O. M. Freaking. G

I don’t have to wait for her when class lets out. She jumps in front of me and cups my shoulders.

“Becca.” Val breathes heavily. She zones in on my eyes, trying to communicate telepathically. I’m lost.

“Val.”

“Becca.” Kids file around us in all direction. “Becca.”

“Use your words.”

“Ezra. Told. Me. That...” Val stomps her feet, about to burst. “He can see himself falling in love with me. Falling in love! With me! Ezra! The cutest nonjock, nonsenior guy in the school.”

My stomach knots itself like the rope I could never climb in gym class. She has yet to apologize for treating me like carry-on luggage at the movies, and I see now that she never will. Just because Val is in a relationship doesn’t give her permission to be a crappy friend.

“Um, hello?” Val says. “Thoughts, comments, concerns?”

“What does that even mean?”

“Obviously it’s too soon for us to be in love. But he can see himself falling in love with me.”

“Why is he giving you the advance notice? If he’s going to fall in love with you, then he should just let it happen. Is he saying that he could fall in love with you as like a test? ‘You’re on track to be fallen in love with by me. Keep up the good work’?” I throw in a thumbs-up.

“I think you’re overthinking this. He’s telling me that our relationship—P.S. I’m in a relationship. With a boy! How cool is that?—our relationship has the potential to go the distance. I think that’s exactly what he means. Right?”

I check my watch. It’s getting dangerously close to two-thirty. I pull Val down the hall as we continue our analysis.

“I don’t know,” I say. “But that’s a really weird thing to tell someone. And really soon, too. Did he just blurt it out?”

“It’s not something you just blurt out,” Val says. She tells me about their Saturday excursion to Fort Lee, where movies in the 1910s used to shoot. “Hollywood before Hollywood,” he told her. Before filmmakers wised up and migrated to sunny Los Angeles. Ezra gave her a personal tour of one of the soundstages. Val found it boring after the first hour, but she loved how into it he was. Ezra probably lit up like a department-store Christmas display describing everything.

Val looks me over. “You don’t seem happy.”

“For you? This is great,” I say with all the excitement of a eulogy.

“Real convincing. You’re my best friend. I thought you would seem more excited for me.”

“I am. I just... Things are different now.”

“They aren’t. I just have an addition in my life.”

“I know.” And I know it’s not true. I check the time on my phone: 2:27 p.m.

“I gotta run,” I say. “Maybe we can hang out later?”

“Can’t. Ezra and I are studying tonight. Where are you rushing off to?”

“Practice.” My walk quickly morphs into a jog.

“For what?” Val asks, but I’m already gone.

My clicking heels reach a piercing pitch and echo down the hallway.

* * *

I enter the gym at 2:35 p.m. Forty sets of eyes stare at me, but nobody says a word. They are embarrassed for me. I keep my head down and scurry to the bleachers. Since when do clubs start on time here?

“You’re late,” Huxley says.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you started right at two-thirty.”

I take a seat in the front bleacher.

“Stand up,” she says. “You can sit when practice is over.”

“Are you serious?”

She glares at me with the fire of a thousand tanning booths. I’ll take that as a yes.

I do as she says. All the girls have a perfect view of me. Now even the guys on the scenery crew stop what they’re doing to gawk.

Huxley turns to the other dancers. “We only have the gym for two hours a day, and there are eight routines to master in six weeks’ time. So when I send an email saying practice begins promptly at two-thirty, I mean it.” She cocks an eyebrow at me.

Message received.

She turns on her smile, all traces of nastiness gone. I sit down.

“Rebecca, I didn’t say you could sit yet.”

It’s only the thought of her relationship crumbling, of her sitting at a lunch table alone and forsaken, that propels me back to my feet.

“Our next order of business is to choose what sports each squad will be representing. Every captain came up with one sport. And this year, to make the process more democratic, I will be choosing sports at random from a hat,” Huxley says, unaware that that isn’t democracy.

She chooses first, exaggerated excitement on her face. “My squad, our sport is...curling? What’s curling? Who put this in here?”

Meredith Arturro, captain of one of the lesser squads, steps forward. “It’s like shuffleboard on ice.”

“Shuffleboard isn’t in the Olympics.”

“But curling is. It’s big in Canada.”

While they go to someone’s laptop to verify curling’s existence, my squad mates talk among themselves. Ninety percent of their sentences begin with “My boyfriend.”

“My boyfriend has the most adorable golden retriever.”

“My boyfriend is taking his driving test next week, and he’s been practicing like a maniac.”

“My boyfriend and I went to a sushi restaurant, even though my boyfriend hates Japanese food. And I told my boyfriend that sushi is amazing, but my boyfriend was like ‘I’m gonna puke if I have to put one of those things in my mouth.’ So my boyfriend just got chicken. At a sushi place! Ugh, my boyfriend.”

They wait for me to join in the conversation. I stand there with my mouth gaping open. “I didn’t know they serve chicken at sushi restaurants.”

The girls humor me with smiles, then continue their deep conversation.

Across the court, the scenery crew nails together the first of the sets. Each dance routine gets its own sets that wheel across the court to emphasize what the theme is. I guess the school had to find a way to open SDA up to guys. I spot a familiar face painting Olympic rings on a canvas.

“Hey.”

“You’re in SDA?” Ezra asks. Sweat forms around his temples. Flecks of paint dot his face and arms.

“I am. I live to dance.”

