AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Though I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her. I would be bored as fuck in my house by myself, listening to some depressing and angsty music that wouldn’t save me, no matter how many songs I blasted.
“Blaise!” Mateo called from the kitchen, leaving the two sophomore girls at the counter.
“What up, kid?” I asked, grabbing his shoulder and squeezing. “Happy birthday.” I nodded back toward the kitchen at the girls gossiping about something with Mateo’s friends gathered in a circle. “You gonna leave those girls over there by themselves?”
“Nah,” Mateo said, walking backward over to them. “I just wanted to say thanks for coming. Mom told me that she invited you, but I didn’t think you’d actually show up.”
“Come on,” I said. “Of course I would.”
Once Mateo mingled with his friends, Vera stepped closer and arched a brow up at me. “My mom invited you? Why didn’t she tell me? How long have you known about Mateo’s birthday party?”
My lips curled into a small smile. “None of your business.”
She pressed her lips together tightly to try to hold back a smile. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because.”
She rolled her brown eyes and opened her mouth to say something, but the front door burst open.
“I brought pizza!” Maddie, Vera’s best friend, said, thrusting the front door open and entering with six pizza boxes in her hands. “Happy birthday, Mateo! I still remember when you were shitting in your diapers.”
Ms. Rodriguez hurried out of a back room and over to Maddie to grab the boxes from her, shaking her head. “Maddie, I told you that you didn’t need to bring anything,” she said. “This is too much.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Maddie said.
After she helped Ms. Rodriguez lay out the pizzas on the kitchen counter, Maddie turned toward us and widened her eyes when they landed on me. She cut her gaze to Vera and grinned evilly. “It’s about time that Vera brought you around.”
“I didn’t invite him,” Vera said.
“You didn’t?” Maddie asked, brows furrowed.
“No. My mom did.” Vera tucked some dark hair behind her ear. “Is Piper coming?”
“No, she’s still sick.”
“So, you invited Maddie and Piper, but not me?” I asked Vera.
“Isn’t she a terrible girlfriend?” Maddie asked, smirking at Vera and shaking her head.
“We are not dating, Maddie,” Vera whisper-yelled to her best friend as if I wasn’t standing right between the two of them. She averted her gaze from me, her dark hair shielding her eyes, and blushed hard as fuck. “Stop it.”
While I didn’t know what the fuck we were—Vera didn’t like to be seen that much in public with me, but she kept coming back around—I found myself smirking at her. In all my player days at Redwood, I never had a girlfriend. But the thought of Vera being my first did something to me.
“The worst,” I hummed, grabbing a Styrofoam cup from the kitchen counter.
Without sparing me a glance, Vera grabbed Maddie’s wrist and dragged her to the other room, looking like she was about to scold her. But Maddie couldn’t seem to care as she giggled all the way into the hallway.
“Thank you so much for coming, sweetheart,” Ms. Rodriguez said, walking up to me, holding three twenty-dollar bills in her hands. “Mateo appreciates it. Now, do you know where I can find Maddie? I told her not to bring all those pizzas.”
“She walked into the back bedroom with Vera,” I said, nodding to her and glancing down at the bills in her hands.
My parents always told me that the poor fought like scavengers with each other for every last penny, that they wouldn’t share, no matter what, that they didn’t care about anyone but themselves as they tried to fucking survive.
But Ms. Rodriguez—the woman who my parents had fired and who worked double shifts almost every damn night—looked like she wanted to repay her daughter’s rich friend for buying some pizzas. It was one of the most generous fucking things I had seen. Ever.
Once Ms. Rodriguez left, I poured myself a drink, sat back on the couch with a Styrofoam cup of root beer, and looked around at the party. Warmth spread through my tightening chest. Genuine smiles, conversation, people here.
It wasn’t like Mom and Dad’s parties, where there were nothing but fake smiles and even fake people, looking for ways to use everyone else to gain popularity or money. Sitting here almost didn’t feel real. It seemed too good to be true.
