“You have a good day too!”
A gal could dream.
***
As I crossed the quad from the parking lot, Elowen gave me the stink eye as ifI’dbulliedherin the girls’ bathroom all those weeks ago, but she and Aria had left me alone since. I suspected that was Orion’s doing, but I’d also obeyed their command and remembered my place in the food chain. I kept my interactions with him strictly chemistry-related.
Just like I wanted. Right?
Not that it was easy. Sitting next to Orion every day, being in his space, was wholly intoxicating. As if he had something in his very aura that bewildered the senses and turned normally rational girls (like me) into distracted, mushy-headed morons.
That day in chem, as Langford lectured about polymers, my eyes kept straying from my work to steal glances at Orion’s profile. Each time, little jolts went straight down my spine. The fifth such time, he caught me. Or maybe he was stealing a glance too.
God, his eyes. Beautiful dark pools fringed in long lashes…
But Orion’s eyes were tired lately. His smile was not as bright and seemed plastered on. Some days, he joked around with Langford, but that sounded tired too. Like an engine running out of gas.
Because he has no help. No accommodations.
My phone vibrated with a text from Emery Wallace.
Come with me to watch the boys’ row after school?
Under the table, I typed back,Sure but need to be done by 4:15. Have to pick up the little guy.
No prob. CU then!
Emery and I had fallen into a “mismatched friendship,” as she called it. She poured her guts out to me about her terrible home life and her authoritarian father, and I listened.
I wanted to spill my guts too, about Mom, Dash…certain boys that I could not evict from my thoughts no matter how hard I tried. But if I spoke Orion’s name out loud, if I let any feelings out of the cage I’d locked them in, it would put cracks in my armor. I was holding my entire life together by dental floss and prayer, and I couldn’t get distracted. I couldn’tbe hurtor the whole thing would come crashing down.
I risked another glance at the beautiful boy next to me.
Because when you fell for someone, youfell. Especially if it happened between a girl like me and a guy like Orion. There was only one outcome, and that was to hit the bottom.
But by the time the bell rang, all this chaos in my heart and brain was too much, and I decided to ask Dean Yearwood to the Halloween festival.
The sun was unusually bright and beautiful—an anomaly and probably one of the last truly beautiful days before the cold and rainsof winter set in. At lunchtime, most students were taking advantage, eating on the quad. I sat with Dean on the grass, just him and me. I opened my mouth to ask him to be my date to the festival, and an entirely different question popped out instead.
“Dean, everybody loves you. You cross the invisible barrier between Richie and Bender so effortlessly. How do you do it?”
“Oh, wow. Wasn’t expecting that, but okay…” Dean chuckled, then leaned back on his palms and tilted his head up to the sun, thinking. He was such a handsome guy, even in a simple jeans and sweatshirt…and I felt absolutely nothing but deep, sisterly affection for him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s because I know that everybody at CHA is facing severe pressure, Richie and Bender alike.” He jerked his chin at a group of Richie girls not far from us: the Mean Girls, and Emery. “You see Delilah Winslow over there?”
“Yeah. The school’s living TMZ.”
“Her family is also one of the Big Five, like Tucker Hill, Gideon Foster, Emery, and Orion.”
I clenched my jaw against the fluttering sensation in my chest that name never failed to create.
“She’s one of the biggest gossips, and I think that’s because she’s insecure,” Dean continued. “She tries to give people what they want so they’ll like her. Because when you boil it down, isn’t that what everybody wants? We’re all wading through academic pressure or athletic pressure or performance pressure, but we really just want to beseen. I try to keep that in mind, so it doesn’t matter to me if somebody is a Richie or a Bender. I try to see them for them, you know?”
I shook my head. “You’re one of the good ones, Dean. No, one of therareones. The rarest.”
“Nah,” he said with a chuckle, as Xander Ford approached and sat down cross-legged between us.
“What are we talking about?” he said, adjusting his glasses with one muscled arm.
