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“Cool,” Alex said.
“Cool.”
“We’re going to warm up that German band,” he said.
“I know. Big deal, right?”
“Kind of.”
“Who knows where it’ll lead? Maybe a scout will discover you and make you big.”
“Fat chance,” Alex said, but he was smiling now.
“Still want to be a dentist?” I elbowed him with a wink. That German band, which shall not be named, was all the rage, and from what I’d heard, they were making good money, too.
He chuckled. “You’re a rascal.”
“You know it.”
On the day of their gig, Alex, Tom, Ryan, and Daniel had a huge fight.
Alex wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but Ryan was in a foul mood at school, and when I cut the last few classes so I could get dolled up for the gig (it’s called priorities, okay?), Ryan tailed me in his car while I walked home.
Yeah, he started coming to school with his car now. Probably because he had to drive to the town where Alex lived for rehearsals right after school every day.
“Hey,” he called out from behind his partially rolled-up window. I continued walking. I really didn’t want him to double park in the middle of the street and start talking to me, blocking everyone’s way. Ryan didn’t have the best reputation at school. People saw him as a bit of a prickly loner, and a stuck-up one at that. He was the kind of guy to make fun of the cheerleaders out loud, and be unnecessarily mean. But I learned many moons ago to make my own mind up about each person I meet. Too much fake news going around.
“What’s up?” I asked, my voice low, my head hanging down. I was still suffering from guilt over dating Alex, even though I had never, ever shown Ryan a sliver of interest.
“Your boyfriend is an asshole, you know?” He threw the words at me.
I sighed heavily. “Please don’t put me in the middle of this.”
“Why not?” he asked. “He wants to kick me out of the band, and you’re the only person who could probably talk him out of it.”
“Why?” I forced myself to ask, even though it wasn’t my problem. There was nothing I could do about it. This was inner circle shit I was not a part of. Besides, it was a high school band. It wasn’t like anyone was planning on making any money out of it. So what if they were going to warm up this German band? Alex wanted to move to the other side of the world to become a dentist, Tom was almost definitely taking over his family’s business, and I had a feeling Daniel was just waiting for everyone to stop making him come to rehearsals so he could finally dedicate himself to his true calling—smoking weed twenty-one hours a day while watching Family Guy reruns.
“No fucking reason whatsoever.” Ryan was still following me in his car. “He just…he just flipped on me!”
“That doesn’t sound like Alex.” I scrunched my nose, suspicious.
For all his faults, Alex was a pragmatic person. He wasn’t exactly known for his irrational decisions. Everything about him was calculated and thought-through.
Ryan snorted. “You would say that. He’s your boyfriend.”
“If you’re not going to tell me what happened, he will.” I stopped in front of his car. He killed the engine and groaned, closing his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t help you,” I said softly. “I don’t have that kind of pull with Alex. Even if I did, you cannot expect me to ask him for shit when I don’t even know the story.”
The truth was, I didn’t know if I had that kind of power with Alex or not, because I’d yet to test my boundaries with him. Whatever I asked for during our relationship was well within the normal things girlfriends asked their boyfriends for—to choose the movies we’d watched, where I wanted us to eat, the odd favor here and there.
Of course, there was a nagging, tingly itch in my stomach. Something that dared me to see how far Alex would go for me. I knew he loathed Ryan. He thought he was a stuck-up, righteous guy who had his nose stuck in everyone else’s business, and above all, he really disliked him for rooting for us to break up. And—and this was solely my suspicion—for bringing Ainsley along all those months ago to seduce him days before we first went on our date.
Ryan shook his head. “You’re so brainwashed by him.”
“What?” I lifted an eyebrow up. “How?”
“Never mind,” he said. A line of cars formed behind him. People were honking, dangling their fists out their windows. Most of them went to school with us. I wanted to kill Ryan for doing this somewhere public.
“You’re an idiot for dating him, and Lara? You’re about to get yours,” he seethed, driving away, leaving me in a cloud of urban exhaust dust.