“Me, too, but I find the costumes too binding,” Ezra says, matching my penchant for sarcasm. “So I paint.”

“You paint.” I look at his masterpiece thus far. The rings are squares layered with jagged brushstrokes. Painting is not his medium. “Looks good.”

“Yeah right.” He dips the brush in more paint and steadies his hand on the canvas. That doesn’t do the trick. “I’m directing the interstitial videos for the show, but since that’s technically part of the scenery crew, I have to help out. At least I was able to sucker some of my theater compatriots into helping out, too.”

“Yeah, you need someone to paint over all your strokes,” his friend Jeff O’Sullivan says.

“I’m more Kubrick than Kandinsky, I guess.”

“You’re doing the videos? That’s so cool,” I say. The SDA captains, and their boyfriends, act in video skits to introduce the show and then each routine. They are usually the only ones who find them funny, but I have faith that Ezra can create something nongroanworthy. “Hopefully they’ll be better than Starship Alien II. ”

“ Starship Alien II had some redeeming qualities, surprisingly.” Ezra’s face brightens, as it does whenever movies come up.

“Yeah, it was under ninety minutes.” I may have liked the movie more if I didn’t have to watch him and Val mash their faces together. I shudder at the memory.

“I’m with you,” Jeff says, flicking back his thin, blond hair. He’ll probably be bald by the time he’s thirty, poor guy. Luckily, he’s been dating Carrie Kirby since freshman year, and she doesn’t seem to care. They’re one of the few couples I can think of that seem to have lives outside of each other. Shocker. “My favorite part is when it ended. And when that scientist took her top off.”

“There were some genuinely scary parts. And the movie had a good romantic subplot with Tony and Victoria,” Ezra adds.

I throw my head back with laughter. “Oh, please! They have a one-night stand, and then he’s madly in love with her and sacrifices his brains to the aliens? That’s what I hate about romance in the movies. A guy looks at a girl once, and suddenly he’s in love.”

“It happens. There’s that moment when you see someone and that feeling hits you. It’s like you’re noticing them for the first time.”

“In the movies. Not in real life.”

“You fall for someone in an instant, not gradually.” Ezra taps his chest, getting more paint on his T-shirt. “The heart doesn’t do gradual.”

Everything Ezra says needs cheesy background music and sparkles. I wonder if his mom read him greeting cards as a baby. Jeff agrees with me and pretends to hold back throwing up. Ezra elbows him in the ribs.

“You could feel the attraction between Tony and Victoria,” Ezra says.

“Ezra, do you even know what a one-night stand is? Victoria only felt one thing inside her that night, and it wasn’t love.”

He nods, taken aback by a girl not talking like a girl for a second. “Here, let’s multitask,” and he hands me the orange paintbrush.

“ Starship Alien II wasn’t a total abomination of cinema, but it definitely wasn’t Casablanca,” he says. Ezra talks like no other guy at school. It’s refreshing.

“You got that right.” My dad made me watch it on a snow day. He told me if I watched any more reality TV, my brain would rot, and it was time to watch something good. Usually I hate his movie recommendations, but I found myself captivated. Inspired by Humphrey Bogart, I went out the next weekend and bought myself a trench coat.

“You like Casablanca?”

“Yeah. It’s a classic.”

“Interesting,” he says. He wipes up dripping paint with his T-shirt. “Now that had a great romance.”

I take a break from adding curves to his square rings. “Just the opposite. It’s one of the only movies where logic trumps love. Rick realizes that he and Ilsa had some fun times in Casablanca, but it’s not serious enough to warrant leaving her husband.”

“Not serious enough? When Rick tells Ilsa to get on that plane—that’s love.” Ezra makes the same pained face as my mom when she joined my dad and me for the final scene.

“Telling her to leave with her husband and never come back is love?”

“He cared about her so much. He wanted her to be safe and live a happy life above all else, even if it wasn’t with him.”

“Or he realized that their fling wasn’t worth ruining their lives over. If he really loved her, capital- L loved her, he wouldn’t have let her get on that plane.” I point my brush at him.

“Let’s agree to disagree.” He turns back to the canvas. “What about Titanic? Easily the most romantic film of the past twenty-five years.”

“I thought film geeks were supposed to have good taste in movies,” Jeff interjects. “Man, we really need to get you to a Michael Bay film, stat.”

“It’s still a classic.”

“Jack and Rose? That was just a vacation fling,” I say. “He teaches her how to spit, she sees him in a tux, and suddenly they’re soul mates? Nope.”

Why do none of the movies girls at my school love have happy endings? One half of the couple either dies or moves away. But they can’t get enough of those films. Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Atonement, The Notebook, A Walk to Remember,every other Nicholas Sparks film known to man. My classmates want a relationship, yet they idolize movies where couples never wind up happy. I don’t get it.

Ezra turns back to finishing his rings. “You must love The Wizard of Oz, then.”

“What? There’s no romance in that one.”

“Exactly my point.” He smiles and his eyes do the awkward shift up and to the left like a child asking for a cookie. Val’s right. It’s adorable, from an objective standpoint.

Huxley has begun speaking again. I have a minor panic attack. I drop the brush into the paint can.

“I have to go,” I say.

Ezra gives me a salute. “Thanks for your help.”

“Really, thank you,” Jeff says. “It actually looks good.”

I spin back around. “You guys do know that there’s no orange ring in the Olympics logo, right?”

* * *

Angie,