Rejecting the Stand-In Script

"Clementine. The one thing I regret most in my whole life is picking you out of spite." The monitor beside the hospital bed ticked down, sharp and thin.

The man I'd been married to for decades gripped my hand while he died, and that was what he chose to say. His eyes were clouded over.

Somehow they still softened, and the softness turned my stomach. "I've loved Delaney this whole time." So that was it. The childhood sweethearts. The two hearts finding each other.

All of it was just a tool he used to get close to my best friend. He never had the nerve to tell her. He stood there and watched her kiss somebody else.

Then he turned to me, smiling, and asked if I wanted to be together. I was the lostandfound bin he settled for.

The place he dumped himself when the girl he wanted didn't work out. I pulled my hand out of his. I watched the line on the monitor go flat, and I didn't blink. Fine.

If he wanted her that badly. If I ever get another life, I'll hand her to you myself. Later I found out I wasn't the only one who got that other life.

Chapter 1 One second I was in a hospital, waiting for someone to sign a death certificate. The next I was facedown on a desk, waking up from a nap.

The disinfectant was still in my nose. Nothing else was where I'd left it. Something dropped hard onto my left shoulder. A hand. A solid smack.

I turned, and there were Brody Whitaker's laughing eyes. "What are you spacing out for? Class starts in a minute. You didn't sleep last night, did you? I got you a coffee." Thunk.

A bottle of iced coffee, set down harder than it needed to be. Like the sound was meant for somebody else in the room. I looked into his eyes. Clear. Bright.

Aimed at me like nothing else could fit in them. In my last life, those honest, focused eyes took every bit of love I had.

Now I could hear his deathbed voice under them, and the whole thing just played as a joke. "I don't like coffee." Looking back, the signs were always right there.

Delaney was the one who liked coffee. Never me. Brody blinked. He'd never once had the girl who always smiled at him say no like that, flat and to his face.

His smile scrambled to catch up, eager and careful. "Then what do you like? I'll go get it after class." The girl I sat next to, my "best friend," Delaney Voss, glanced at me.

Then she gave Brody a sweet smile. "That's okay. I like coffee. Clementine, you can give it to me." That snapped him out of it.

He held out the second bottle, the one clenched in his other hand. "This one's for you." Color crawled up that clean, handsome face. I'd never seen it there before.

I watched the whole exchange happen in front of me. I didn't take the coffee. I handed it to Delaney.

She winked at me, delighted. "Perks of being friends with Clementine." That afternoon I went to wash my hands, and through one wall I heard her talking to some other girls. "She's so fake.

Is she showing off that Brody cares about her?" "Who would be friends with her if it wasn't for Brody?" I shut off the faucet and stood there, one wall away, and listened to every word.

It took me a whole marriage to believe that sentence the first time around. So I got out of the triangle. I went to my homeroom advisor and asked for a seating change.

She was frowning over my class rank. "Clementine, I know you're a good kid. But you can't spend all your energy on friends and none on the work. You're down twenty spots this term.

You used to be top five, every time. How are you getting into an Ivy like this?" "Ms. Prentice, that's actually why I'm here." "I want to move seats." She looked up, surprised.

Sitting next to Delaney had been my idea. I'd asked for it. I said we'd help each other, that I'd pull her up. She climbed. I lost twenty spots.

That was how I ended up at a solid state university and nothing more. I got a whole life back. I intend to collect on it.

When I came out of the office, Brody was waiting by the door. He'd shot up since freshman year. Somewhere in there he'd turned into a tall, goodlooking boy.

Looking him in the eye meant tipping my chin up. He pressed his lips together, not quite comfortable. Then something warm bumped my arm. I looked down.

A carton of skim milk, the kind with the extra calcium. I laughed out loud. So he knew what I liked. He just never brought it. This time I took it.

Before I hand you over to her, you're going to see exactly what you're throwing away. Chapter 2 I laughed, so he relaxed. He opened his mouth to say something.

I got there first. "I asked Ms. Prentice to move you next to Delaney. I know you like her. Don't waste it." Nothing happy came into his face. He just stood there.

I took one last look at him and walked past. Ms. Prentice worked fast. The seats changed the second physics let out. What I didn't expect was who I got. Elias Reeve.

Number one in the class, number one in the grade, the curvebreaker himself. He never talked. He answered questions. Outside of that, I'd never heard his voice.

