Free The Thing About the Truth by Lauren Barnholdt

invite?”
    “I’ll invite Marshall.”
    “Marshall who might be on steroids and dropped a microscope and then tried to cover it up?”
    “Yeah.”
    She closes her eyes and leans her head back against the headrest.
    “Fine,” I say, “you don’t like Marshall? We’ll advertise. I’ll make some really nice posters with—”
    “No, no,” she says, “the devils we know are better than the ones we don’t, right? And besides, it worked really well at my old school.”
    When she mentions her old school, she sits up and looks out the window, and her tone kind of changes.
    “Did you like your old school?” I ask, trying to keep my tone light.
    She shrugs, still turned away from me. “It was okay. It was a school, you know?” But something about the way she says itmakes me think that she really does miss it. Which is a foreign concept to me. Yeah, I can understand maybe missing your friends or whatever. But a school? They’re all the same. School sucks, no matter where it is or what goes on there.
    “Why’d you transfer?”
    She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then finally she says, “My parents couldn’t afford the tuition anymore.” She turns away from the window. She’s smiling, but something about it seems forced. “What about you?” she asks. “Why did you leave your old school?”
    “Got kicked out,” I say happily.
    Her mouth drops. “You got kicked out? For what?”
    “A bunch of shit,” I say. “The thing that finally got me kicked out was that I pulled a prank on the headmaster and stole his wig during an assembly. But that was just the last straw. I’d been getting in trouble for months.”
    “Were you upset?”
    “That I got kicked out? Not really.” I shrug. “I’m used to it.”
    “But you had to leave your friends.”
    “Most of my real friends are all over the place,” I tell her. “They’ve been kicked out of tons of schools too, so it doesn’t really matter.”
    “Must be nice,” she mumbles.
    “What?”
    “Just that you can get kicked out of school and not really have to worry about if it goes on your record or not. You’ll get into college because of who your dad is.”
    I think about it and realize that she’s right. But the thing is, I’m not sure I even want to go to college. College, to me, seems like a complete waste of time. If you’re talking about college like what most people think of as college, it seems fun. A state school, maybe, with lots of frat parties and kids going to class in their pajamas. But the kind of college I’m expected to go to? An Ivy League, where I’ll have to take some specialized curriculum and write some kind of thesis on environmental policy or whatever the new issue of the moment is? That sounds horrible.
    We’re pulling into my driveway now, and I cut the engine.
    My dad’s car is in the driveway, which is a surprise. My dad spends a lot of time in the capitol, obviously, and he wasn’t supposed to be home today. The last thing I want is for him to meet Kelsey, (a) because he might scare her away, and (b) because he’s going to judge her. Not to her face, of course. Oh no, he’s way too smart for that. But later he’ll call me into his study and start asking me all kinds of questions about who she is, who her family is, what she’s into, etc. My dad’s a real dick like that.
    It’s not that he doesn’t have reasons to question my choice in girls—at pretty much every school I’ve gone to, I’ve picked out the one or two hot girls who are there just to party. And you’d actually be surprised by who they are. In fact, they’re usually the students who have the most high-profile parents. But they’re definitely not the kinds of girls you’d marry. Or even bring home.
    “Hello?” Kelsey’s asking. “Are we going inside, or . . . ?”
    But before I can answer, the front door of my house opens, and my dad comes walking down the cobblestone steps toward the driveway. I can tell from his face that