considered until I typed it out. We’ve sexted so many times—would Cheshire expect it when we finally meet face-to-face?
I don’t even know her first name yet.
It wouldn’t be my first time, but I can count the number of times I’ve had sex with anyone on one hand. I’d need maybe two or three fingers. Max.
Would she wait until I was ready?
Griffin scrunches his face.
1) ew
2) spare the sex stuff I am a pure, impressionable child
3) then you can go flip burgers I guess
“Oh, give me a break.” I say this out loud. “You’ve been with more girls than I have.”
Griffin puts a finger to his lips and points to our mom in the front seat. She’s oblivious, gratefully, absorbed in an audiobook she has faded to the front speakers. Behind us, Iliana has her headphones on and her eyes closed, but I don’t think she’s sleeping. Sarah is asleep and snoring slightly. Only Kiersten seems to be listening with interest, and I don’t care what she does or doesn’t know.
If you’re so worried about it, tell her you’ll meet her after the project proposal. I think it *will* distract you if you wait until after the winner is announced …
That’s a good idea, I type. I’ll do that. Why are you so smart?
I’m not, he types. You’re just exceptionally clueless.
Oh, eff off.
I swipe back over to my Slash/Spot direct messages.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47p: let’s do it after the proposal
“DO IT?!” Griffin whispers over my shoulder.
“That’s not what I meant!” I elbow him in the stomach, but the damage is done. My face throbs with embarrassment.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47p: MEET I MEAN. LET’S MEET AFTER THE PROPOSAL OMG
Smooth, Griffin texts me.
I turn to give him an earful, but he’s already leaned against the far window with his eyes closed, feigning sleep. I punch him in the arm, and he spreads his knee past the seam between our two seats—an old-as-time breach of territory lines. I kick him in the shin, and he pinches me in the ribs, and I poke him in the ear, back and forth until Mom threatens to pull over the car like we’re six and eight again.
It isn’t enough to distract me from the fact that Cheshire still hasn’t messaged me back.
* * *
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:41a: okay
I-Kissed-Alice 1:45a: okay what
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:45a: let’s meet. After the proposal
I-Kissed-Alice 1:45a: okay
I-Kissed-Alice 1:46a: where
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:46a: I don’t know anything about Nashville
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47a: There’s a coffee shop around the corner from Frist. It’s called Glace. They have ice cream too. And glaces … like both.
I-Kissed-Alice 1:47a: Ice cream and coffee together
I-Kissed-Alice 1:48a: well I mean not coffee. Espresso. If you like espresso.
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:48a: so we’ll meet at 8, then?
I-Kissed-Alice 1:48a: 8 is good
Curious-in-Cheshire 1:48a: we’re really doing this
I-Kissed-Alice 1:48a: we’re really doing this
* * *
CHAPTER 13
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 20m ago
On paper, the Frist Art Museum didn’t sound like a big deal at all. I should have known when Rhodes gave one of her bored shrug-slash-sighs and said Frist was “just, you know, fine.”
She didn’t call it unoriginal, or boring, or anything else.
It was “just, you know, fine,” and that should have told me everything.
The Frist Art Museum is grand in the kind of way that I feel a little too dirty to step inside. It looms over Broadway, granite and angular, as if one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses and a medieval fort had some kind of strange, glorious love child.
The front is lined with—what, Doric? Corinthian?—columns cast through an art deco lens, a pantheon dedicated to the only deities people like Rhodes, Sarah, Kiersten, and I worship: the patron gods of culture.
It seems like I’m the only person here that didn’t realize—really, truly, absorb—that the project proposal was an actual, bona fide, stand-in-front-of-a-podium presentation.
“Randall literally told us it was a presentation,” Sarah whispered to me as we were queueing up backstage. “He even said, ‘Plan for five-to-seven minutes—use the whole time, and bring a slide show—’”
“I know what he said!” I hiss.
She laughs at me.
She’s told me before she thinks I sound like a goose when I whisper through my teeth like that.
I’m not laughing.
I don’t think it’s funny.
I don’t have a presentation planned. I wasn’t planning on a speech at all—I know my strengths. I know that if I’d written out what I was going to say, it would sound clunky and robotic. I know that there’s a burning in me that fascinates people, and I know that I’m anointed by fire when I get going on something I care about.
I know I will never