Misfit in Love (Saints and Misfits #2) - S. K. Ali Page 0,8

meeting we get a clipboard each with instructions—Sarah gets two—and I scramble out of the gazebo in my eagerness to go read quietly in my room. I have a bit of time before I go see Mom in town.

* * *

In my room, I fling my green clipboard on the bedside table and flop into bed. Immediately two books fall off the other side.

I’m okay admitting I sleep with books. They collect in an almost-body-shaped mass beside me, one that I can hug, and I love it.

Books are tidy and contained and bring closure. Sometimes not full closure, but there’s an arriving at a destination that’s perfect.

Why can’t life be like that? And, really, why can’t love be like that?

School is, and that’s why it makes sense to me. It’s ordered and has a beginning and an end, and the in-between is split up by studying for this or handing these three assignments in to make up this much of your grade.

I can’t wait for college to start, to bring that order back into my life.

I reach for my phone and scroll through my personal guest list for the wedding.

Arriving on Saturday are some of my people and their plus-ones:

1. Sandra and her date: her grandmother, Ms. Kolbinsky. Sandra is good without having the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing going on in her life. And Ms. Kolbinsky is the best. (She already promised to bring me a container of her spicy Polish samosas.)

2. My partner-in-nerd, Soon-Lee, and her boyfriend, Thomas, the only forever couple from middle school that has lasted. They already have their own wedding date “circled” ten years from now.

3. Coming on Friday for the henna party: Sausun, this girl (way older than me, already done college) I edit YouTube videos for, for her extremely popular Niqabi Ninjas channel, and her plus-one, her older sister. Basically, Sausun saved her sister from a nightmare marriage, and now Sausun is not into marriages or coupling for herself at all, only into making sure her sister heals.

(Though Sausun did say in a recent Niqabi Ninjas episode that she wants to find someone in this vast universe—and she emphasized universe because she wasn’t ruling out aliens or jinns—who one day could be worthy of her. Someone who loved her personality, didn’t care that she covered her face as a niqabi and so didn’t put an emphasis on how she looked, who would be a good parent to the four kids she wants to have one day. “Thus far, I’ve never met worthy parent material. Truly. But there are unexplored parts of the ever-expanding universe, so I continue holding out hope—but only a sliver of it,” she ended the segment with.)

4. Also coming on Friday, of course, is Tats, short for Tatyana, my best friend, and her mysterious plus-one. Who I’m super confused about. I haven’t seen Tats for the three weeks I’ve been at Dad’s, but there’s no way she hooked up with someone new who I don’t know. Whenever I text her WHO WHO WHO, she changes the subject or replies with something wedding related (like we’re picking out a suit now) but random at the same time. And I just want to pull her long, glorious hair in retaliation for each cryptic message. But she’s in Eastspring, and I’m enjoying the good life under blue skies, so she’s too far away to beat up effectively.

I prop two pillows behind me and get comfortable to scroll and tap slowly through all of Tats’s social media stories and posts in another attempt to suss out information on this date of hers. A knock interrupts me while I’m rewatching her latest TikTok ode to Billie Eilish, this one for “Ocean Eyes.”

“Janna?” Sarah’s voice.

It’s Sarah and Dawud. He blinks at my unhijabbed head as I swing the bedroom door wide for them to enter.

“Can you give Dawud a ride when you go into town? He’s already made an appointment with the florist Muhammad hired. To ask about the flower ceiling.” She pats his head, and he beams while still staring at my uncovered hair. “I’m proud of him.”

“Sure.” I grab my scarf from the foot of the bed, where I’d thrown it. “We’d better leave now then. But is he okay with me staying in town for a while? I wanna hang with Mom for a bit.”

Sarah shoots a questioning glance at Dawud. “You okay with that?”

“As long as we get back here for the movie night Uncle promised us.” He continues staring at me, almost