Free The Inside of Out by Jenn Marie Thorne Page A

the page they’d left me, expecting to find some taunt, or threat, or accusation about my own sexuality, but it was something far more disturbing.
    Please meet me after class. I’ll treat for pizza. Need to talk.
    ~ Chris
.
    First, I marveled that he’d signed it Chris. Was it because I’d called him that this morning? It wasn’t the oddest thing in the world to sign your own name on a note. But QB had been “QB” since sixth grade. His friends would correct teachers on his behalf when they called roll with the standard “Chris Saunders.”
    But what was I thinking?
Chris
was not what was insane. What was insane was that “Chris” had left me a note imploring me to get pizza with him.
    Either this was an elaborate practical joke or QB had been body-snatched.

    Hannah had time to give me only the quickest of whispered rundowns before we sat for bio.
    â€œShe came out to Madison and Dana over the weekend.Madison quoted the Bible, said that she was uncomfortable that Natalie was ‘choosing this path.’”
    Hannah paused for effect, but I could see the irony all on my own. Madison was not the purest lily in God’s garden. Not that
I
had any issue with the percentage of the junior and senior class she’d worked her way through, but if you’re gonna talk righteous paths . . .
    â€œDana promised to support her,” Hannah went on. “She seemed great about it, apparently. And then she went home and emailed half the school.”
    â€œOh God,” I said, and thankfully got shushed by the teacher before I was forced to recite
“Poor Natalie,”
my next expected line.
    This situation was horrible. No question. But the Beck wasn’t exactly a defenseless victim. She chose her friends a long time ago and set the tone for the way they treated other people—including me. If the situation had been reversed, who’s to say she wouldn’t have behaved exactly the same way?

    I knew better than to expect a Natalie-free ride home from Hannah today, so after the last bell rang, I hid in the girls’ rest-room and called my mom approximately one million times, getting only voicemail. Dad too. Same result.
    The sharp corner of QB’s note was digging into my jeans pocket. He was seventeen. He probably had a car. He could give me a ride home. After we ate pizza. And talked. And flew to the moon on giant papier-mâché butterflies.
    I was leaning against the bathroom’s windowsill,calculating the cost of a taxi, when two girls came in, holding each other up between bursts of debilitating laughter.
    A pang scrunched my stomach. Hannah and I always got into giggle fits over the stupidest things—the gym teacher running all over the basketball court trying to catch a possum, the “phallic oak” lecture in English after we’d read
Jane Eyre
.
    Then I heard what the two girls were saying.
    â€œWho is he waiting for? He’s just standing out there like an idiot.”
    â€œHe
is
an idiot! How can you not know your girlfriend’s a dyke?”
    â€œMaybe he turned her.” Giggles galore.
    I shoved myself away from the window and past the two banshees, managing to shoulder-check both of them like a cowboy leaving a saloon. Then, ignoring their “
Excuse
me?”s, I slammed the bathroom door behind me, not stopping until I reached the exit beside the arts wing—where QB Saunders was, in fact, standing there like an idiot.
    His sad orphan face lightened a fraction when he saw me. Oh God.
    I felt sorry for him. For QB Saunders.
    â€œPizza,” I barked. “Let’s go.”
    People were staring, so I walked, hoping he’d have the sense to follow. Mario’s Pizzeria was only three blocks away. I had to assume that’s where he was planning to take me. It was The Place, full of the very people Hannah and I went to the Moonlight Coffee Shop to avoid.
    I had to stop when a minivan