“Fine. But Josh, you keep an eye on her,” Tiffany warned, raising a finger and waggling it between us.
Josh’s brow knit in confusion, but he nodded. “Okay. I’ll do that.”
My friends traipsed off and Josh took my hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night. Tiff told me they were taking you out to distract you and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Oh. Well, you could have texted me to tell me that, at least,” I said, feeling relieved nonetheless.
“Sorry.” Two almost-perfect circles of pink appeared high on his cheeks. “Come on. We need to talk.”
“We so do.”
He tugged me toward the nearest oak tree and tossed his canvas jacket down beneath it for me to sit on. I chuckled at his chivalry, but accepted it. This was one of those rare days when I’d chosen to wear a skirt and I didn’t love the idea of twigs and rocks jabbing into my bare skin. I sat down and cradled my cast against my chest, feeling warm and nervous, wondering where this was all going.
Josh sat down next to me and bent his knees, resting his forearms atop them and lacing his fingers together. He blew out a sigh, looked at me sheepishly, and began.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” he said, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He closed his eyes for a second, like he was building up his confidence. “I wasn’t exactly accepted at Cornell.”
I blinked. Whatever I had imagined was coming, that wasn’t even close. “Wait, you were rejected?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?” I asked, baffled. Josh had told me back in March that he’d gotten his acceptance letter.
“I was wait-listed,” he admitted, ducking his chin. He looked at me from the corner of his eye. “Do you hate me?”
“Hate you? Are you kidding? No!” My voice had gone shrill out of relief. This was so much less bad than anything I had conjured up in my mind. All I wanted to do was get up and do a happy dance. But Josh was not looking quite so elated. “I guess I’m just . . . confused,” I told him. “I thought you got in weeks ago.”
“I know. I lied,” he said, turning slightly toward me. “I’m so sorry, Reed, I was just so embarrassed. My entire family went to Cornell. I mean, everyone except Lynn, but he did get in. I’m the first ever to not get in.”
“But you didn’t not get in,” I said. “You got . . . maybe-ed.”
“I know. It was just so humiliating. And even worse because . . .”
When he trailed off, my heart thumped fretfully. There was more?
“Because I didn’t apply anywhere else.”
My jaw dropped.
“I know! I’m such an idiot!” He covered his face with his hands, one of which was peppered with purple paint spots. “I thought it was a lock and I didn’t really want to go anywhere else anyway, so—”
“So what you’re saying is, as of right now, you don’t have a school to go to next year,” I clarified slowly. A light breeze rustled the green canopy of leaves over our heads, and I leaned back against the tree’s rough bark.
“That’s what I’m saying,” he replied. “And that’s why I’ve been so stressed. My dad has this friend on the admissions board who basically told him that if I want to get in, I need to get straight As this semester.”
Suddenly I felt like the worst girlfriend ever to call herself a girlfriend. Here I was, coming up with all of these disturbing theories, all these scenarios in which Josh was a real villain, while he was fretting about his future and studying his ass off to secure it.
“So that night that I said I was out with Trey, I was ac
tually working with a calc tutor,” Josh told me. “And whenever I’m not around, I’m studying.”
“Wow,” I said.
“And that whole thing with Graham at the library that night?” he said.
My skin prickled with curiosity. “What about it?”
“He and a couple of the other guys found out about the wait-list thing a couple of weeks ago—I don’t know how. At first he was just being a dick about it, mocking me for it and crap like that, but that night . . . he actually said that if I didn’t break up with you, he was going to tell you about it. Can you believe that?”