by Dahlia Adler
Jasmine would’ve been the perfect call. Shopping with her was one of my favorite things to do because she’s honest to a fault, but when you find something that looks good—and she would make me try on some craaaazy shit because she was certain it’d look fantastic on me, and was often right—she makes you feel like no one has ever looked as good in anything as you look right then in that rhinestone-studded leather bodice.
There is a great dress I’d purchased with her at the outlet mall in Nags Head, and it’s still summery enough outside to wear it, though the bright red gingham feels a little country against the backdrop of Stratford. Well, whatever—I spent the money and I know it looks cute on me. I shuck off the black yoga pants and matching T-shirt I’ve worn under my purple apron for the past six hours and jump into the shower.
Forty-five minutes later, I’m clean, cute, and my mom is driving me to Benny’s, Demi Lovato’s “Confident” bursting from the car’s speakers. (I embark on approximately nothing without blasting this song first. Thankfully, my mom understands.) But my enthusiasm comes to an abrupt halt when I see waaay more cars in the parking lot than I expected, including a familiar 4Runner.
So much for Shannon not having the info to mock this non-date.
There’s a little less bounce in my espadrilled step when I let myself into the diner, even though Shannon whoops when I walk in and loudly proclaims what a cute cowgirl I make.
Thankfully, I’m saved from having to respond by Chase getting up like the gentleman he is and giving me one of those epic smiles. “You came!” he says, as if it were ever a question.
“How could I pass up a fried chicken sandwich with extra slaw?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Shannon registering that Chase’s invite is why I’m here. I also see her flirting with Lucas Miller, which I guess explains why she is.
I am not looking forward to the hour of “How could you not tell me?” that will go down the instant I get home.
And speaking of conversations I’m not looking forward to, everyone jumps right back into the one they were having before I arrived, which was about Friday’s party and its mysterious hostess. “So, nobody knows if she has a boyfriend?” Keith Radcliffe asks.
The question sits in my stomach, heavy as a stone. It doesn’t help when Shannon pipes up, “Sure didn’t seem like it when she was dancing up on Linus Friday night.”
Ugh, Linus? Of all people? God, he’s the kind of guy who thinks negging is a legitimate social interaction. How do you go from me, or even Carter, to that?
“Linus is a douche,” says Keith, and I can’t argue with him there. “She can do way better. She’s got a bangin’ body.”
Okay, now Keith is a douche. Discussing a girl’s body in public is gross, and anyway, he’s barely even seen it. Like, yeah, OK, sure, you know what she looks like because you’ve seen her in a short skirt. Maybe don’t think you know her “bangin’ body” before you’ve ever come face-to-face with her hip bones because let me tell you, you don’t know jack shit.
“Hey, you OK?” Chase murmurs in my ear.
I blink out of my ragey hornball thoughts. “Yeah, of course. Why?”
“Because you’ve massacred my fries.”
I look down and see a ketchup-bloody pile of potato stumps scattered around a red basket coffin. “Whoops.” My cheeks fill with heat. “Sorry about that. Guess I’m hungrier than I thought. Where’s our waitress?”
Chase gives me a funny look. “I already ordered for you—fried chicken sandwich with extra slaw, right? And I was planning to share my fries, but maybe I should order more of those.”
“I’ll get them,” I say sheepishly, climbing out of the booth. I need some air, even if it’s heavily scented with cooking oil.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This is it. This is everything. I’m on a date-ish thing with Chase and my best friend is here (for better and for worse) and he ordered for me and everyone knows it and somehow Jasmine is managing to ruin it without even being present.
In another life, having her around could make sense. She could date Keith and I could date Chase and we could double, or even add Shannon and Lucas and triple. It’d be perfect.
Except we’re in this life, and that sounds like my personal hell.
I order fries and they tell me they’ll bring them to the table, so I have no choice but to go back. I hope they’ll be done talking about Jasmine by the time I arrive, but no such luck. Worse, I get there as Shannon’s assuring everyone that she and Jasmine are friends and she’ll get the dirt on if she’s seeing someone.
