Lois elbows her friend. “Not a fair trade. The trophy for a T-shirt? Seriously?”
“I do love sleep shirts, though,” Carrie muses.
“And there’s more.” Don turns back to his car and leans into the passenger seat.
“Oh my God! Matching socks?” Carrie’s hands go flying to her cheeks. “Okay, you win!”
This is out of fucking control.
I duck as the milk carton goes flying from Carrie to Donovan, its cape streaming in the air.
Milk’s a pretty good image for how I see relationships—something that quickly sours.
“I’m outta here,” I say. “You guys are officially insane. I have no idea whether this is normal or what, but… I’m gettingwaytoo much information right now.” I gesture back and forth between them. “This love thing? It’s sick. Absolute disgrace, dudes.”
I stride over to the bench across the path, desperate to put a little space between us, ignoring Lane’s gaze as he pulls Lois into him.
“You keep on trucking, Lewis,” he says, wrapping his arms around her waist. “But I’m telling you—one day, you’re gonna fall hard on your ass for some girl.”
Lois gazes up at him, misty-eyed. “My boyfriend, the poet.”
He plants a butterfly kiss on her nose and looks back at me again.
Urgh. Just leave me alone!
“And when that day comes, we’ll be there with you. Watching. Waiting.”
“Kinda like right now, huh?” I mutter.
Lane winks. “Kinda. But way worse.”
“Way worse!” the group chimes as one.
“I call bullshit.” I sigh. “And anyway, we’ll have graduated by then. So you can stop creaming your pants over me. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll find me on some beach somewhere, with a babe on each arm, kicking back between Heat games because I’ll be the Miami captain.”
“And that’s not sick at all.” Carrie rolls her eyes.
Lane wiggles his eyebrows. “Speaking of graduating… You talk to Firebird yet?”
Here we go again.
“Why are you so obsessed, dude?”
Firebird is our nickname for a girl we’ve seen driving around in… a Firebird. Yeah, we’re creative like that. The guys are thinking they want to hire her as part of next year’s Campus Drivers team—the crew that’ll be taking over from us old dogs.
This is our senior year, and Iknowit’s time to let go and share the love, but I’m finding it triggering. I’m not ready to go headhunting. Not just yet. These past few years have been the best years of my life, and it feels like I’m abandoning a tiny little baby to a cohort of new parents. They’ll never love the app the way we do. How could they? We started it from scratch.
I turn my attention back to Lane. “Did I talk to Firebird yet? Negative.”
“Oh, man…” He shakes his head. “You get we have, like, only a semester to find and train up the new guys, right?”
“Youtalk to her, then.”
“I’m training Lois’s brother. He’s planning on coming up to Sycamore Heights every vacation.”
“Every vacation? Plenty of time to focus on Firebird,” I fire back.
“We agreed we would each mentor a newbie.”
