At least we were getting out of the car in a second. I pulled into an open parking spot outside of the 7-11.
I quickly hopped out of my truck to open the backseat door, but Nick had the same idea, and now I was lamely holding the door open for just her brother, and Nick was helping Savannah out. My eyes were practically glued to the two of them as he gallantly lifted her out of the truck. Show-off. That’s all I had to say about that.
Duke scampered around me. “Ya coming, or what?” he yelled back at me.
I snapped my focus back to him and started moving slowly.
I had to chill.
Nick and I looked like absolute children when we got our slushies compared to Savannah… and Duke- who was the only actual child in the situation. While Savannah and Duke both got small cups and filled theirs with just frozen coke, Nick and I used about every flavor to fill up our mega sizedcups.
Savannah watched us with an amused look on her face.
“What? We’re growin’ boys,” I said softly and shook my head, but I could feel my face heating up. I always tried to play it cool, but my face gave me away.
“Shoot. I shoulda got some blue mixed in mine too,” Duke said beside me.
“Next time, bud. We’ve spent years perfecting our slushies. You’ll get there,” Nick said, patting his head.
When we went to buy our slushies at the counter, Nick motioned his head toward theirs, telling me to pay for all of them.
I reached into my pocket for my wallet and held my breath as I handed over my debit card, hoping it wouldn’t get declined in front of them. If that were the case, I’d want the sticky 7-11 floor to swallow me whole. I’d be too damn embarrassed to keep going after that.
When it went through, I felt a sigh punch out of me, and Savannah looked up at me curiously.
She touched the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and my eyes went directly to her delicate hand.
“You didn’t have to pay. Thank you,” she said sincerely.
I just nodded dumbly.
I felt Nick’s eyes staring holes into me, but I didn’t dare look back at him.
We all lazily walked back to the truck. I felt the need to stretch out our time with them, but I didn’t necessarily know how to do it. I held Savannah and Duke’s slushies while they climbed into my truck first. Then we all sat in the car slurping in kinda awkward silence. Nick gave me a look with wide eyes and motioned toward them again.
“What?” I mouthed back at him. I mean, I knew we almost had a telepathy-like system on the ice, but did he actually think I could tell what he was thinking? Like was he asking if we could bring them back to our place? Because that would be a solidhell no.Our place needed to be picked up a bit before guests wandered over. Plus, I was kind of embarrassed that we didn’t have a couch or TV or anything. We just had two twin size mattresses laid out on the living room floor and our laptops which we did schoolwork on. Back in September we bought a streaming service to watch NHL games, but we eliminated that when we figured we could save money by just watching them at Benny’s if we ordered some pops and sipped them slowly for two hours. Paige hadn’t yelled at us yet, so it worked.
Duke was the one to break the ice, probably unaware of the awkwardness in the first place.
“Wanna come over?” he asked simply.
Sav shot him a wide-eyedlook.
Nick glanced at me and shrugged, like this solved all our problems. While I really wasn’t ready to split away from them yet, I didn’t want to shove our presence on them if they didn’t actually want it. By “them” I meant Savannah.
“Sure,” I said slowly. “If that’s alright with Sav.”
“Umm.” She bit her lip nervously. All three of us were staring at her, waiting for her to have the final say… and I felt a bit bad putting so much pressure on her. “Okay, yeah. Our parents won’t be home for a couple of hours, so you guys can come by for a bit.”
“Sick. Wanna play some Xbox? Or air hockey?” Duke happily suggested.
Nick’s eyes lit up like a kid’s on Christmas morning. “Hell yeah! We haven’t played in forever.”
4. Savannah
I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t completely sure about inviting them over. I racked my brain to think of all the angles like my dad always taught me to do… Did they have some ulterior motive I wasn’t aware of? They wanted to just hang out… with us? It felt like we somehow stepped into an alternate reality. I mean, I always thought that Duke and I had a ton of fun and that other people were missing out by not wanting to hang with us… but now that people actually wanted to, I felt self-conscious about our usual fun– which was air hockey and outdoor skating in the winter, and then rollerblading and ping pong in the summer.
I was 100 percent an introvert at school and didn’t care much about socializing. Yeah, I had a group of girls I sat with at lunch, but it’s not like they were jumping to have me come to their birthday parties. I knew life went on without me outside of school. Girls used to ask me to come over, but with skating and watching Duke, I always said no. Eventually, they stopped asking. It still hurt sometimes hearing the inside jokes and about all the fun times they had without me, but I learned to brush it off. I had a best friend in Duke, and I had the ice.
