Expel by Addison Moore

go through an entire line of suitors she blackmails into being with her, probably the latter.
    “This is Ethan,” Emily starts.
    Should we be listening? Gage asks, plucking at my hand.
    Very much so , I assure.
    “Remember,” Emily reprimands, “this is only for this year.” She pulls a pencil from a plastic cup blooming with markers and uses it as a pointer. “Your relationship goes somewhere with him. You have something real here. It’s funny because I didn’t think you were that into him.” She shrugs it off. “This is Logan.”
    Shit.
    “You are so going to piss off Michelle and Lexy, but not too much because he was on theirs, too.”
    What?
    He is a free agent , Gage is quick to remind me.       
    “He’s hot and heavy with you for a while then it’s cold turkey right around here.” She points off to some timeline I’m not privy to. “Same with Lex and Michelle. It looks like he gets pretty serious with someone else and shuts the rest of you down, but you continue with Ethan, and I see this for the rest of the school year.”
    Chloe gives a heavy look in our direction. She leans into Em and whispers. Emily nods and whispers back, bringing a smile to Chloe’s face.
    Obviously it’s about Gage.
    Gage is the soil in which she buried her heart. Chloe waits for springtime, for the sun to warm over it, for a good shower of my bloodshed to fertilize her efforts. She’s insane if she thinks anything is ever going to bloom out of that rancid maggot pit that lies buried in her chest. Devastation, maybe, but that’s all that will ever come from there.
    You better not make Chloe’s year , I say, yanking Gage by the fingers.
    “I’ll be too busy making yours,” he leans on his crutch and kisses me full on the mouth, causing the room and all of its interruptions to melt away.
    “Next,” Emily beeps it out, obtrusive as an air horn.
    I scoot in next to her, and Gage takes a load off his aching leg in the seat across from us. Emily stares at me banally as though she were reading a newspaper printed across my forehead.
    “You sure you want him here for this?” She flicks a finger towards Gage.
    “Yes.” I fully expect to see an entire page cluttered up with nothing but our love—hearts and rainbows, a unicorn or two with our names tattooed on its rear in a giant frilly heart. Gage, on the other hand, looks like he’s ready for a nap, like just walking across the street has proven to be too big of a physical challenge.
    Emily zigzags her way at top speed across the front and back of the thick parchment set in front of her.
    “So you can interpret the things you draw?” I’ll have to beg her to tell me in detail what that freaky body art she scribbled over me this last winter meant.
    “Sometimes,” she says it bored as if she was fine with it either way. If it were me, I’d totally want to know what the hell my haunted drawings were trying to say.
    Emily continues to spit out microscopic scenes across the page before coming abruptly to a halt.
    See? Easy as pie. Gage and I are so utterly predictable in our happily ever after, it took less than ten seconds for her to whip it out.
    She reaches over and grabs another sheet.
    “What the heck are you doing?” I spit it out in a panic.
    “Ran out of room.” She darts around the page before flipping that too, over. To my horror she picks up another sheet and continues without missing a freaking beat.
    “Looks like a lot of loving going on,” my toes curl when I say it. Truthfully, I’m regretting this big time. The last thing in the world I want to see is that I, in any way, veer from Gage in the next year.
    “Um, you know, I think we’ll get going now.” I try to stand, but she yanks me back down.
    “You have Gage, you can relax. But these other two, they’re not,” she shakes her head, “something’s different about them. This one’s not human, you’re not like into some freaky shit, like dogs, right?”
    She pegged it—dogs of the