The idea of Shannon and Jasmine being friends is an immediate appetite killer.
My relationship with Shannon is complicated, but she’s still my best friend. She’d drag someone over broken glass for hurting me, and yes, I do say that from experience. She may like to keep her friends in line, but she would also do anything for us, and I don’t exactly have a lot of people like that in my life. (Shout-out to my dad, wherever he is these days!)
So, yeah—the only thing I might hate more than the idea of losing Shannon to Jasmine is the idea of losing Jasmine to Shannon.
And if the two of them get close and start sharing secrets about me, I might lose them both.
I am so not letting that happen.
“When did you guys become so tight?” I ask as casually as I can manage while I squeeze back in next to Chase, sitting a little closer to him than before. “I didn’t realize you’d hung out. You don’t think she’s a little weird?”
I honestly don’t even know what about her I could play off as weird, but desperate times, etc., etc.
“We talked for a while at the party,” Shannon says, “and I didn’t get a weird vibe. She’s pretty cool. She speaks French even better than I do and she’s been, like, everywhere. All the jewelry she was wearing came from a trip to Morocco.”
My brain immediately corrects this piece of information. She was also wearing the emerald ring her grandparents gave her for her sixteenth birthday, bought for her in Paris. Plus, she always wears her hamsah-and-Jewish-star necklace underneath her clothing, and that was a bat mitzvah gift from her mom. They’re silly facts, but knowing them reminds me that it’ll be a while before Shannon can surpass everything I know about Jasmine. Because, apparently, I’ve created a competition in my head, and I’m not going down without a fight.
“Why don’t I invite her here?” Shannon continues, pulling out her phone. “Keith can lay on the charm right now.”
The only part of me that doesn’t want him to call her bluff is the part that wants to know if Shannon really has Jasmine’s phone number. Thankfully, Keith is a total coward and says his romantic moves are not meant for a greater audience. While everyone’s teasing him, the food arrives, and thankfully, the conversation changes to things like scouts, college applications, and Homecoming. I swear Chase squeezes my thigh when the latter comes up.
Homecoming on Chase Harding’s arm? I’m not sure I’ve allowed myself to dream that high. (That’s a lie—I have quite literally had this dream many, many times, and I always wake up in a terrible mood when I realize it’s just the work of my horny brain. It is item number two on my high school bucket list, right behind “prom on Chase Harding’s arm.”) But now he’s here, ordering me a fried chicken sandwich with extra slaw and squeezing my thigh and making no secret of the fact that he’s interested. It’s all so fast I’m starting to get paranoid Shannon’s behind it, like she’s paid him to make my senior year special or something. Which is ridiculous, because honestly, I don’t really lack for confidence, but how else do I explain such a huge change?
“You still up for ice cream after this?” His low voice tickles my ear and beyond, and suddenly, I wouldn’t care if my own mother was paying him for this.
“Absolutely,” I say, and this time when his hand squeezes my thigh, it stays put.
* * *
As expected, I get an eyebrow waggle and a mouthed “Call me” from Shannon when Chase and I take off afte
r dinner. It’s surreal that I’m already getting to know his car, like the way the AC vents need to be jiggled and how classic rock always fills the air within seconds of him starting the car. That he’ll tap the beat on the steering wheel any time a Rolling Stones song comes on, and he won’t do air guitar when it’s Black Sabbath, but his fingers will twitch like he wants to and is controlling himself in front of me.
So many things to learn about this boy I’ve been observing for as long as I can remember.
I know he’s gonna get vanilla with rainbow sprinkles because I’ve seen him here with his friends and that’s what he got both times. He doesn’t disappoint. I get the same because I spent the whole ride thinking about how I knew he was gonna get it and by the end of the five-minute ride to the Ice Palace, I couldn’t get the craving out of my head.
