“We’ll talk tomorrow.” He disconnected the call.
He said yes. It wasn’t a lot, and he was clearly bitter, but he still said yes.
I needed to pack my things. I was going back to the Bloom.
I waited until we were on the road to Bakewell to call everyone. I called Dasha first. She was nice enough—allIt’s cool, shit turns up. She promised we’d do something next time she was in Toronto. Or that I could call her whenever I was in LA. The offer sounded pretty fake, but the fact that she was being fake nice told me Dasha considered me someone she might need something from in the future. I called Matteo next. He was furious, of course. Without me he wasn’t getting the interview. I couldn’t make myself care too much, though. If he’d wanted to ride my coattails long term, his first mistake had been cheating on me.
Gia was surprised. “Why are you going back toBakewell?” She said “Bakewell” as if it were Kansas or something. Which, I realized, was how I’d talked about the place when I first got there.
“I decided I’d rather do the Bloom than the Dasha Payne thing. You can stay and hang out in Toronto, though, if you want.”
Gia snorted. “Well, duh, I’m going to stay. Didn’t you hear who’s going to be at that pool party? I’m going bikini shopping tomorrow. Oh, you’ll never guess what happened after you left...Marcus asked for my number! We’re meeting up before the party tomorrow!”
“What about Cameron?”
“What about him? He was a summer fling. The summer is over. Hey, can you ask Shar if it would be okay if I don’t come back on Monday? I mean, there’s, like, only a week left anyway. I brought most of my stuff home this weekend, and you can bring the rest when you come back.”
Nilusha was right. Spending the day with twenty-plusinfluencershad brought out the worst in Gia.
“I’m not doing your dirty work for you. If you want to quit early, G,youcall Shar.”
“Fine. I will. All right. I need to go. Byee!”
She hung up and I shook my head.
“I don’t get why you’ve been friends with that girl so long,” Samaya said.
I turned my head sharply. I’d forgotten my sister was sitting beside me in the car. I nodded. “Yeah, lately I’ve been wondering the same thing,” I said.
Lastly, I called Nilusha. She actually approved of me leaving. She made me promise to send her lots of pictures of the sculptures at the Bloom and told me we were going for churros again when I was back in Toronto for good.
After that call, I tossed my phone in my bag. I didn’t even want to look at it until I was back in Bakewell.
“Honestly, Tahira,” Samaya said, “when I get famous, I’m hiring an assistant to make all my phone calls for me.”
“I’m not famous.”
Samaya raised a brow. “Um,yeah, I know. I said whenIget famous.”
I rolled my eyes. “How is a mathematician going to be famous?”
“Girls. Stop fighting,” Mom said from the front seat. “You’ll both be famous, and I’ll hire your personal assistants myself. Your dad will draw up the contracts.”
I laughed because it was so rare for the four of us to be in a car together. It was kind of nice.
Samaya pulled out her iPad.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked.
“Trigonometry.”
“You have, like, a week between summer school and real school, and you’re doing trig?”
“You’re not in any design classes right now, and you’re still designing.”
Touché.
But now that she said that, I pulled out my own iPad to refamiliarize myself with Rowan’s sculpture design. I’d loved it when I first saw it a few weeks ago, but I wanted to take a closer look now that this was the design we’d be building tomorrow.
