He glances up at me, his eyebrows knotted in the middle. “No.”
“Maybe her phone’s dead. I haven’t heard from her either.”
“Yeah.” His lips form a thin line as he pockets his phone. “Anyway, can I bum a ride?”
“It’s your car too.”
We don’t talk all the way to school, which is rare but kind of nice. I need the minutes to run through what I’m going to say to Charlie. On top of Empower, we have three classes together. I’ve decided to play it totally cool and ask about Girl because that’s what friends do. We ooh and aah over new crushes and tease each other about that inevitably weird first kiss.
Girl’s full mouth flashes through my mind and I swallow against the tangle in my throat. “This is what friends do,” I whisper to myself as I pull into the school parking lot.
“Huh?” Owen asks.
“Nothing.”
“You sound so convincing.”
“Really, it’s nothing.”
“Is this ‘nothing’ the redhead with Charlie on Friday night?”
I wince. “You saw them together?”
He waves a hand. “I vaguely remember something crimson-hued in Charlie’s vicinity. Then again, maybe it was just a giant Solo cup.”
“Were you really that trashed?”
He rubs his forehead with both hands. “Do you have to scream all your questions?”
I laugh and turn down the music a little. “Good thing you had Hannah to take care of you.”
He sighs, dropping his hands into his lap and turning toward the window. “Yeah.”
Some alarm in me goes off—?some twin sense. “What’s wrong? You sure you aren’t fighting?”
But he just shakes his head and turns up the music. I can’t help but roll my eyes. Clearly, yes, they are fighting and probably about Owen acting like a total miscreant frat boy when he drinks. Hannah’s ridden his ass about it more than once.
“Good luck with Charlie,” he says when we walk into school, parting ways in the main hall to head to our separate homerooms.
“Thanks. Good luck with Hannah.”
He frowns but waves me off, disappearing into a crowd of his perpetually laughing orchestra friends.
I watch him, but my eyes don’t focus on him for long. Almost immediately, they start a search for Charlie. I run through my even-toned questions about Girl in my head over and over, determined to be a good best friend.
Except I never get to prove that I’m a good best friend, because Charlie is absent from school. So is Hannah, and neither of them responds to my messages. Consequently, not only do I spend the entire day obsessing over what I would’ve said to Charlie, I don’t even get to hash it out with Hannah at lunch or through texts, leaving me feeling like a dormant volcano about to erupt by the end of the day.
To top it all off with an irritating cherry, Greta accosts me on the way to my car.
“Hey, is Owen okay?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“He got called out of calculus and never came back.”
I frown. “He didn’t?”
“Hope he’s not sick. Tell him hey for me.”
