Narc by Crissa-Jean Chappell

really weird.”
    “Do you buy that?” I asked carefully.
    Nolan looked down at the pavement, where the Spirit Club had left one of their support messages for the football team:
    .50 WINS!!!
    The chalk letters were smeared with sneakerprints. Somebody had added a dot in front of the five, making it seem like half a win.
    “I think you’ve changed,” he said.
    It was my senior year. Why couldn’t I change? Or was everybody so caught up in the social chess game, we weren’t allowed to rearrange the pieces? Sometimes I wanted to flip the board upside-down. Let gravity decide the rest.
    “People have been saying stuff about you,” Nolan said.
    “What kind of stuff?”
    He didn’t answer. Instead, he said something totally bizarre, in true Nolan style:
    “You can’t just go hanging out with girls.”
    “Yeah?” I said.
    The bidi had shriveled down to nothing. All I had left were used matches. Real used ones, not the magic-markered kind. I flicked the bidi on the concrete. It landed in the pile of cigarette butts—some half-smoked, some rimmed with lipstick.
    “Maybe I like it,” I told him. “Did you ever think of that? Besides. It’s my personal right to hang with whoever I want.”
    “Not those girls,” he said.
    Out of everyone I’d met at Palm Hammock, Nolan Struth was the last guy I expected to go around judging people. God knows he put up with enough judgment on his own time.
    “Well, good luck with the plutonium,” I muttered, turning back toward the classrooms. I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but that’s the way it came out. Nolan cringed, as if I’d punched him in the stomach.
    Maybe it was true, what he said.
    I had changed.
    I called Morgan and apologized in a voicemail. For what, I wasn’t really sure.
    At first, she wouldn’t pick up. I probably called, like, five times. It was sort of stalkerish, I admit. When she finally answered, I held the phone to my stereo. Played her a few tracks by her favorite bands. She listened to every song. Then she listened to me.
    “That picture was on my phone, okay? That doesn’t mean I sent it.”
    “I know,” Morgan said quietly.
    “When I find out who did it, trust me, I will destroy them in so many ways.”
    “My hero.”
    I imagined her rolling her eyes. Yeah, it was official. I wasn’t anybody’s hero. That’s for damn sure.
    “So … we’re friends, right?” she asked.
    Friends .
    I’d never hated a word so much in my life.
    “Yeah,” I said. “We’re friends.”
    “Good. Because this enemy stuff is getting old.”
    It was kind of weird, talking like that again. Weird in a good way. No awkward silences, where you wonder if the other person put the phone down to take a leak. With Morgan, I could blab about anything from Bigfoot to weapons of mass destruction.
    I still couldn’t believe we’d made out. Blame it on the booze. Now I started to realize that all the guys at Palm Hammock ignored Morgan, who usually left the cafeteria at lunch to sit by herself, under a tree with a book. She was one of those weird popular girls, who everybody knows but nobody really is close to. Lots of “friends” but no real friends, it seemed. I secretly thought she was the hottest girl in school. They just didn’t get it. For some strange reason, neither did she.
    Morgan said she’d meet me later at the gallery in the Design District, which wasn’t far from my apartment. I could ride my bike, which was probably a smart idea.
    Outside, I heard Mama Pigeon fluttering around. Dad used to call pigeons “sky rats.” I yanked back the curtain. The chicks had finally hatched. They sat there, alone. Their beaks opened wide, like singers in a silent choir.
    “What’s up?” I whispered, as if they could actually talk back.
    In this building, people passed in the hall without talking. On the rare occasions I waved hello, they looked the other way. It totally creeped me out. We were living under one roof, yet I knew more about the pigeons than my next