When he heard someone was finally taking the empty seat beside him, his pencil paused on his scratch paper. He lifted his eyes for exactly one second.

Behind the glasses, black eyes, still as dead water. That day I sat through every class with nothing pulling at me. Neither of them anywhere near me. Even the air was cleaner.

Evening study hall ended and I was still writing, head down, when a shadow dropped over my desk. Brody.

He said my name the way he always did, easy, like it belonged to him. "Clementine. Let's walk home." There was something bright in it. Of course.

He'd spent the whole day sitting next to the girl he wanted. I didn't look up. "No thanks. Go ahead. I'm staying a while." He didn't move.

He didn't seem to hear anything cold in it either. He blocked the light from overhead, one hand planted on my desk. Still warm.

Still easy. "Twenty more minutes isn't going to change your grade. Go home while it's safe out." "I'm leaving now. Who's going to walk you home?" He bent closer.

His body heat crossed the space between us. I looked up into eyes that were still smiling. His bag hung off one shoulder. He had that loose, unhurried look he always had.

Like he already knew what I'd say. Over his shoulder I saw Delaney, and her face wasn't holding together. She'd been staring at me. She hadn't planned on me looking back.

She froze for a second, then dragged her expression into place. The smile came out badly. My mouth curled. It probably wasn't a nice smile. "Don't worry about it.

You like Delaney, don't you? Walk her home. And move, you're in my light." The color drained out of his face. His fingertips went red where they gripped the edge of my desk.

His breathing picked up. His lashes shook. I'd put my hand right on the thing he kept buried, and he came up swinging. His voice jumped. "Clementine, are you mad about the coffee?

That doesn't mean you get to spread stuff about me. Who said I like Delaney?" The aisle was full of people going by. Eyes started moving between us. We sat in it for a few seconds.

Then my new seatmate spoke up, into the middle of everything. "Nobody wants to know who you like, Whitaker. You're loud. It's annoying." Cold. Like ice cracking. The air stopped.

Somebody in the crowd snorted. Then the whispering broke out everywhere. Guesses flew. Brody caught up a beat late and reached for Delaney, who had gone unsteady on her feet.

Before he left, he looked at me for a long moment. Then he took her wrist himself and walked her out, in front of half the class. Chapter 3 Brody brought her breakfast. Coffee.

Snacks. They walked to school together and walked home together. No spare third person wedged in the middle anymore. Which meant it moved fast.

By the week they were leaning into each other in the halls. I got up earlier and slept later, mostly so I'd never be in a room with them, and the hours went into the work.

By finals at the end of junior year I was back to fifth in the class. Twentieth in the grade. The printout was warm off the machine. Something clicked back into my hands.

My own life. My eyes climbed the page. They stopped on the first line. The one everybody looked up at and nobody ever caught. Elias Reeve sat there like a mountain.

He barely dropped a point on anything with a right answer. He was a very good machine. No feelings. No mistakes.

Then I looked at my own physics score, limping along at the bottom, and decided to swallow my pride. I turned to ask him.

He was staring out the window instead, somewhere else entirely. I followed his eyes and found an orange sky and a run of clouds going pink.

He caught me looking and gave me one flat glance. "You need something?" It had a question mark in it.

Nothing else about it went up at the end. "Can I ask you about some of the science problems?" His eyes dropped to the practice test on my desk. "You missed the gimmes.

What exactly would I be teaching you?" There was no sneer in it. No dig. He said it the way you'd read a temperature.

Then he took the test anyway, picked up a pencil, and walked me through plugging in the formulas. He used short words and I understood all of them.

His voice stayed level, like the light outside. It made you feel like the ground was solid, which it wasn't. He finished and handed the pages back.

My fingers closed on them, and he was looking straight at me. Those black eyes dropped a long way down. "You've come a long way. You got the grade back.

Don't let it slip again." I sat there a second. Then I nodded, once, and I meant it. This life, I'm not playing a part in their love story. And I am never sliding backward again.

That night there wasn't a cloud anywhere. It rained anyway. Elias didn't have an umbrella. I did, so I offered to walk him to the bus stop.

He looked at me for a few seconds. "I have a car coming. I'll drop you. It's on the way." Same flat voice. Same wall. But he wasn't the impossible person everybody said he was.

He was tall, and holding the umbrella over him wore my arm out fast. He saw me struggling with it and his fingers came around the handle. "I've got it." The umbrella was small.

