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cheerleaders and I choke. I don’t have the self-esteem to go up to him while he’s surrounded by beautiful, charismatic girls who flirt with him to get help on their homework.
    The only other stagehand is absent today. And I probably wouldn’t have asked him anyhow, because he breathes loudly and always stares down my shirt. I return to our lunch table, defeated.
    “It’s funny,” Margot says, dipping her French fry into a ketchup and mustard mix. “I auditioned for the lead role and you didn’t, and yet here you are working harder than I am.”
    “How is that funny?” I pop the tab on my Diet Coke and it bends my fingernail backwards. Gasping in pain, I shove it in my mouth and bite down hard, trying not to think about how this is probably a sign from life that today is only going to get worse.
    Margot snickers at my misfortune. “Not funny haha , just you know. Funny.”
    “Right.” I shove the soda can aside, no longer wanting to drink it. “It looks like I’ll be stuck working on sets with Derek tonight.”
    Margot’s mouth falls open. “Alone?”
    “Yep.”
    She grabs her purse off the floor and digs around in it, retrieving a hot pink keychain with a small can of mace. “Keep this on you, in case he tries anything.”
    “He’s not going to murder me.”
    While she’s in her purse, she grabs her lip gloss and reapplies it. “And if he does, I’m going to give a great ‘I told you so’ speech at your funeral.”
     

     
    Derek sits at a workbench flipping through a fresh copy of LOVE & SUICIDE. An empty bag of skittles sways in the wind from the large fan across the room and threatens to become litter on the floor. Two piles of Skittles sit on the table: a big pile of all the colors and a smaller one with just green and yellow. I toss my bag on the floor and sit on the stool next to him.
    “So I guess we’ll be working together.” Though I tried to say that friendly and upbeat, it came out a little gloomy and morose. Derek doesn’t seem to notice.
    “Good thing I know my way around the miter saw,” he snorts. He scoops up a handful of Skittles, drops the green and yellow ones in the small pile and puts the rest in his mouth.
    “Why are you doing that?” I ask.
    “I don’t like those colors.”
    I pick up a green one and eat it. “You’re kidding. Green and yellow are the best flavors.”
    He shoves his script out of the way and looks up at me. He smiles and it melts away all the nervousness I’ve been harboring. “You’re insane.”
    I eat another one to prove how delicious they are. “Plus green and yellow are the school colors.”
    “School spirit is for chumps.”
    “You’ve clearly never been to one of Lawson’s famous pep rallies.” Right as I say it, I feel like I’m punched in the gut with my own stupidity. Of course he’s never been to a pep rally—he spent the last five months in juvi. I wonder if he knows that I know. I mean, he has to, right? The whole school talks about him. My face burns. I grab my notebook and flip through it, hoping he doesn’t see how red my cheeks are.
    The silence probably lasts a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity. Derek rests his head on his left hand and watches me as I flip through pages of the detailed notes Greg had made in my notebook. “Um,” I start, and my voice comes out all croaky. I clear my throat, and without looking at him I say, “Do you want to read through the notes I made earlier?”
    “We’ll switch notes,” he says, taking my notebook and giving me his. “I was hella bored in calculus today, so I wrote down some ideas.”
    Like Greg, Derek had broken the script into scenes and acts, and listed ideas for how each set should be designed. His ideas are a million times better than Greg’s.
    “You’re right. I haven’t been to a Lawson pep rally.” Derek’s voice breaks the now comfortable silence a few minutes later, and thrusts us back into an awkward conversation. I look up from his notes. Should