“I told you we could share,” whined a pink-clad girl who had appeared beside him, tugging ineffectually at his elbow. I didn’t realize I was frowning until his brows drew together.
“Come on,” his companion urged.
“You only want me for my tater tots,” he teased as he dragged the chair back to their table.
Anjuli waited until the pastel pair were seated to address me. “What was that?”
“Nothing.” As in,nothing I want to discuss.
Chin in hand, she stared at the overcrowded table that had spawned our chair thief. Every last one of them sparkled with teenage joie de vivre. It was like peeking through the window of a London drawing room to watch the aristocrats strut and pose. I felt like a scullery maid by comparison, lurking in the background until someone needed their fireplace cleaned.
“Talk about a lost opportunity.” Anjuli emptied her juice pouch with an angry slurp.
“It really wasn’t.” By now he would have forgotten our existence,ifhe’d noticed us in the first place.
“A cute guy walks up—”
“Don’t be taken in by the pretty face. Handsome is as handsome does.”
“What does that even—you know what, never mind. The point is, we could have had a moment.”
“While he stole one of our chairs?”
“And instead of being friendly,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken, “you looked at him like he was a bowl of dog food.”
I snuck another glance at the beautiful people, a flicker of doubt tightening my chest. Had I been rude? He was talking to a different girl now. Whatever he’d said must have been charming; the shoulders of the dark-haired girl’s companions shook in a chorus of giggles. Growing desperate, the girl in pink shoved a tater tot past his lips, forcing him to look her way or asphyxiate.
“He’s not exactly suffering.” When I turned back to Anjuli, thinking she might concede the point, her eyes were closed and her fingertips were pressed to her temples.
“I saw some girls today.” She spoke without opening her eyes. “I’m pretty sure they made their own clothes. Really long skirts. They were talking about slow cooker recipes.”
I glanced at Pittaya, but he appeared equally clueless. “Why are you telling me this?”
“They might be your kind of people.”
My pulse whooshed in my ears. “I don’t care about slow cookers. Or sewing.”
Anjuli’s eyes opened, but instead of looking at me she studied her hands, bedecked with several new rings. A daisy, a skull, some kind of animal ... it was hard to tell what aesthetic she was going for. “They like old-fashioned stuff.”
“Thanks for the tip.” I tried to keep my voice light, but even to my ears it sounded shrill. “I’m sure there are plenty of people at this school who share my interests.”
Turning hopefully to the teeming hordes around us, I searched for a likely candidate. It was hard to tell that kind of thing from the outside, but I doubted the guy dribbling chocolate milk onto his neighbor’s hamburger was a kindred soul. Or the person gouging a tabletop with her ballpoint.
My gaze hopped sideways, inadvertently landing on the boy in blue. He must have been in a brief lull between flirtations, because he looked back at me with raised brows. I shook my head, wishing there was a telepathic way to convey that the eye contact had been accidental. He could scratch my name off his list of admirers. If he actuallyknewmy name.
Which he did not.
“Did you talk to anyone in your classes?” Anjuli asked, not bothering to hide her skepticism.
“It’s the first day. My sisters said—”
“Your sisters hadcoolinterests.” Anjuli speared a segment of mandarin orange from the plastic cup in front of her, pointing at me with the dripping fork. “I guarantee there’s no such thing as a Moldy Old Books group at this school. Nobody here wants to sit around drinking tea with their pinkie sticking out.”
“My pinkie just does that. It’s not an affectation. And you read, too.” On the rare occasions we’d socialized outside school, most of our time had been spent reading together—or rather, in the same room.
“Yeah, sci-fi, which is full of cutting-edge discourse.”
I thought dubiously of the covers of her paperbacks, with their skintight spacesuits and phallic ray guns. “My books have a lot of deeper meanings. Moral lessons. Et cetera.”
