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“Nya, are you okay?” I ask. I’m practically jogging by her side to keep up.
The angry expression from seconds earlier is gone. She flashes me a bright smile, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Yes, don’t worry about it.” She swats her hands. “It’s fine. I’m good. It’s nothing, honestly. Well, I don’t want to talk about it, I mean.”
“That didn’t seem like nothing to me,” Tara says, her expression skeptical. “You two are bickering like you’ve had a break-up.”
Nya looks down at her fingers, picking at the cuticles. We’re not that far from where we left Ezra and Vance, and I glance behind me to see the two of them exitingBianchi. They’re heading in our direction.
“To have a breakup, there had to have been a relationship to begin with,” Nya says almost contemptuously. “Look, we’re just having a disagreement. It’s fine really, and I’m sure if you ask Vance he’ll tell you the same thing.”
Though she doesn’t say it, her tone and eyes tell me everything I need to know. She wants us to drop it, so I do. Tara won’t be as willing though.
“I’m gonna get it out of you, one way or another,” she says.
Nya chuckles, rolling her eyes. “Whatever. You promised me a shopping trip when you invited me, I would like to actually do some shopping.”
Ezra and Vance catch up to us and we fall silent.
There’s still a thick tension in the air. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit curious about what’s going on between them. Hopefully Tara either pries the information from her while I’m around, or tells me at another time.
I feel bad for being so desperate to know.
We spend the rest of the morning milling through different luxury stores in the mall. By the time we’re finished shopping, Vance and Ezra have made almost a dozen trips to and from his car to stow what we’ve bought. Without the restrictions of the Hemlock House dress code, I find myself drawn to the kind of clothing I know they wouldn’t let me wear—sneakers and platform boots, lacy skirts, fishnet stockings and dark, patterned fabrics.
Tara might be rubbing off on me a little bit.
When Ezra mentions getting lunch, we’re all the way on the other end of the shopping mall.
“We should go to an actual restaurant,” he says. “I don’t want to eat that processed food court shit. They don’t have any good vegan options.”
“You’re vegan?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Not exclusively, but I prefer it.”
“Why?”
“We don’t have enough time for Ezra to explain that,” Vance cuts in. “Ezra’s freaky about his health. More than me, even.”
Ezra shoves his hands into his pockets. “That’s not a good topic sentence. I’m not freaky about my health. Just, aware.”
The mysterious aura that seems to cloak him is back. Out of their little friend group, Ezra seems to be the…weirdest. He does have a comical side, but it seems to flick on and off like a light switch. Sometimes he’s deathly serious, and the next he’s cracking jokes.
He balances them out, I guess. The midpoint between Vance’s laidback attitude and Alexander, the raging asshole. The longer I spend with them, the more I understand him. Alexander would definitely need friends like this to survive or he would run himself into the ground. They probably know that too, which is why they’re so loyal to him.
“Right.” Vance turns away from him, and to me. “So, restaurant?”
“Hold on,” I say. “There’s one more thing I want to do here.”
“What’s that?”
Instead of replying to him, I turn to Tara and whisper my idea in her ear. My hand shakes as I do. I’m still not a hundred percent sure of it, but it feels like what I need to do. She doesn’t seem to need time to think about it. She bobs her head in agreement, then whispers to Nya.
Vance narrows his eyes. “What are you plotting?”
“Don’t worry, just give us like half an hour,” I say.
“Fuck it!” Nya exclaims.
