10 Things I Hate About Pinky - Sandhya Menon Page 0,52
you stopped scheduling things in your planner?”
Samir looked at her, uncomprehending. “What?”
“What do you think would happen?” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, her Coke off to the side. “If you just threw your planner aside one day and didn’t write anything in it?”
He looked like he was choking on something. “Everything would be utter chaos?”
Pinky wanted to laugh at the horror in his voice. “Or maybe you’d be fine. Millions of people go through life with hardly any planning whatsoever.”
Samir cocked his head. “Okay, so what would happen if you made a choice to stop being so roller-coaster-y and decided to just get along with your mom? To not challenge her anymore?”
Pinky shook her head. “Roller-coaster-y isn’t a word.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
She met his eye. “I wouldn’t know how to do that,” she said finally, honestly.
Samir studied her for a moment before nodding. “Yeah, me either. With the planner thing.”
Pinky took a deep swallow of her Coke, feeling slightly off-kilter. Had she and Samir actually… agreed on something? Or connected on it, or something? Weird. “Hey, are you ready for trivia night next Friday?”
“If Boggle was any indication, it’s going to be intense,” Samir said, smiling a half smile. He had good lips, for a boy. They were kind of bow-shaped and looked really soft. Suddenly and for no good reason, she was thinking of sitting on the couch during the Boggle break. The way he’d brought his face so close to hers, it had made her think of breathless first kisses. And then she thought of the paddleboat, how he’d caught her when she fell, how she’d stood there with her arms around his bare waist. And at the lighthouse—
She felt a warmth spreading through her. Oh God. Abort, abort, abort.
Wrangling her mind back to the present, Pinky blinked. “Ah, yeah, you got that right. If you think a whole room of adults acting like my dad did tonight is intense, that is.”
Samir blew out a breath. “Well, thanks for preparing me for that. Maybe I’ll wear body armor. In case they throw anything besides pencils.”
Pinky chuckled. “I think you can handle them, Muscle Boy.”
He raised his eyebrows at her and she flushed. Why the hell had she said that? She was turning into some kind of perv. Over Samir. Quickly, to distract from her perviness, she picked out an amber orange from the pen pack and glanced at him. “You don’t have to sit here with me, you know. You can go do something else if you want.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, studying the pen pack himself. “But if it’s okay with you, I’d like to stay here and finish this picture.”
Pinky hooked her foot around the leg of her chair and dipped her head so he wouldn’t see the ghost of a smile at her lips. “Sure,” she said in the most nonchalant way she could manage.
Samir
A couple of days after the Boggle Debacle, as he’d come to think of it in his mind, Samir and Pinky were downstairs, finishing up breakfast. The adults were more subdued than usual, as if the whole thing with Pinky and her mom had put a damper on their summer. Everyone was tiptoeing around Pinky and her mom, as if they were afraid to set off another thermonuclear reaction. Honestly, Samir felt a little bad for Pinky—it probably wasn’t fun to feel like everyone saw you as the troublemaker. But then again, she was the troublemaker.
“Oh, look,” Mr. Montclair said in a hearty voice, as if to try to cut through some of the tension. He turned his phone to show everyone the screen. “The Ellingsworth Point Butterfly Habitat made it onto TripAdvisor as a must-do summer activity!”
Samir expected Pinky to grunt or to say nothing at all, as per her usual morning routine, but she was sitting up straighter, peering at the screen. “That doesn’t surprise me,” she said, and her eyes darted to meet her mother’s across the table. “It’s a pretty magical place.” Samir remembered the picture in the hallway, of Pinky as a toddler and her mom smiling down at her.
Pinky’s mom smiled faintly. “It is,” she said, playing with the tag of her tea bag and leaning back against her dining chair. “You always thought so. Do you remember your fairy princess phase?”
Pinky laughed. “Yeah. I used to bring a plastic magic wand every time we went and pretend to change the butterflies’ colors.” She shook her head. “So stupid.”