’s for lunch? I love sushi.”
    “You’re disgusting.” I’d elbow him too, but something makes me feel like he’d just enjoy it. So I keep walking to the cafeteria and the table by the Coke machines where I’ve been sitting to avoid an unusually-bitchy-this-week Whitney. I always look busy sitting here—mostly because I am. Usually writing in the notebook to Trip. Like about how I discovered that Lish must’ve switched her schedule, because now she has lunch this period too.She was walking out to the parking lot to go off campus with D’Shelle the other day. Which is maybe another reason why I’m not joining Oliver out by his car right now.
    “Don’t you have class?” I ask Benji.
    “Eventually.” He shrugs, not caring about the bell ringing over our heads.
    “Well, I have practice on Saturday,” I say, to say something.
    “I’m free this afternoon.” He blinks. “And practice for what?”
    “Practice for none-of-your-business is what.” But I can’t help grinning at him a little. “This afternoon, though, I could do.”
    He offers a charming little bow. “I love a woman who doesn’t make me wait.”
    I wonder, Why doesn’t Trip like him? while Benji salutes and says, “See you at the last bell.”

Chapter Five
     
    O n Monday, Trip gives me back the notebook, but reading what he’s written is like trying to decipher the scrawls of a crazy person. Turns out he was at a party Friday at Chris Monroe’s and spent a good portion of the time in some corner, criticizing the entire thing for my benefit. He also seems to have had an entire bottle of peach schnapps or Jägermeister during the process, because his writing is a mess and he eventually trails off, trying to describe different couples making out around him. His last entry is about how he woke up on the floor in what he figured was Chris’s dad’s study, made his way out, and drove himself home, slept off his hangover mostof Saturday. Sunday he watched Bruce Lee movies with his dad.
    “You’re drinking too much,” I tell him when I see him after lunch period. “It makes me worry.”
    “Thanks for the input, Straight Edge.”
    “I am not straight edge. I’m just not a lush .”
    “I’m sorry.” He concedes, but he’s put off. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing at this age? I think it’s in the manual.”
    I frown at him. “You’re supposed to be working on new music. Like I am.”
    His eyebrows go up. “You are?”
    His genuine surprise makes me feel sheepish about not telling him before. I let the long slant of my bangs fall between us. “What did you think?”
    “I just didn’t think—I mean . . .” He recovers a little: “I didn’t know you were.” He looks startlingly solemn. “But maybe I need a break from all that.”
    “It’s fine if you need a break,” I growl. “But the rest of us are going ahead.”
    He looks at me with that serious blankness, and I immediately regret what I’ve said. I