“Idid.”
Frank looks up. “Did you win?”
“Don’t think he’d be eating this slop if he had,” Trevor says, then winks at me. “Sorry, Alice.”
“It’s okay, I’m just on dishes tonight,” I tell them. “But I’ll see what I can do about some chocolate cake for this weekend.”
Trevor grins at me. “I’d come here for that cake even if Iwasa millionaire.”
“Glad to hear it,” I say, but as I carry a stack of dishes back into the kitchen I’m thinking about Teddy and that money, about how his mom has spent six years sleeping on a pullout couch in the living room of a tiny apartment in a crumbling building on a terrible block, and nobody could ever say they didn’t need it. But then to hear Trevor and Desmond and Frank joke about winning only reminds me there will always be others who need it even more.
As soon as I drop the dirty dishes into the sink, my phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out to see that Leo’s sent me a photo of Teddy from a gossip website. The headline readsLOTTERY HOTTIE MEETS PAPARAZZI.
With a sigh I set it down on the counter and turn back to the sink. I can feel Sawyer’s eyes on me, but he doesn’t say anything as I begin to scour the dishes, scraping at dried noodles and hardened sauce until my elbow is sore.
“So,” he says eventually. “You wanna talk about it?”
I pass him a glass. “About what?”
“Whatever it is that’s got you so fired up.” He wipes down the cup, then sets it on the counter beside the others. “There’s only so much dish-related brutality I can watch before intervening.”
I stop what I’m doing and turn to him. The sponge in my hand is dripping into the sink, making fat splashes in the soapy water. Sawyer is watching me with those blue eyes of his, looking half-amused and half-nervous, and I find myself thinking about how different he is from Teddy.
I’m about to shrug off his question, to say that there’s nothing wrong, to pretend everything is fine. But I’m suddenly desperate to talk to someone. Yesterday Leo left for Michigan, and Teddy is probably on his way to Mexico right now. Not that it matters, because how could he be the solution when he’s already the problem?
I tip my head up to look at Sawyer, who is watching me closely.
“My idiot friend,” I tell him, “has gone viral.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Teddy?”
“Yes,” I say with a nod, relieved to finally say it out loud and surprised to discover that I’m dangerously close to crying. I bite my lip.
Sawyer looks confused. “And that’s a problem because…?”
“It’s not a problem. It’s just that…the guy does a couple of interviews and all of a sudden he’s like this Internet sensation?”
“He won the lottery,” Sawyer says. “People are curious.”
I shake my head. “He’s everywhere. There are clips of him all over the place. He’s even a GIF! And there are all sorts of fan sites already. I mean, it’s only been a couple days. How fast do these people work?”
“It actually doesn’t take that long to build a—”
“I don’t get it,” I say, cutting him off. “How can you have fans if you haven’t done anything? What are they fansof?”
“Just one of those things,” Sawyer says. “You know how it is. People online get excited about really random stuff.”
“But he’s not a cat eating a cheeseburger or a monkey making friends with a goat. He’s just a guy who had some good luck.”
“Human interest story, I guess. Young, good-looking guy from a not-so-great neighborhood wins the lottery. It’s like a fairy tale.”
I place both hands on the edge of the counter, leaning forward to watch the whorls of soap and grease in the water.
Sawyer tosses the towel over his shoulder. “Are you and Teddy…?”
I look over at him sharply. “What?”
“Are you guys together?”