We walked shoulder to shoulder and neither of us said anything. It was tilted toward me the whole way. The shoulder he kept on the outside was soaked through. He never mentioned it.

I assumed it was because he was tall. "Clementine!" Somebody was shouting my name through the downpour. It should have been the most familiar voice in the world.

Decades of my life were spent next to that voice, and it landed on my ear like a stranger's. I wasn't doing this with Brody. I kept walking.

Elias glanced sideways at me. "You two used to be close, I thought." That surprised me. "You keep your head in a book all day.

Didn't think you noticed." The corner of his mouth twitched. First time I'd ever seen his face do anything at all. "I study. I'm not deaf and blind." "And Whitaker is loud.

It's hard work not hearing him." He'd barely finished when somebody stepped into our path. Brody had no umbrella. He was soaked through, eyes barely open, the rims of them raw red.

He looked at me anyway, and he didn't look away. Chapter 4 "I don't have an umbrella either. Why does he get one?" "We've known each other our whole lives.

That's worth less than three months of sitting next to him?" Three months he spent sinking into Delaney, closer every week. I was glad for it.

Every time he passed me he slid his eyes off me like I was furniture. And now he wanted standing to ask me anything.

I looked at him, and my voice stayed where it was. "You really think I don't know why you came around in the first place?" He froze for a second, and something in him stepped back a long way.

For that second the face didn't belong to the boy I'd known all my life. It was the face of a man caught out across an entire lifetime.

We went around him while he was still standing there, and left. I should have caught it the first time through. He didn't start being sweet to me because our parents were friends.

He started because the new girl, Delaney Voss, was my friend. Pretty face. Soft way of talking. And a nerve on her. Under the uniform she'd be wearing some little floral dress.

Her second day she came right up to me and said she wanted to be friends. She had those wet, wide eyes. When they landed on you, you went under. So we were friends. We ate together.

We paired up in gym. Not long after, Brody, who'd been in our class the whole time, started coming around. Before that he was a hiinthehallway kind of person.

Delaney showed up, and suddenly he and I were close. The friend I thought I had was running a calculation.

The favorite I thought I was turned out to be a trick he used to get near her. The rain got heavier. The car came for Elias and stopped at the school gate.

He held the umbrella and opened the door onehanded, then lifted his chin at me. Get in. I didn't argue. I gave the driver my address. Ten minutes and I was home.

Before I got out, Elias stopped me. Nothing came through those eyes at all. "I won't be here when school starts. Do the work.

If you slide again, nobody's going to take you seriously." His voice landed on top of the engine turning over. Rain hit the umbrella. It reached me a beat too late.

People really don't know when they're seeing someone for the last time. Chapter 5 That short summer, I barely left the house. Eyes open, straight to work.

Science was my weak spot, so I went at it over and over. The textbook. Problem sets. Every mistake copied out until I could see the shape of it coming. I didn't have much time.

Senior year was about to start. There was no room for a single wrong step. Now and then a text from Brody came in. I'd blocked his number and everything attached to it.

He bought a new one. I didn't understand why he kept at it. He didn't want me. Why spend a summer on me? Then it clicked. Brody wanted Delaney.

He also liked having me look at him like that, careful, hopeful, following him around the room. He wanted the worship and he wanted the girl. Both. All of it.

He'd been playing that hand on me for years. I blocked the new number too and marked it as spam. The summer stayed quiet after that. New homeroom in the fall.

The seat next to me sat empty. Elias had said it and he meant it. He never came back. His family had money. Transfer, or somewhere overseas. Take your pick.

They put someone new next to me fast. Second in the class, a quiet, sharp girl. Claire Bennett. She was good at science and shaky in English. We fit.

We started talking through problems between classes. Little by little we got close. She dragged my physics up. I pulled her English up eighty points.

First practice test of senior year, she came first. I came second. Ten points between us. She said it like a joke. "Good thing Reeve left.

Who was ever going to beat him?" I thought about his face bent over a problem, cold and quiet. I thought about those three words. Do the work. I could have run through a wall.

I was going to be the next one they looked up at. I was going to take his record. While I had my head down, bits of Delaney gossip still reached me.

Nobody was walking her through the material anymore, marking what mattered. Her grades slid right back to the bottom of the pile.

Everyone else was clawing for every point they could get. She put all of it into Brody. A hundred days out from the SATs, in the morning. She told him in the empty hallway.

