Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
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There are only a few people who know just how bad my anxiety is. Mom and Oscar, most importantly, because they've both seen some of my worst panic attacks and total meltdowns. Sonja, my Mom's best friend, because Mom and Sonja tell each other everything.
The last two people to know are Gracie Hero and Liam Somner.
They know because they were both there to witness the worst moment of my life.
If I was going to list the worst moments of my life, you might think there'd be another contender for first place. Like the day my dad walked out on us, leaving our family broken. Or the night when Oscar almost died.
But although those days were both horrific in their own way, the worst moment of my life was when I experienced my first panic attack. I was dragged through hell, my body a shell, and Liam and Gracie witnessed it all. They've both seen the darkest, most vile part of me. And instead of holding out their hands to support me, they turned their backs and walked away.
Gracie and I became best friends because I love black and white movies, and she loved someone called Lena Horne, an actress and singer who was in one of the films Oma kept on video. We could have looked up the clips on Youtube, but there was something magical about watching those original films on the grainy tape in my grandmother's apartment after school.
I didn't care much for Lena Horne. I loved Judy Garland and Katherine Hepburn and Grace Kelly, but Gracie loved Lena Horne. I didn't want to watch the same musical again and again, but Gracie was fixated. She'd rewind the tape so many times and rewatch Lena Horne singing, then copy her dance moves and pitch.
Gracie has wanted to be a singer for as long as I've known her, and when I look around the cafeteria at school, out of all the kids in this place, I bet she's the one that'll become famous.
She's always been beautiful. She's black and Italian, with the kind of eyebrows and cheekbones and lips that make her look like a goddess even just sitting here in a grimy school cafeteria. Today she's wearing leggings and sneakers and a cropped sweatshirt, but she manages to look like Kendall or Kylie even so.
And she can actually sing, too. Back when we were best friends, she'd spend all her time listening to singers and matching their pitch and belting the same notes. I used to be the one sitting on her bed after school, holding up her phone to record her while she sang acoustic covers to upload to the internet.
That was a long time ago.
I never did reply to her message asking for Liam's phone number. If she wants it, she can get it herself. I'm not Liam's secretary.
It's been two weeks of school, and I have to admit that I'm slipping behind on my best friend strategy. Because I'm sitting at one end of a table in the cafeteria right now, while on the other end are some annoying freshmen boys who keep flicking pieces of fruit at each other.
And I'm staring over at the table where Gracie is sitting with Loren and a few other girls, and wondering how exactly I've never managed to have a table of my own. Gracie has always sat at that same table, with a big group of friends, and I've always floated around to whichever table would have me, which today, is the annoying freshman boys.
