On our way to Garden Grove High School, while Tanner and Devon sat at the back of the bus, quizzing each other on American history, Madeline told me more than I ever wanted to know about Blake. "He invited me over to his house, and it was the best day of my life," she said.

"What happened?" I asked. Two months had passed since we had returned to Hackberry Heights after our tour of Japan, and I had hardly seen Blake since then. We occasionally met up for band practice or a local show, but I spent far more time with Tanner, Devon, and Madeline. In fact, Madeline had become my best source of news on what Blake was up to.

"Well, he took me out to dinner first," Madeline said. "The food was okay, but it was so fun to talk to him. He's so cute, and I could just stare at his gorgeous face all day..."

"I get it, Madeline," I said. "What happened next?"

"We were going to see a movie, but there was nothing good playing, so Blake and I went back to his house. It was so much fun. We played some video games, we sat on the couch and chatted, and we danced together. I just wish that night could have lasted forever."

I stared out the window, unsure how to respond. I wanted to be happy for Blake and Madeline, but it was nearly impossible, so I watched the cars go by as we headed toward the Quiz Bowl tournament. The landscape rushed by as I drifted away, lost in thought again. "Dani, are you listening?" Madeline asked me.

"Yeah," I responded.

"I think I'm in love with Blake, but I don't know what to do about it," Madeline said suddenly.

"Maybe you should just tell him how you feel," I suggested.

"I don't know. What if he doesn't feel the same way as I do?"

"He talks about you all the time, and he practically took you on a date. Sometimes, he goes on and on about how you're the one for him, and he doesn't do that with anyone else. I don't know if he loves you, but I'm sure that he likes you."

I didn't tell her that she was spending more time with Blake than I was. If anyone knew how he felt, it would be her.

Madeline nodded, but the bus arrived at Garden Grove High School before she could respond. I didn't understand Madeline's obsession with Blake, but I promised myself that I would try to be supportive. We were friends, after all, and we needed to help each other.

The tournament went surprisingly well. The McKinley High School Quiz Bowl team had been winning more and more matches lately, even with only four people on our team. I usually only buzzed in for the life science questions, but with Devon getting all of the math and physical science questions, Tanner answering all of the social studies questions, and Madeline knowing everything there was to know about literature and classical music, it didn't matter if my specialization was a little bit narrow. We were a perfect team, and before long, Mrs. Welch started to talk about the possibility of us going to regionals.

We won every match of the tournament, but on the way home, I realized just how long it had been since I had seen Blake. I was still unsure about how I felt about him and Madeline, but I didn't want to let that stop us from being friends. I sat a few seats away from my teammates on the bus as they talked about how the match against Garden Grove wouldn't have been so close if we had spent more time studying South American geography, and I pulled out my phone and texted Blake. "Do you want to hang out sometime?" I asked him.

"Sure," Blake replied. "How about tomorrow after school?"

"That works," I texted him. "See you then!" I put my phone away and moved closer to Madeline, Tanner, and Devon, eager to join their discussion. They were my closest friends now, but I couldn't forget about Blake, who had been there for me since middle school. No matter how much I cared for them, I didn't have the same kind of history with Devon, Tanner, or even Madeline that I had with Blake.

The next day, I drove straight to Blake's house after I got home from school. When I entered his house, I saw that there was a book sitting on the dining room table. I was a little bit surprised, since in all the years that I had known him, I had never seen Blake reading anything that wasn't for school. "What are you reading?" I asked him.

He suddenly went pale and then said, "Nothing. Let's go downstairs."

Blake went downstairs, but instead of following him, I walked over to the dining room table. I opened the slender book sitting on the table, and I froze when I saw what was written inside the cover.

Property of Madeline Fujita: Please Do Not Read

Despite my better instincts, my eyes drifted over to the first page. There wasn't anything interesting - it was just a standard diary entry detailing everything that had happened on February 11, 2015. There was some gushing over Blake, but there weren't any dark secrets hidden on that first page. I closed the book and put it with the rest of my stuff, telling myself that I would give it back to Madeline the next day.

I raced downstairs, and I found Blake lying on the couch, waiting for me. "Why were you reading Madeline's diary?" I asked him.

His eyes opened wide. "I wasn't reading her diary," he said, but I could instantly tell that he was lying.

"It was on the dining room table," I said. Perhaps I was a little bit more accusatory than I should have been, but at this point, I don't regret it. If anything, I should have been even harder on him.

"She left it here last time she came over," Blake said.

"I don't believe you."

There was a moment of awkward silence, and then he said, "Fine. I stole it."

"Blake, you can't do that."

"Why not?"

"It's creepy!" I exclaimed. "You can't act like a pig and expect girls like Madeline to actually like you."

"She likes me. It said so in her diary."

"But what would she think of you if she knew that you read that?"

Blake didn't answer right away. He paused and then said, "I don't know."