“You know, everyone else teases me about how boring I am,” he says as we sit down on one of the benches outside. “You didn’t have to get the same thing to make me feel better.”
“As it happens, I think vanilla is extremely underrated,” I tell him as I lick a stray drop off my finger, knowing he’s watching me do it. I actually do think vanilla is underrated, but yeah, under normal circumstances I probably would’ve gotten cookie dough or one of those flavors with seventeen kinds of candy bar in it. “And so is a little colorful brightness on dessert.”
“Thank you,” he says, a huge smile breaking out onto his face. “How do you not get in a good mood eating something covered in bright colors? My little sister taught me that.”
God, I wish he hadn’t mentioned Kira. My crush on him grows three sizes whenever he does. #onlychildproblems.
And then my stomach twinges again because “hashtag onlychildproblems” was something Jasmine and I used to say all the time.
I’d been so upset at the thought of Shannon calling her when we were at Benny’s, but why didn’t I just do it? My mom’s right, at least in part—I did depend on Jasmine for friends in the Outer Banks. Shouldn’t I be making it up to her for introducing me to Keisha, Derek, and the rest by inviting her out with my friends?
Even if I’m worried Shannon might steal her.
Or Keith might.
Or both.
What does it matter anyway, if I have Chase?
That’s the million-dollar question, I guess.
But also, I don’t quite have Chase yet. And if I want to, I should probably talk instead of staring out into space, letting the ice cream melt over my hands. After a while, there’s no way to make cleaning that up look sexy.
I take another lick of the cone and look at this boy who has starred in my dreams. He’s looking back at me, with those beautiful eyes the color of the night sky, and I somehow feel warm and shivery at the same time.
“It’s clear I’m gonna kiss you now, right?” he asks, and I nod.
I had always imagined sparks the first time I kissed Chase Harding, but it’s a sweet, cold kiss, thanks to the ice cream, and sprinkles feel better than sparks, anyway. We can’t exactly get handsy while holding our cones, but it’s definitely more than a peck, and I’m hyperaware of his scruff against my skin.
It’s hard to forget that the last person you spent weeks kissing was a smooth-skinned girl when you feel that scruff again.
But it sure doesn’t mean they can’t both feel good.
We finish our ice cream and head back to his car, where some more kissing happens before we drive home to Rush and The Who. There’s more kissing in my driveway. We finally jump apart when my cell phone rings, revealing Shannon’s face on the screen. But whatever, I’m in a good mood and I want to talk about my night, so hopefully she’s up for being excited rather than a buzzkill. One never knows how generous she’s feeling.
Chase laughs quietly as I silence my phone and says, “Guess I should let you go, but maybe next Friday night, after the game, we can do this ‘just the two of us’ thing again?”
“Weren’t the guys talking about going to Lucas’s after the game?”
“The guys were.” He tucks a blond curl behind my ear. “I wasn’t.”
Oof, that was good. I debate just how smutty it would be to haul him into the back seat of his car and decide it might be a bit much. But that won’t stop me from being a little shameless. “Sounds good. Maybe pick a terrible movie we can not-watch.”
“God, I like you,” he murmurs, and though I can’t respond through him kissing me, “I like you too” shimmers through my entire body.
* * *
It only makes sense that Jasmine Killary would be the first person I see at school Monday morning. She’s standing near my locker, and I’d almost think she was waiting for me, if she weren’t so consistently clear that waiting for me isn’t something she’ll ever be doing again.
“I hear you and Chase Harding are officially a thing.”
I freeze in my tracks. There’s only one person who’d have told Jasmine, only one person who sat with me on the phone for an hour last night until she’d squeezed out every bit of information. “Apparently, so are you and Shannon.”
“I knew he was gonna be all over you as soon as he saw you,” she says, sidestepping my response. “I told you that hair would be great on you.”
The fact that she’s taking any credit for Chase and me getting together when she’s the one preventing me from fully enjoying it pisses me off, and of course she managed to poke at the very thing I’ve been most worried about. “I don’t think a cut ‘n’ color can be credited for an entire relationship, Jasmine.” I hope not, anyway.
