She pulls her phone out of her blazer pocket and sets it on the stone table in front of us. “Text me.”
“What?”
“Just do it.”
I pull out my phone and send her a message.
When I lean down to look at her shattered screen, she grabs my face. Like a bolt of lightning hitting me, a current runs through my body. She turns my face toward her, and she looks just as stunned. She looks like she’s feeling the same as I am.
She releases my face and clears her throat. “Just glance at the screen.”
Takes me a beat to look away from her, but she’s not looking away from me either. When I finally do, I see what I know says Tricks through the cracked glass.
“I dropped my phone. She picked it up, and I grabbed it from her,” she says, crossing her arms, as if to hug herself. “She knows I don’t text. She also knows I’ve been doing so a lot lately. She thought it said Trisha. I let her.” She picks up her phone and hits the message, and I sit here, knowing what she’s reading as my heart beats like a sledgehammer against my chest.
1:59 p.m. - Crazy jealous, Savannah. Tell me you’re not feeling this thing with us, and I’ll do whatever I can to make it stop.
2:00 p.m. - You’re my first true friend. That took time. I’m leaving here after high school, so why chance hurting each other?
2:01 p.m. - Could be the best year of our lives. Will be regardless. Just promise me I’ll be the first guy. Any others wouldn’t be good enough for you.
2:02 p.m. - You wouldn’t be the first, Patrick. But you’re not wrong. I feel lots of things I never thought I would. If I give into this, and if things progress to a sexual relationship, and I didn’t like the whole sex thing, how could I lie to you, my friend, and tell you it’s not for me? That would ruin what I have come to treasure—our friendship.
2:02 p.m. - We make a promise that we’re always friends first.
She puts her phone in her pocket and, without looking at me, whispers, “Why do I feel like you’re expecting a timeline?”
“Did he?” I ask, trying to keep the rage hidden from my tone.
She doesn’t answer, which is telling as fuck.
“That’s fucked up, Savvy, and that’s not me.”
“You’re already expecting this to turn to that.”
“I didn’t say sex; that was you. And regardless, that shit is only scheduled if you’re hooking up. That’s so fucked up. So fucked up that someone put a timeline on you. So fucked up I wanna fuck him up. So fucked up I want a damn name, so I can fuck him up. So fucked—”
Her silent chuckle catches me off guard.
“Shit’s not funny, Savvy. It’s so—”
“So fucked up, I know. You’ve mentioned that literally five times in a row, five seconds ago,” she says with way too much amusement in her voice for my liking at this moment.
I sit back in my seat and stare straight ahead. “Does he go here?”
“No.”
“Do you still talk to him?”
“No.”
“Do you—”
“Are we really doing the whole how-many-people-have-you-been-with-and-what-are-their-names-so-I-can-hate-them?”
“Maybe we are,” I sneer.
“Really? Because you were the one who was insistent my roommate—”
“That’s different. Had I seen you first, I wouldn’t have even looked in her direction.”
She silently laughs. “Oh, please. She’s beautiful.”
“Not past the surface. Not yet, anyway.”
“What’s not yet anyway mean to you?”
“Means what it means, Savvy. You’ll be the one to change her. You’re already doing it.” I push back my chair and stand up. “We have plates to make. Let’s do this.”
Chapter 18
“Yes I deserve a spring-
I owe nobody nothing.”
~Virginia Woolf
Savvy
When I first came here, I hated the monotony of every day. I craved the things I used to almost despise—the constant move disguised as an adventure.
Now I get anxious when my morning text from “Trisha” doesn’t come at around 7:30. I get worried at nine at night when I’m working if he doesn’t come for a cup of coffee. It’s so bad that, even when I have just left a class, knowing he is in fact here at school, if he’s not in before the bell, I wonder if he’s coming at all.
It’s not just that I obviously have a major crush—like major—it’s also that there is a lot going on with his family, and then there’s the business his family owns, and a new artist that they are working with who