"Besides, she trusts you, and you're breaking that trust. I'm giving Madeline her diary back, but you need to promise me that you won't do anything like this again. You have to treat her better."

"I promise," Blake said reluctantly.

The two of us hung out in the basement for a while, laughing over YouTube videos and playing video games. Neither of us brought up Madeline's diary again, but I took it with me when I went home and put it in my backpack with the rest of my school supplies. At lunch the next day, I sat next to Madeline, and I gave her the diary back.

"I've been looking for this!" Madeline exclaimed as she took the diary and stuffed it into her backpack. "Where on earth did you find it?"

For a moment, I considered telling her the truth. She deserved to know that Blake had stolen and read her diary, but I couldn't bring myself to destroy their relationship like that. "You left it in Mrs. Welch's classroom on Monday," I said.

Madeline gave me a skeptical look. I knew that the timeline didn't quite match up, but it was the best lie that I could come up with. Eventually, she shrugged and said, "Thanks for giving it back to me."

"No problem," I said. All of a sudden, I wondered if Blake was ever planning to give the diary back to Madeline. What would have happened if I hadn't found it on the dining room table? Maybe Madeline would have found out eventually, or maybe she never would have known that Blake had invaded her privacy, and that her darkest secrets were lying on his dining room table, ready to be exposed at any moment.

In retrospect, I should have told her. Madeline would have stopped her relationship with Blake right then and there, and in the long run, she would have been a lot happier. Maybe we would have spent our junior year of college light-heartedly chatting with each other online, cracking jokes and laughing about the sort of boys that we thought were cool in high school. It was all my fault. There were so many times that I could have stopped everything from going wrong, but I didn't have the foresight to do it.

"Do you want to hang out at my house this weekend?" Madeline asked me. "Caden will be home, so you'll be able to play with his pet snakes too."

"I'd love to, but I'm going college visiting," I said.

"That's cool. Where are you visiting?"

"I'm going to visit this school in Florida called Egmont College. I don't know a lot about it, but my parents think that I need to add to my list of colleges to apply to, and my great aunt likes it because it's close to where she lives. How's your college search going?"

"I'm mostly looking at music schools. I can't imagine myself doing anything other than playing the cello. There's nothing else that's quite like the feeling that I get when I play. You're a musician, so you get it, right?"

I didn't get it at all, but I didn't tell her that playing music with Blake wasn't anything like Madeline's love affair with her cello. Instead, I nodded, hating how much I was lying to one of my closest friends.

"I'm just not looking forward to applying next year," Madeline said. "All of the seniors I know were so stressed last fall, and they didn't have to do any auditions."

All of a sudden, the bell rang, and lunch was over. I put my tray away and went to AP Bio, still agonizing over the college search, while Madeline headed for orchestra. The rest of the week was fairly dull, but the college visit snuck up on me. Mom, Jason, and Sydney picked me up after school on Friday, and we drove to the airport right away. "Can I pick the music?" Sydney asked as we drove toward the highway, and when I said yes, she turned on her favorite album, American Idiot. Both of us screamed every lyric as we headed toward the airport, and I tried not to think too hard about my future. There was enough going on in the present.

One miserable flight and many hours of waiting in line later, we finally made it to Florida. I was exhausted by the time we got there, and I hardly slept that night, so by the time we got around to the tour of Egmont College, I wasn't exactly thrilled to see the school. All I wanted was to go home again and spend some time with my friends.

However, once I stepped onto the Egmont campus, I fell in love with the warm breeze drifting across the fields, the palm trees standing next to sleek, modern buildings, and the way every girl walking by had a dark tan and a wide smile. It was nothing like the colleges that I had seen in Ohio, and all of a sudden, I understood why people like my Aunt Shirley moved to Florida. It was the perfect antidote for reality.

The campus tour was nothing special, but when I sat in on an introductory biology class, I knew that I had to apply to Egmont. The professor was lecturing about the importance of biodiversity, and unlike any of my high school teachers, he actually managed to make his lectures interesting. I couldn't stop listening, and after the class was over, I stayed to talk to him. "Professor Igbinedion?" I said after all of his students were done chatting with him.

"Call me Jonas," he said. "You're Danielle, right?"

"Dani," I corrected him. "I just wanted to ask you about your research. You mentioned that you were studying freshwater fish."

Jonas' eyes lit up, and he told me everything about his research. I didn't understand a lot of it, but I was still fascinated. I wished that I could have stayed even longer, but I had to go to a presentation about financial aid at Egmont. I'm not sure if Jonas recognized me when I ended up in his Introduction to Biology class two years later, but I definitely remembered him.

After the visit, Mom asked me what I thought of Egmont. "I want to apply here for sure," I said, and she breathed a sigh of relief, glad that the trip to Florida hadn't been a total waste of time and money. As for me, although I loved Egmont, I was more than ready to return to McKinley High School. I had Blake and Madeline and the whole Quiz Bowl team waiting for me there, and I didn't want to let any of them down.