“No, I suppose not,” she muses. “But you have this whole … aura of confidence that’s a way more magnified version of when I met you. Has he found your piercing yet?”
The piercing. We were so bored one day that a game of Truth or Dare? went too far and landed me with a ring through my belly button thanks to Carter’s older sister. Cliché, maybe, but it looked hot. Anyone could see it if they happened to go swimming with me, or if I threw on a crop top, but the way she says it, you’d think it was somewhere even the tiniest of bikinis would still cover.
“Not yet.”
She smirks, but there’s no jealousy in it. No bitterness. And that’s what makes it cruel. “It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure.”
“I guess.” I still can’t get past Shannon running to Jasmine after she spoke to me. I guess she had her phone number after all. “So you’re talking to me now?”
“I haven’t been not talking to you, Tinkerbell. We literally just talked at my party.”
Tinkerbell. The resurgence of my nickname might suffuse me with warmth if she weren’t giving me such attitude. But I was right, I realize—Jasmine did need to know that I wasn’t going to try to bring things back to where they’d been this summer. She needed me to have a boyfriend in order for us to be friends, so she could be sure I wasn’t going to pursue her. I’d been happy when I first thought of how maybe that would bring us back to normal, but right now it makes me feel sick.
“OK, whatever. Guess it doesn’t matter since you’ve had no trouble making friends here.” I try to keep my voice light, to remember how grateful I am for the friends she made me a few months ago, even if they fell to the wayside. But my feelings at her buddying up with Shannon drip from every word, and it doesn’t help that I’m upset about the other stuff.
The thing is, I wanted us to be friends, and I wanted to date Chase, and it looks like I’m gonna get it all, so I should be happy. At the very least, I should be nice. “Guess this means you’ll be joining us for lunch?”
“Shannon did mention something about that, yeah.”
“Great!” I plaster a smile on my face. “Guess I’ll see you then.”
I walk off before she can leave me first.
* * *
It takes two periods before I finally have a class with Shannon, and as soon as I spot her, I storm over and demand, “What the fuck, Shan?”
“What’s wrong?” she asks in the world’s most bullshit innocent vo
ice.
I yank her out into the hallway, because we’re already drawing stares. “I told you about my date in confidence. You know there’s nothing official between me and Chase yet. Why the hell would you run off and tell some girl you barely even know all about it?”
“God, Lara, I’m sorry. It sounded pretty official to me, and I was excited for you. I figured you’d want to tell Gia and Kiki, so when Jasmine called…” She shrugs. “I had to get my excitement out somehow!”
She is so full of shit. I know she’s full of shit. For one, there’s no chance Jasmine called her. Jasmine is not a phone person, and certainly not to chat. But I’m too deep into my own bullshit to be able to call her on that. I’m not supposed to know this, or anything else, about Jasmine.
Plus, I know this move from Shannon’s playbook. Jasmine is on the popularity radar and Shannon’s trying to swoop in so the next time someone asks for details on her love life or why she has such a nice house, Shannon can be The One With All The Dirt. “Knowledge Is Power” is one of Shannon Salter’s favorite mottos, and it’s hard to argue with since she sure seems to have a lot of the latter.
Unfortunately, I also know there’s nothing I can do. Shannon always finds a way to spin things, to make it seem like she was just being a great friend in the best way she knows how; she’s a gaslighting gold medalist. And the mere mention of Jasmine’s name already feels like a minefield. There’s no point in fighting here. Shannon’s gonna do what she wants, and so will Jasmine. And fuck it, so will I.
“Whatever.” I roll my eyes right as Mrs. Spier turns the corner, and I slip back into the classroom and into my seat before I can get called late.
Jasmine wants me to be with Chase. Shannon is apparently very excited I’m with Chase. And we all know I want to be with Chase. So, what exactly am I fighting about?