Page 8 of Kicking Up Dust

“Do you know this guy?” Tate asks, as though she didn’t completely overreact to my very innocent joke a few minutes ago. She shows me her phone, which has an incoming text that just reads, Hey, it’s Wyatt.

“Do I know Wyatt?” I ask her with a blank look. I knew about ten different men named Wyatt, and I’d fucked at least three of them.

“Got a last name, sis? Just a first name ain’t much to go on,” Jameson says, and I know it’s another joke at my expense so I shove him. Tate sucks the melted chocolate from her Reese’s cups off her thumb and types back a response with her free hand.

“He’s a bull rider that took her phone and texted himself so he could get her number,” Tyler reports, passing Jameson and me a hot dog each. Now I feel bad for pretending to snatch the nerd’s Nerds. “You should just delete it, Cricket. He clearly doesn’t understand boundaries.”

“You didn’t bring us anything to wash it down with?” Jamie asks, making Tate snark at him about how they only had so many hands—though I hadn’t seen her carrying shit.

“You know how to make that quit, don’t you?” I mutter to Tyler. “The other guys in her phone?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

FIVE

BLAIR

9 Weeks

Baby is the size of a fence staple.

Senior year was kicking my butt. Actually, the first half of senior year wasn’t even that bad, just this last semester.

My romp with the tattooed rodeo star back in February was, apparently, the last bit of brightness life had in store for me for a while. Since then, it’s been hit after hit after hit. The stress of trying to figure out what I’m going to do after graduating—when my housing is no longer government-funded by my foster kid scholarship and I have to get a real job with the degree it paid for—combined with catching what I can only assume was the flu a few weeks ago and now a stomach virus to boot?

It seems like God is under some misunderstanding that I’m one of his strongest soldiers or something, because these battles are ridiculous. I’m twenty-one. The only reason I should be hugging a toilet bowl like this is from drinking too much at a frat party, but I haven’t even had time to go to any lately.

Someone knocks on the bathroom door and I’ve never really been one for violence until right at this moment. Chelsey risks her life by sticking her head in. I don’t even have to look at her to know she’s wearing that same sympathetic smile she’s been wearing all week while I’ve been puking my guts out. I want so badly to tell her to get out, but I’ve been pretty mean recently, so I bite my tongue and rest my forehead against my arm instead.

Is draping my arm across the toilet bowl the most sanitary thing in the world? No. But if anything kills me, it’ll be whatever I picked up that caused this illness, not bacteria from the toilet Stephanie has been obsessively cleaning lately anyway.

“Stephanie and I were talking⁠—”

“No, Chelsey was talking!” Stephanie shouts from the other room.

Chelsey sighs and sits on the edge of the bathtub like I invited her to the front row of one of the most disgusting moments of my life.

“Stephanie and I were talking,” she says again, much quieter this time.

Not that it helps, because Stephanie comes through the door Chelsey left open and corrects her again. “Chelsey was talking. I was minding my business.”

“I don’t really care who was talking. If we’re being honest, I wish neither of you were right now.”

That shocks them silent for long enough I run the words back through my mind and realize how mean I sound. Normally, I’m a much kinder person.

“Sorry. I just feel like crap,” I groan, using Chelsey’s knee to push myself up. I close the lid of the toilet, flushing it and taking a seat, head in my hands.

My hair is a greasy mess, piled up in a bun on top of my head. I should wash it. I should shower in general. But getting out of bed to puke has used up 98% of my energy for the day already.

“I think maybe it’s time to start considering this may not be a stomach virus,” Chelsey says quietly.

I snort. “Well, I’ve been throwing up for like… two weeks, so I don’t know what else it could be.”

More silence. Really heavy, loaded silence that I’m not a huge fan of.

“When was your last period, Blair?” Stephanie asks, just as gently.

Regardless of how gently she tosses the grenade, it still blows apart my life just the same.