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“Three. What’s yours?”
“Three.” It wasn’t like I could lie, even though I wanted to, but the reality of making friends started settling in. She would see me there daily, and I’d have to be… nice.
“No kidding? Besties it is, then.” She smiled, elbowing me on the side.
Besties?
God, was my mother somehow manipulating things in my life right now? She wanted me to have friends and just after having the worst experience with a student, in walked Thea.
She must have spies.
“Sounds awesome,” I smiled, but it was fake, hoping that I’d only see her occasionally after this elevator ride, and the times I did, I’d be too busy to say hello. “Not sure what you’re into, but I thought maybe you’d want to come over one night, and we could get a pizza.”
Okay, that didn’t work as planned.
“Sure. Sounds great,” I drawled out, but it didn’t sound great because I wasn’t cut out for people.
As the elevator doors opened, we walked down the hall together. “No way? You’re 315? I’m 316.”
“What are the odds?” I wasn’t faking any enthusiasm, but Thea seemed to like it.
“Bet you’re as excited as I am.” She wiggled her brows and there was a hint of amusement in her voice, which made me wonder if she was in on the joke.
“I’m thrilled.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just knock on your door to see if you’re around for pizza sometime?”
“Sounds perfect.”
We said our goodbyes, and I was getting myself ready to study for the evening. I started thinking back on the interaction with Thea. She was nice. She might talk a little too much, but she wasn’t mean to me, and in some ways, I’d say she was pretty pleasant. Unlike that idiot Tanner today. He took one look at me and judged me as though he knew all of my intentions, and that was exactly why I hated athletes. They were just so self-assured, to the point of being arrogant.
I rolled my eyes and did my best to focus on my essay instead of how much I wanted to strangle Tanner.
“Aster,” Hazel sung. “Is, uh, everything alright?” She stopped twiddling her pen and looked at me with wide-eyed pity.
Just what I needed today. More pity.
It had been three days since ‘the incident’ as I liked to call it, and if I thought getting dumped by Connor caused a stir across campus, accidentally pissing off the best quarterback our school had seen in ten years was a hell of a lot worse.
People acted like the guy walked on water. I was getting spat at. People were trying to trip me up. I even got a death threat under my door. Albeit I wasn’t scared. It was on a bright pink note, written in a sparkly red pen with her name on top of the paper. Suffice it to say, if I went missing, the police would know to go straight to Hillary Pillar to find answers. Whoever she was.
“Everything’s fine,” I quipped, writing a few meaningless numbers on my notepad to make it look like I was doing something of value, when in reality, I was thinking about how hard it was to walk into the library today.
Once my sanctuary from everything, it was tarnished by that idiot Tanner Joyce who embarrassed me in front of the entire student body. Okay, maybe it wasn’t theentirestudent body, but it was enough to start rumors about me. As if dating Connor hadn’t given me enough of a reputation, apparently, Tanner was even higher up in the pecking order of athletes at this school, and it was making me look desperate.
Somehow, it seemed Tanner and Connor were manifesting me into a Jersey chaser, and I hated that people thought I was interested in any of them.
“Are you sure? Because I heard what happened the other day.”
Of course she did. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath because the oxygen was the only thing stopping me from completely losing my shit. “Did you? What happened?”
I figured asking would at least help me hear how much the story had changed through the grapevine.
“Just heard about you and Tanner Joyce.”
That was it. She was just going to leave it like that, as though I should know.
I narrowed my eyes, watching her flinch in her seat. Poor Hazel. She was a timid girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but she clearly thought we were close enough friends that she could mention this whole thing to me. “What exactly did you hear?”