Homeroom hadn't started. The room was still mostly empty. I had the seat by the door. Her voice came through shy, with something hopeful under it. She wasn't loud.

It carried anyway. "Brody. I like you." "I know you care about Clementine more.

But I want to try for myself anyway." "Would you be my boyfriend?" Nothing came back through the doorway.

I was halfway through a derivatives problem, working it out fast on scratch paper. Then Brody, hesitating. "The SATs are right there. We should be studying.

Once we're in the same city we can talk about—" She cut him off. "Brody, there's a guy at the other school who's after me. You can say no.

I'll go talk to him." A pause that went on a little too long. Then his voice, very low. "Fine. Okay." I wrote the last line, flipped to the answer key, and checked. Identical.

Claire leaned over and made a small shocked noise. "That was fast. Ten minutes?" "Whoever comes first next time buys lunch.

Deal?" Before I could answer, my paper lifted out from under my hand. Delaney's voice was sweet. Her smile was lovely. "Wow, our resident genius.

Guess what, we're together now." She held up their linked hands.

The smile had teeth in it. "Thanks for giving us the chance to get to know each other." Claire's mouth actually fell open. Nobody announces it like that, in front of the whole room.

We were a hundred days from the test that decided which doors opened for the rest of our lives, and she couldn't tell which one mattered more. They both stood there looking at me.

Waiting for my face to do something. Waiting for the crack. I stayed exactly where I was, and I smiled at them. "Really? That's great. You two are perfect together.

I always thought so." The color changed in Brody's face. The smile stopped moving. "Clementine, she was nice enough to tell you.

What's with the attitude?" He kept his eyes on me, digging for what I actually meant. "We're just classmates.

What attitude am I supposed to have?" I looked back at him and let it be funny. "I'm not your parents. You don't need my permission." The bell went. The rest of the class filed in.

The two of them slunk back to their own seats. Claire dropped her voice. "What is wrong with them?

Were they bragging at you?" I shrugged. "Beats me." How long that relationship of theirs was going to last, that answer was going to walk itself right through the door.

Chapter 6 Next round of mock exams, I finally passed Claire. First in the class. Third in the school. Still a distance behind the old curvebreaker. Behind Elias Reeve.

I would close it. There was no version of this where I didn't. Test after test after test. There's no time in it to feel sorry for yourself. Pack the bag, get to the next stop.

The stack of used scratch paper got taller. The stack of blank tests got thinner. I cleaned out every gap, one at a time.

Every problem in my error log I knew by heart and inside out. I got a second run at it, and this time I gave myself an actual fight.

Last mock exam of the year, I came out first in the school. My total cleared 1580. I had turned into the old Elias Reeve. Ms.

Prentice looked at me and something in her face eased. "You keep that up all the way to test day.

When Reeve left, he said he thought you could do it." My head came up before I could stop it. "Reeve? He talked to you about me?" "He did.

He said you and Claire balanced each other out.

Said if I put you together you'd both come up." She sighed, and there was a little regret in it. "If he hadn't gone abroad, he'd have taken the whole city." My throat did something inconvenient.

Then something else spread out behind it, and I couldn't name it. If Elias hadn't left. We'd have been very good rivals. The test was close. I worked harder.

And right there, in the last stretch, the news broke. Delaney was pregnant. It went through a school full of bored, exhausted seniors like a lit match through dry grass.

By lunch everybody had it. It started because her parents came for our classroom, and they came loud. Mrs.

Voss went straight up to the front of the room. "Which one of you is Brody Whitaker?" The class started whispering. Our physics teacher stood there with no idea what was happening.

Delaney's seat was empty. Every head in the room turned toward the boy next to it. He had nowhere to go. He stood up. "That's me." His eyes wouldn't hold still.

He looked like a person who'd done something in the dark. Mr. Voss came at him and hit him across the face before anyone could speak. The crack of it went down the whole hallway.

Half of Brody's face went red instantly. You could count the fingers in the mark. His head was still turned from it when a lab report slapped down on his desk. Mr.

Voss's hand shook as he pointed at him. "You piece of garbage. You've wrecked her whole life." "She's a kid. She's a minor.

How do you talk a girl into that?" The man was almost steaming. The report on the desk read hCG, dated at four weeks, and Brody's eyes went huge. "That's. That's not possible