Page 24 of I Choose You

“It’s simple,” she said when I erased a paragraph of my responses three times in a row. “Hot goes to cold when they’re trapped together.”

“You mean like when Kody’s in the janitor’s closet with the principal’s daughter?” one of our group members said. He lifted his arms and mimed making out. “She’s a frigid ice queen.”

Another student giggled. “And Kody’s hawt.” She fanned herself.

“And what, he’s chopped liver?” Brooke joked, pointing her pencil at me.

I almost laughed.

The girl’s face turned so hot I wondered if she’d rival a tomato.

“Oh, hey, she’s our live demonstration,” another teased of her blushing.

Someone else leaned in and whispered, “Did you seriously just tell Kaden Wagner he’s hot? To his face?”

The girl covered her face. “I said Kody was,” she hissed.

“They’re twins!” another said and laughed.

“Okay, okay. Settle down over there.” The teacher clapped his hands. “Thermodynamics isn’t that fun.”

“I don’t know,” Kody said from across the room, noticing the girl blushing. “It looks like her face is on fire. I didn’t realize we could do experiments today.”

I shot my brother a tense look. He never knew when to shut up. I loved him, but he could be such a jerk sometimes.

“Okay, people. Ten minutes to go.” The teacher pointed at the clock whose minute hand moved too damn slowly.

I glanced at Brooke. She frowned at the girl who still blushed furiously for not realizing what she said. “Hey,” Brooke said.

“Shut up.” The girl snarled at her. “Like you could say anything that would make me feel better.”

I frowned. Girls could be catty and mean and spiteful. I liked that I never had to deal with the psychological warfare girls used at school. Kody and I solved our shit with our fists. Or when we weren’t in the mood to fight, we’d be upfront and direct. As a spectator of teenage girl drama for the last three years, I swore that cattiness had to be exhausting.

Paige shot Brooke a look and frowned.

“Just to clarify, I didn’t even hear what you said,” I said, trying to diffuse the awkwardness.

The girl rolled her eyes, but I saw a smile she tried to hide as she looked away.

“Hot to cold,” Brooke reminded me as she tapped her pencil to my paper, getting back to work. “Like the mood swings of some of our cohorts.”

I grinned, fixing my answer to better match hers.

“Co-what?” another student said. He’d been napping until now.

I copied down what Brooke wrote while also making sure it sounded like my voice, and she kept a lookout for the teacher noticing. We were to work together, not copy and turn in the same thing. It was harder than it should have been because my vocabulary wasn’t as good as hers.

Quiet and smart. I respected that.

Brooke didn’t speak up for the rest of the period. I was quiet too, rushing to finish the assignment for the day. I never would have managed without her steering me away from the wrong answers, and I appreciated her even more for not being so obvious in staring at me. Brooke didn’t seem like someone who worshiped the ground I walked on. Each time we debated an answer, she stood firm to her reply and refused to be swayed to an incorrect one, pointing at references in the big-ass textbook.

After class, I went through the rest of my day without sparing her another thought. We seldom ran into each other this year. Last year, I’d had three classes and a lab with her, but as seniors, we only shared chemistry.

“Sucks you got stuck with the weirdo,” Kody said much later at the end of the day. I’d waited for him at his locker, a sacrifice I had to make since he drove. After school, I was ragged. Every day, no matter how much sleep I got, if I ate well, or whether I had tests, I was exhausted by the time the last bell rang.

As soon as we’d get home, I would zone out. Kody would raid the kitchen for snacks while I sprawled out on the couch and flipped through the channels without pausing long enough to watch anything. Then once my stomach growled, we’d switch. I’d go snack while he put something dumb on.

Dad never gave us a hard time about it. He said he could remember being a teenager himself and wanting to sleep often. Mom used to remark that we simply needed to decompress after being “on” all day, and that made perfect sense.