Nao Summers hates drama, but life becomes full of it when he's paired with the school delinquent on a film project. He's also in dire need of a way to break up with his girlfriend who wants to have lots of sex, while Nao would prefer to die. To crow...
Lily's letters were pored over and scrutinized throughout the remaining days of the week. The members of Operation Nao took turns working on the plan while the others attended to December High project business. Setting up a timeline and a game plan was easy, working out the kinks of it was another story. Seth had taken to speaking in a high-pitched voice again, announcing his arrival in a squeaky, nervous kind of tune. Axel was a gargoyle of brute force and handled most of the physical demands of our plan.
We called it Rat Trap. The name was Seth's idea, of course, but I hadn't cared enough to protest its cheesiness. After all, Seth seemed to work better if he had a stupid nickname to whatever task he was doing. He always gave his school assignments the most ridiculous code names, amusing both himself and the rest of the class in the process. If that was how he dealt with things, I'd let him. What mattered now was that we put the plans into life and that I got through November in one piece.
We'd composed a timeline of everything that had happened since Fort Violet, every sign of this stalker/nemesis's movements. With the help of Lily's love letters, we'd even made a mock-profile of our suspect. When I wasn't busy stressing over the impending deadline of the film project, I felt an almost silly pride over our operation.
But all wasn't well. Axel only spoke to me when Seth was around, and the topic was always the operation, the suspect, the plan. He didn't even look me in the eyes when we were speaking, and the empty hole in my stomach reacted by emitting sharp jolts of pain every now and then. The stomach aches had gotten so bad I could hardly sleep, and I knew they wouldn't go away until I spoke to him.
The problem was that every time I tried to address the source of my despair, said source evaded my advances. Axel didn't offer to let us use his apartment for the operation, and he certainly didn't stick around to grab dinner and a movie when we were finished. When the work was done, so was Axel, and any hope I had for speaking with him disappeared with his retreating back at the end of a long day. I'd spent the last few nights typing up texts I could send him, words to explain what had happened, but my finger never pushed "send." The mental block was real, and dealing with it was hard when the rest of my life demanded so much of me.
It felt silly to admit it, but I missed us.
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Friday came in a rush of work and desperation. Mr. White had called the media crew into an emergency meeting at the beginning of class, a meeting in which he paced around the room, picking out random students to interrogate and yell at.
His hair seemed even grayer and thinner than usual, and there was a perpetual tension in his scrawny shoulders. He'd ignored my presence ever since the rat incident, but now he turned to me in full force, letting his crazy eyes land on mine.
"Are you aware that we have less than a month left, Summers?" he hissed through gritted teeth. Seth sent me a wide-eyed look from his desk.
