Beside me, Violet basically choked on her drink. She tried to cover up her laugh with coughing, but I knew the real reason she choked.
“Sorry, I have a boyfriend,” I said, the lie slipping off my lips a little too easily. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “But thanks.”
“Yeah.” He looked a little disappointed, but not so much that I felt guilty. “Have a good day.”
“You too.”
I pulled away without rolling up my window or putting the food away. No need to stick around and make everything even more awkward.
“Shut up,” I said to Violet as she continued to snicker.
“Hey, I think it’s good you’re putting yourself out there,” she said. “You haven’t dated anyone in weeks?—”
“Three and a half weeks, thank you very much,” I said haughtily.
“Which is like a lifetime for you.”
I shook my head and grabbed my drink from the cupholder, taking a long sip. The hot coffee felt like it was burning my mouth, but I wasn’t complaining—anything to remove the pain from my head.
“Oh, we should go over my checklist,” Violet said. I laughed as she dug her paper out of her bag. “Okay, cleaning out our lockers is the last thing we have to do for school. Then, tomorrow you have that thing for work—you know what it is, right?”
“Of course,” I said. I was actually more surprised that she knew I had to go in. Before my first actual week of work, I had to go in briefly to fill out some paperwork, “meet” my supervisor, and go over my expectations for the summer. I understood better why they needed me to do it last year when I was new, but doing it now just felt like an unnecessary reason to have to see my awful supervisor, Courtney, who absolutely hated me. I wanted to limit my time near her as much as humanly possible.
“Okay.” Violet checked something off on her list. I glanced away from the road for a second to look at her list, but I couldn’t read anything from this distance.
“Did you really have ‘remind Madison about her work meeting’ on your checklist?”
“Well, I knew you wouldn’t have it on yours,” Violet said.
“I don’t have a checklist.”
“Even more reason for me to have it on mine,” she said. “Okay, so tomorrow evening is Jaxon’s pool party. And the day after is his second pool party.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Why are there two?”
Jaxon was the most popular guy in our grade, and he had an end-of-year pool party every June, so I wasn’t surprised about the one tomorrow. But I didn’t understand why we were going to a second one.
“This one’s just for us, and Sabrina and Eli,” Violet said. Her cheeks tinged red as she added, “One of the perks of dating him.”
Right. Even though it had been a few weeks, I wasn’t used to the idea that Violet and Jaxon were dating now. He’d been in love with her basically since the moment he’d met her, but she had been insisting forever that she could never fall for him. If I was being totally honest, I always thought they would get together eventually. Still, I had a little whiplash from how it had all come about—they had suddenly announced they were together before our grad trip, then afterwards, Violet admittedto me that it was actually a fake relationship for mutual benefits between them, but, then at prom, they officially got together. I would get used to them being together soon, but right now, my mind still felt like it was spinning.
She chewed on the lid of her pen as she looked at her list in deep thought. “Now, onto summer plans…”
“Violet,” I said. I dropped one of my hands from the steering wheel to grab her hand and squeeze. “Please tell me you haven’tscheduledfun into your summer.”
I couldn’t really see her, but it wasn’t hard for me to imagine the way she must have rolled her eyes.
“Don’t make fun of my schedules, Madison.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I didn’t schedule fun,” she said. “I just have a list of some stuff we should do.”
“Okay…” I said hesitantly. “I guess that’s fine.”
“It’s more than fine; it’s great,” Violet insisted. She moved my hand back to the steering wheel, always a stickler for safety. “This way, we know we won’t waste the whole summer doing nothing outside of work. Don’t you want to have fun before we go to university?”
I sighed. “You know I do.”
