“What about Brooklyn?”
“What about him?” I quipped a little too quickly.
“Don’t you want to see him?”
I sighed, and the admission came out with it. “He didn’t exactly invite me himself.”
Nikki didn’t miss a beat. “Probably because he’s nervous to talk to you since you went all radio silent on him after kissing him.”
“How do you know—”
“Because I know you.”
She knew me better than anyone else did, and recently, I’d spent so much time and effort worrying about her it was easy to forget that she did the same for me.
Nikki hopped across the couch cushions to squish herself beside me. “You should come anyway because it’ll befun.”
She wiggled her eyebrows at me, satisfied with throwing my own words back at me when I’d convinced her to come to the fair. It worked; begrudgingly so.
“All right fine.” I held my hands up. “IsupposeI can take advantage of an opportunity to channel Cher Horowitz.”
And that was exactly what we did. I wore a yellow plaid skirt I’d thrifted a few years ago in college (for this exact moment, perhaps?) and paired it with a white baby tee and knee-high white socks. My sister—whose maximalist style belonged more in the ’80s—sported a variation of Britney Spears’s live “Baby One More Time” outfit in a cropped neon-pink tube top and white flare pants.
Of course, nothing measured up to how effortlessly cool Brooklyn looked in his faded jeans and his Deftones T-shirt, like he wasmadefor the ’90s. Despite it being close to dusk, he wore a pair of Ray-Bans as he and Alec lingered outside the roller rink, waiting for us.
“Hey.” He greeted me effortlessly, as if nothing at all had transpired last weekend.
What’s the right move when you greet someone whose tongue has been down your throat, but whom you aren’t dating, or are in any way, shape, or form romantically involved with? Do you hug them? Do you kiss them on the cheek? Or do you do nothing, for fear that touching them would cause some type of nuclear meltdown?
“Hey, yourself.” I tried to echo his casualness, and his lips lifted into an easygoing smile.
“This place is sick.” Nikki beamed as we followed the boys inside. She fell into step ahead of Brooklyn and me with Alec, who looked like he’d borrowed the flannel shirt limply hanging off his shoulder from Brooklyn as it hung off his shoulder.
We were blasted by the sound of the Beastie Boys as soon as we walked into the lobby. There were pinball machines and vintagePac-Mangames in the corner next to the bar, and then the entire room opened up into the actual roller rink. A disco ball hung over it, throwing a confetti of lights onto the slick rink surface.
“Where’s your sister?” I asked Brooklyn.
“Oh, she . . .” He rocked on the toes of his Converse as we waited in line to get our skates. “She had to bail last-minute. Some kind of junior league emergency. Who knows.”
Nikki glanced back at me over her shoulder, and gave me a wicked, conniving look. I blinked, and she turned her attention back to Alec, throwing her head back and laughing at something he said.Not compatiblemy ass.
When it was our turn to get our skates, Brooklyn paid before I even had a chance to grab my wallet from my purse. For someone who hadn’t even reached out to invite me, he was certainly acting like he wanted me there. He lit up when he turned to hand me the skates, and his smile melted away the weird sense of unease building inside of me. He had that effect on me without even trying.
“You okay?” he asked as I sat on a bench in front of the rink, wrangling the skates.
It took only a moment standing upright for me to realize that this wasnotfor me. I gingerly inched over to the cut-out section of the wall that separated the rink from the floor, and gripped the sides of the gate with white knuckles. “Yeah, but I’m not sure I’m entirely coordinated enough for this.”
“Come on.” He held his hand out to me. “You can do it, just don’t think too much.”
After another few moments of hesitation, I slipped my hand into his, suddenly hyperaware of how clammy my palms must have been. He slowly rolled backward, pulling me onto the rink, but didn’t let go of my hand.
“See?” he said. “You’re fine. Now push yourself forward slowly. Bend your knees a little and relax your body, you’re too stiff.”
I tried to breathe normally as I grasped the sleeve of his shirt. “How ridiculous do I look?”
“No.” He shook his head. “You look great.”
After a few timid laps, I started to feel less like Bambi on ice, but he kept a reassuring hand on the small of my back, and his touch damn near set me on fire.
