"Can I help you?" he asked with a sense of silliness behind his voice.
"No, you can be on your way," Benji said with full irritation.
Javier ignored Benji. "What did I do to deserve an apple slice to the chest?"
"Sorry," I said as I nervously laughed. "Do…do you want to come with us?"
Ricky and Justin chuckled at my lack of exposition in the question. Benji did not. He was not being subtle about not wanting me to ask Javier to join us. Quite frankly, I didn't give a shit. I liked Benji, but his attitude toward Javier was pissing me off. Javier, albeit arrogant at times, was a good person and I hated to see someone treat him otherwise.
It was okay for me to pretend to hate Javi, but it wasn't okay for anyone else to dislike him.
I cleared my throat. "Alright, so you obviously don't have to if you don't want to. Well, you probably won't want to because why would you? We’ve never done anything like this before and—"
"Ten years later and we're still waiting for you to ask the question," Justin said impatiently.
I rolled my eyes but understood that I needed to get to the point. "Did you, um, maybe wanna come with me to the mall later?"
My words were fumbling in my mouth and I couldn’t stop fidgeting. Fuck, why did I constantly get so worked up around Javier? I used to have no trouble saying what I needed to him nomatter if the words were kind or rude. Now I couldn’t ask him a simple question without practically foaming at the mouth.
I had said 'me' instead of 'us,' so I felt the need to correct myself. "Well, I mean us. I know that it's last minute and that you don't know Benji or Justin all that well. I just...I'd like you to come anyway. For me, I guess."
In a way, not having many friends was a good thing. I never felt awkward or nervous about asking Ricky, Bella, or Kailey to do things with me because I knew that if they said no, it was for a real reason. It was not because they didn't want to be around me and weren’t telling me that out of fear of hurting my feelings.
Not that I blamed people for not wanting to be around me. Hell, I didn't want to be around me.
So, it made me nervous to go out of my comfort zone and invite people who I was not close with to hang out with me. If I started to truly grow fond of someone and then it turns out that they didn't feel the same way, it would sting more than if they had hated me from the start.
I made people dislike me from the beginning because that was better than them getting to know me and later deciding that they didn’t enjoy my company. It was easier for me to never get to know new people because then I couldn’t care about their opinions of me. I was starting to become too fond of my rival to not care about his opinion of me.
So when Javier took a minute to answer my question, I immediately regretted ever opening my stupid mouth. I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out because rejection was painfully embarrassing.
But as he stood before me with his lunch tray in his hands, he sent a warm smile my way. The words that came out of his mouth next made me feel warm inside.
"Anything for you, amor."
Amor?
It was safe to say that all I could think about for the rest of school was going to the mall with Javier. Benji and Justin coming along was irrelevant. How drawn I felt toward my rival was a confusing feeling that I had no idea how to navigate, but I was trying.
The ride to the mall was awkward. We had all piled in Benji’s car and no one spoke at all. Benji put on music, but it didn’t get rid of the tension and awkwardness. He insisted I sit in the front next to him while he drove and his arm rested close to mine on the console. So close that my arm would occasionally brush against his when the car hit a bump in the road, even though I was trying to keep my distance.
All of this for a present for my dickhead siblings was ridiculous.
Birthdays were a big deal to most people. Many would count down the months, weeks, and days leading up to the day of their birth because it was so looked forward to. Benji wanted me to help him find the perfect gift for the twins. We all knew that he was a bad gift giver, but I was the last person he should have been asking for help from.
He knew that I wasn’t the best person to help yet he insisted that I did. Honestly, we were mostly here to get Emerson a gift. He was bad at gift-giving in general, but he always did worse with his girlfriend.
"Do you think Emmy would like this?" Benji asked me.
He was holding a sparkly pink tank top with rhinestones all over it. The glitter made my eyes burn and it looked itchy. It was hideous to say the least.Icould have crafted a better tank top.
I made a face of disgust. “No."
Benji pointed to another tank top that looked the exact same, but teal instead of hot pink. "What about that one?"
"No," I repeated in the same tone as before.
"That one?"
