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Talk about a useful skill to prepare us for life.
    “Uh, no, I, uh….” There was a lot of stammering and stuttering at this point, interspersed with a silent prayer that the earth would open up and swallow me whole. Finally, I managed to get out, “I got asked to join the swim team.”
    “Really? Cool. I’d be freaked out, myself. Have you seen the Speedos the swim team wears? I’d never be able to run around like that.”
    For a moment I was pleasantly distracted by the image of Zach in a Speedo. He could be wet, with rivulets of water sliding down over his flawless skin, snaking around his pert brown nipples and traipsing downward….
    I filed that image away for later use. In its place, I put me in a Speedo. And if I didn’t already have enough reasons to say no to the team, that one was enough to kill the whole idea. There was no way I was going to subject myself to that sort of public humiliation.
    “You should totally go for it,” Zach said.
    I gaped at him. “I should?”
    “Dude, being on a team is like a free pass to as much tail as you want.”
    Including yours?
    I wished I had the balls to say something like that. The look on his face would have been priceless. But of course, I didn’t. There were just way too many ways that that could go wrong.
    I was completely surprised to see Liam in History. He was wearing a black hoody to match his dark sunglasses and ski cap, so he looked even more thuggish than usual. His head was pillowed on his arms. I wasn’t sure why he needed a nap at one in the afternoon, but I had some guesses.
    “Hit the bong a little too hard last night?”
    He didn’t respond save to flip me off. I didn’t care. Whatever weird impulse had driven him to make an effort in class and try to be friends had clearly passed. It wasn’t important to my life.
    But for some reason, I just couldn’t stop asking myself why had he bothered at all? And why he had even come to school after missing half of it? It was an effort, obviously, so why was he making it? He still didn’t quite fit into his box, no matter how hard I shoved him into it.
    Just to really confuse me, he roused himself and pulled his homework out of his bag and handed it to me. “Can you make sure it doesn’t suck too bad?”
    He’d done his homework somewhere between hits on his bong? I just didn’t get it. I nodded to him and took the sheets of neatly-printed pages from him. Looking at his face, I thought he looked even paler than usual. In fact, he kind of looked like crap.
    I checked over his homework while watching him out of the corner of my eye. He looked more than tired. He looked sick. Was that why he had been late today? If so, I couldn’t really fault him, but he had seemed fine yesterday.
    “Looks good except that number six is Ramses II and not Seti I.”
    “Thanks,” Liam mumbled and took the homework back.
    He scribbled out the wrong answer and penned in the right one.
    “You sick?”
    “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just waiting for the Red Bull to kick in.”
    I was sure he was lying, but I couldn’t figure out why. He was always bailing on school, so why was he showing up when he really looked like he should be home? It just didn’t make sense. He was really quite frustrating, the way he refused to conform to the stereotype I had assigned him.
    Over the course of the class, I watched him slowly return to life like an animated corpse. His color was still sickly, but he was awake and paying attention, at least. I considered asking him if he still wanted me to come over, but I just figured he was looking forward to going home and going back to the sleep that school had interrupted.
    So I was completely surprised when he found me at the bike racks at the end of the day. He came up to me, puffing away on a joint, and gave me this friendly smile like we really were just buds. I didn’t know what to make of that, honestly. It was like he just didn’t care what an odd match we made. In his mind we