After showering, I changed into the spare clothes I’d left here yesterday and walked back into her room. Violet was sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through her phone. When I came back in, she looked up and blinked in surprise. “You’re dressed.”
“Well, I didn’t think I wanted to spend the whole day in my graduation dress, personally,” I said. “Now, I won’t tell you what to do, but I think it might be best if you get changed before we go to school. People might get a little confused about our different styles, you know?”
Violet huffed a laugh and stood up. “Yeah, you’re right. Wouldn’t want to confuse people.”
As always, she bounced back to her usual self very quickly and an hour later, if I hadn’t seen firsthand how terrible shelooked this morning, I never would have believed it happened. I, on the other hand, looked like a veritable mess. I did my best to look as normal and presentable as possible, but there was only so much I could do when I still felt like crap.
“You should really be the one driving,” I said as we waited for our drinks in the Starbucks drive-through on the way to school. Violet frowned as she looked up from her phone.
“But it’s your car.”
“I don’t care.”
She laughed. “You’ll feel better once you have coffee.”
“Doubtful.” I rubbed my index finger and thumb along my forehead, wishing I could have just slept through the day. Nothing good came out of going to school voluntarily.
The car in front of us drove off, finally allowing us to pull up to the window.
“Welcome to Starbucks,” the boy working there droned on as he prepared the card machine for me to pay. “Your total is $24 today.”
He finally looked up at me as he turned the card machine toward me and did a double-take. It was so small that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been looking directly at him.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked as I pulled my card out.
He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe I was talking to him. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to either answer or give me the machine so I could pay. As it turns out, he did both at the same time.
“Have I seen you around before?” the boy asked. I glanced at him briefly to double-check, but I was pretty sure we had never met. If anything, he might have been a couple of years behind me at school — I didn’t really pay attention to anyone that I didn’t know, so I couldn’t be sure. Either way, I wasn’t sure if he actually thought we had met or if he genuinely thought it was a good pick-up line.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I tapped my card on the machine, but instead of handing it back over to Violet as I originally planned to, I leaned down to grab my wallet from the floor by her feet. I could feel the boy’s eyes raking over my back the entire time, and when I sat back up, I made sure to flip my long, wavy hair over my shoulder and blink at him innocently. Unsurprisingly, the boy’s jaw had dropped open in the time I was looking away, and he seemed to forget what his job was. I glanced at Violet, who shook her head and sighed. She was well used to me playing with boys’ hearts by now.
“Could we get our drinks?” I asked, giving him a small smile. The boy blinked a couple of times and looked around haphazardly.
“Your drinks,” he repeated back to me. “Yeah! Um… I’ll be right back.”
He spun around and walked off. I laughed and looked at Violet again.
“You’re right,” I said. “I do feel better.”
“You cannot go out with him, Madison,” she said. “He looks—at most—fifteen.”
“Relax, I’m not planning on actually doing anything,” I said. I raked my fingers through my hair, wincing as they got caught in tangles. I guess I hadn’t done a very good job of brushing my hair this morning. “I’m just having fun. Maybe we can set him up with one of the underclassmen I work with.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure he’ll love that. ‘I don’t want your number, but can I give it to all my coworkers.’”
“Hey, he could do a lot worse than some of them.”
“I’m sure he could, but I don’t know that he’ll see it that way.”
I was stopped from giving any sort of response by the boy coming back with our two drinks. Where he’d had to go to find them, I had no idea.
“Here you go,” he said. I grabbed them carefully and handed each of them to Violet carefully. The edge of my fake nails scraped the boy’s hands as I took the small brown bag of food from him, and he pulled his hand back like I’d shocked him.
“Sorry,” I said. He glanced behind him, then leaned forward and cleared his throat.
“Hey, uh, I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, “but… do you think you would want to meet up sometime?”
