“Thank you. Oh—you remember Goldie, right?”
It was more of a reminder for Shrishti to follow social norms than anything else, because Shrishti and I had hung out at least five times at this point.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. “Wait, who are you?” She gave me one reeling second before laughing and shaking her head. “No, I’m just kidding. Although it’s true that I can’t recognize faces to save my life.”
“Fair. We’ll pretend this is the very first time we’ve met,” I said. “Just to make it easier.”
“Cheers to that.” She clinked her beer can against mine and smiled. Then she made a face and pulled a buzzing phone out of her back pocket, peering down at the screen. “Hold on,” she said, and picked up. “Hey. Yeah. No, I’m over by the window—the back window, the one looking out toward the—yeah. With the stupid curtains. Okay. See you in a sec.”
“Who was that?” Cessy said, clearly because she very much hoped to keep Shrishti to herself all night. Probably already planning their disappearance into some unused bedroom, abandoning me to bop around the room to awful top-forty music, pretending I knew anyone here.
“Nobody,” Shrishti said. “Well, not nobody. Here he—hey! Jamie! Over here!”
And suddenly, I was staring Jamie Larson straight in his perfect sea-glass eyes.
Shit.Be cool, be cool,I told myself, but it was too late; the back of my neck felt like it was on fire, and Jamie was staring me down as if daring me to look away first.
Which I definitely did.
“Hi, Jamie,” said Cessy, all chipper, which made me regret not telling her about the whole Jamie ghosting disaster. At the time, I’dbeen too embarrassed—mepersonallyknowing I didn’t skip the date on purpose didn’t make me feel less shitty about it. “I didn’t know you were coming to this. Shrishti said you usually hide in the practice rooms during parties.”
“What can I say? I live to defy expectation.”
He was glaring daggers at me, like he wanted to pin me to the wall and use my body as a dartboard. I’d already suffered through four very awkward classes with him since ghosting him on that date. And I’d tried to explain, I really had—but he simply wasn’t interested.
And things had only escalated since then. That horrible DM he sent me after I missed our date lived in my mind rent-free. I could only aspire to be so sociopathically cutting over text.
“Defy what expectations?” I said. “You’re wearing a baseball cap and basketball shorts. You’re the blueprint for every cis straight guy here.”
“Wow,” Cessy said. “Is it just me, or is it getting chilly in here?”
“I think the temperature’s perfect,” Jamie said, all but biting off the words, and I turned my gaze toward the ceiling and prayed to disappear.
It very belatedly occurred to me that he’d probably told Shrishti about all this. Which made the whole situation five hundred times worse, because I was now the villain to at least 50 percent of people present, and I never should have come to this fucking party.
“Right,” I said, “well, maybe you should have stayed in the practice room after all. Saved all of us from this truly invigorating conversation.”
Sometimes I astonished myself with my capacity for sheer bitchiness. But fuck it, he kind of deserved it at this point. I’d told him six billion times that me ghosting him wasn’t personal, and if he wanted to act shitty about it, well, that was on him.
“I’m going to go get another drink,” I declared, even though I still had my unfinished beer in one hand, and escaped before I could hear anyone’s response.
My entire body felt overheated, buzzing with the adrenaline of that whole…interaction. Confrontation? There needed to be a better word for an unanticipated and subtly antagonistic encounter with someone you’re trying very hard to pretend to like.
Cessy found me fifteen minutes later, stewing in the corner over my third beer—wow, I’d really downed those—and slid her arm around my waist, tugging me in tight.
“Hey,” she said. “So…what the fuck?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, embarrassment finally catching up with me now that I was out of Jamie’s sight and my heart rate had gone down a couple dozen beats per minute. “So…yeah. Jamie and I…well, he asked me out.”
“What!” Cessy shrieked, but I was already shaking my head and shoving her in the elbow.
“Yeah, well, it didn’t go well. I mean…I said yes, but then I kind of…ghosted him? Not on purpose,” I added quickly, before Cessy could start drawing any unsavory conclusions about me. “I had something come up. With my mom. Something urgent. And I kind of forgot to update him.”
The truth was, that was the day after my mom decided to stop treatment. The day after I learned for sure that my time with my mother was officially on a countdown. My coffee date with some guy from class was the last thing on my mind. And maybe that should have been easy to explain to him…only I wasn’t ready to tell anyone the truth yet. I didn’t want pity.
You’d think a reasonable person would have cut me some slack and trusted that I meant it when I said there’d been a family emergency, that I wasn’t just trotting out the same tired sick-day bullshitused by skiving students everywhere. But apparently that was too much to ask.