On Monday, as we were cleaning up after Quiz Bowl, Tanner decided to make an announcement. "We're playing D&D at my house after school tomorrow," he said. "You guys are welcome to come if you'd like."

"What's D&D?" I asked.

"Dungeons and Dragons," Madeline answered. "Anyways, I can't go. Mrs. Gutierrez scheduled an extra orchestra rehearsal for tomorrow night."

"Does the wind section have to go to that too?" Devon asked.

"I think so," Madeline said.

"I won't be able to go either," Devon said. "Sorry Tanner."

Tanner frowned and then asked, "Dani, are you coming?"

"I don't know," I said. "I've never played Dungeons and Dragons before."

"That's no big deal," Tanner said. "I'll help you out."

"Okay," I said. "I'll come."

The following afternoon, I drove to Tanner's house. He lived on the north end of town, in a neighborhood that looked exactly the same as every other neighborhood in Hackberry Heights. When I entered the house, I noticed that it was quiet and neat. There were no stacks of fan letters or diaries on the table, but there were pictures of Tanner and his siblings on the walls, along with a few bookshelves, with not a single story out of place.

"It's nice that you're the first one here," Tanner said. "We'll have some extra time to design your character."

He handed me a character sheet, and I was a bit intimidated. I didn't understand anything on that piece of paper except for "Player Name." Tanner noticed the look on my face, and he said, "It's not that complicated. Let's start with character name. What do you want to name your character?"

"I don't know," I said. "What's your character's name?"

"I don't really have a character for this game, since I'm going to be the DM," Tanner explained. "I have a group that I play with online though, and my character there is a half-orc Chaotic Neutral warlock named Sorunur." I gave Tanner another confused look, and he handed me his copy of the Player's Handbook. "If you're not going to pick a name, could you at least decide on a class, race, and background?"

I started looking through the Player's Handbook, and before long, I was enthralled by all of the possibilities of Dungeons and Dragons. I didn't have to be the seventeen year old bassist of the Love Martyrs anymore; I could be anyone that I wanted to be. I could have spent hours leafing through that book, but as some of the other players started to arrive, Tanner told me to hurry up.

In the end, my first character was a vaguely Scandinavian dwarf whose parents were killed by ogres. I've thankfully gotten better at creating characters since then. Tanner seemed a little bit exasperated by my lack of originality, but I was new to the game and didn't know any better. While somebody else in the party who I recognized from school ordered pizza, Tanner helped me figure out my character's stats, all while complaining about how Sean hadn't bothered to show up. By the time the pizza arrived, I was ready to play.

Playing D&D for the first time changed my life, and believe it or not, that's not an exaggeration. I would have gone crazy in high school and college if I couldn't have retreated into the fantasy world of D&D, a place where nothing mattered except for going on epic quests and killing monsters, and everything wrong with the real world could magically disappear. I stayed at Tanner's house until well past midnight, even though it was a school night. I never wanted to leave the world that he had created, and I definitely didn't want to go back to being myself.

After the college visit and the D&D game, I thought that there wouldn't be any more excitement for the rest of the week, but that changed when I went to Blake's house after Quiz Bowl the next day. We headed into the basement right away, and as we went downstairs, Blake said, "It's been a while since I've seen you, Dani. You've been at that nerd club way too much."

"It's called Quiz Bowl, and it's actually pretty fun," I said.

"Whatever," Blake said.

I was sure that we would play video games or just chat, but as we approached the bottom of the stairwell, my phone buzzed. I looked at the notification, gasped, and then showed it to Blake.

"Holy shit," Blake said. "Green Day is playing in Cleveland."

"I know, right?" I said. "We should go! I've always wanted to see them live."

"Me too," Blake said. He paused and then added, "Wait a second, it's April Fool's Day. What if this is all a joke?"

I thought about it and said, "I sure hope it's not a joke, but there won't be any way to know until tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? It says that tickets will go on sale to the general public on April 3rd."

"My sister's an Idiot Nation member. We can buy presale tickets if we do it under her name."

"You're a genius, Dani," Blake said. "How about this? I'll check to make sure that it's not an April Fool's prank tomorrow morning, and if it's not, I'll buy three tickets at nine o'clock, and I'll text you once I get them."

"Perfect," I said.

When I got home, I didn't tell Sydney about the Green Day show right away. I didn't want her to be disappointed if it all turned out to be a joke, but already, I was dreaming of listening to Green Day alongside my sister and my best friend, having the night of our lives.

As soon as I woke up the next morning, I checked the House of Blues website, and sure enough, Green Day was playing on the sixteenth. I frantically texted Blake, "IT'S NOT A JOKE!" He didn't reply right away, so I desperately hoped that he had gotten my message and that he would buy tickets for us.

