lol there’s nothing a bowl of cookie dough ice cream can’t fix.
I smile at his mention of my favorite ice cream flavor. I’m just thinking of my response when Beth appears in my doorway.
“How pushy was your dad this time?” she asks.
“Not as bad as last time, but that’s only because thesprinkler broke on my mom again, and he had to cut the conversation short.”
“Oh Sara,” she says, clutching her hands to her chest. “I just adore your mother.”
Standing from my bed, I grab my favorite sweatshirt off the back of my desk chair and slip it on. “I was promised junk food and comfort movies, and if I don’t get that within the next hour, I might have a complete breakdown.”
“Right, I think we still have some cookie dough ice cream left,” Beth gushes as she exits my room, all but running out into the kitchen.
Grabbing my phone off my bed, I read the chain of text messages with Theo again.
I’m not even sure we’ll be attending the party this weekend. Usually, when I attend parties with Beth, it’s during a school-sanctioned break. Parties on a random Saturday night aren’t typically my thing.
Especially not when they’re being thrown by a man with forest-green eyes and laptop-saving reflexes.
Nevertheless, there’s no point in attending a party that only serves as a distraction from my job search. Before I can throw my phone on my bed and ignore it the rest of the night, it pings again.
Theo
Hope to see you this weekend
He’s certainly not going to make avoiding this party easy, is he?
5
SIENNA
“Hair up or hair down?” Beth bursts into my room, a hand around half her hair, holding it into a ball on top of her head.
“What?” I say, too busy recovering from almost poking my eye out with my mascara wand to process what she just said to me.
“Hair up?” She motions to the hair at the top of her head. “Or hair down?” She lets it fall. Waiting for a response from me, she does this about five more times without saying a word.
Eventually, I put her out of her misery and respond, “You know you’ll look good either way, but I say hair down. You always end up taking your hair down after your third drink, once you find an elevated surface to dance on, anyway.”
Sitting next to me on the bed, Beth smooths out the yellow-and-pink quilted comforter covering my mattress.
“I don’t always find an elevated surface to dance on.” She scoffs.
I give her a pointed look, silently calling bullshit on her statement. We don’t go to many parties, but when we do, she always ends up dancing on somethingor someone.
Refocusing on applying my mascara in the lighted rectangular mirror that sits on my nightstand, I say, “You know you do, and I love you for it. All the way until the moment you try to drag me up on said surface with you.”
I pull an eye shadow palette out of my makeup bag, knowing she’ll be asking me for it any second now, and hand it to her.
“I still can’t believe you talked me into going to this party in the first place.”
“Oh please.” Beth waves her hand. “With the way you were looking at Theo evenafterhe ran you over with his cart, you practically begged me to drag you to this party.”
“I did not.” I point my mascara wand at her through the mirror.
“Did too. It was all in the eyes,” she says with a dramatic wiggle of her eyebrows. “I know I beat up on him a little in the store?—”
“A little?”