I didn't get a response until my phone started ringing in the middle of Mrs. Welch's class. I was staring at the sloth poster, pretending to pay attention as Mrs. Welch lectured about vectors. All of a sudden, the phone started ringing, and even though I thought that I had set my phone to silent, it was loud enough for everyone in the classroom to hear the stupid default ringtone that I hadn't bothered to change. I tried to be stealthy as I reached for the phone, but Mrs. Welch noticed me. "Dani, you know that you're not allowed to text during class," she said, glaring at me.

"It's an emergency," I said, which wasn't that much of an exaggeration. Mrs. Welch didn't seem to believe me, but I ran out into the hallway anyways, carrying my phone. Once I was safely outside the classroom, I checked my texts. "I got tickets!" Blake had texted me.

"Thank you! I can't wait to see Green Day!" I replied, and then I set my phone to silent, put it back in my pocket, and returned to Mrs. Welch's classroom. However, I couldn't focus, not when thoughts of seeing Green Day live were dancing through my head. I could already see the blinding lights and hear the epic guitar riffs. Having Blake and Sydney by my side would only make the concert better.

I couldn't focus in history either, but when lunch came, I rushed to the geek table, eager to tell my friends about the concert. However, Madeline had her own news to share. "Blake Pinkerton asked me to go to a concert!" she exclaimed as she sat down next to me.

"What concert?" I asked.

"I don't know," Madeline said. "I've never heard of them."

I shrugged, assuming that it was one of the local bands that Blake liked. "Are you going?" I asked.

"Of course!" Madeline said. "I'll take any excuse to spend more time with Blake, and he's paying for my ticket, so I would be stupid not to go." She paused and then said, "Wait a second. I can check my texts, and then I can tell you the name of the band we're seeing."

Madeline scrolled through her texts while I said, "It's not that big of a deal, Madeline."

All of a sudden, she found it. "Green Day," she said. "Blake and I are seeing a band called Green Day."

The table erupted into chaos. "Your boyfriend is taking you to see Green Day?" Vivian said. "Lucky!"

"I tried to get tickets to go to that show, but tickets were seventy five bucks each, and they sold out during the presale within seconds," Sean said. "By the time I got there, they were selling for thousands of dollars online."

"How the hell do you not know who Green Day is, Madeline?" Tanner asked.

"I'm going to that concert too," I said quietly, but I was already filling with rage.

"Oh yeah," Madeline said. "Blake said that you were coming."

"You two are so lucky!" Sean exclaimed. "Can you take me with you?"

"I still can't believe that you don't know who Green Day is," Tanner said.

"I'm not that into music!" Madeline exclaimed.

"Madeline, there's a line between not being into music and not knowing who Green Day is," Devon said. "They're getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!"

"What does that have to do with anything?" Madeline asked.

Everyone continued to bicker as I thought of how Blake had betrayed me. My heart sank every time I thought about the Green Day concert, knowing that Blake could have brought Sydney, and he chose Madeline instead. She didn't even know who Green Day was, yet he chose her over my sister, who could have told you every member's blood type. I wanted to scream, but I was trapped in the William McKinley High School cafeteria, listening to Madeline tell her friends about the concert that Blake was taking her to, so I kept my wrath inside, worried that it might devour me whole.

I spent the rest of the day contemplating whether or not to text Blake. A part of me wanted to call him out, telling him every reason why I hated him, why he shouldn't have lied about bringing my sister along, why Sydney was more important than some grand romantic gesture for Madeline. However, I decided in the end that it could wait. I let my fury simmer inside me until after I got home, but when I stepped off of the bus and walked into the living room, I picked up the phone, dialed Blake's number, and I exploded.

"You lied to me, Blake," I said, my words dripping with venom.

"What are you talking about?" Blake asked.

"You said that you were bringing Sydney, and then you invited Madeline," I said.

"Dani, I can explain," Blake said. "It was an accident..."

"How do you invite someone to a concert by accident?!"

"I didn't think you'd have a problem with it. You and Madeline are friends, right?"

"You should have invited Sydney."

"I didn't think of that."

"She loves Green Day more than anything, and Madeline doesn't know who they are. You bought the tickets using her Idiot Nation membership!"

"Anyways, it's too late now. Madeline already said yes."

He had a point. I stayed silent for a moment and then hung up, still angrier with Blake than I had ever been. Even Blake's creepy reply to Keiko Tamaki's fan letter hadn't made me feel this sick. Every time I looked at my sister, I thought of Blake and how he had betrayed us. Before long, she would find out that Blake had bought tickets to the House of Blues show, and she would be jealous, but she would never know that it could have been her screaming all of the lyrics to "Jesus of Suburbia" or dancing along to "When I Come Around."

I hated him for taking that chance away from her.