Max drives us to a DairyFreeze on the side of the road about ten minutes from school. You can’t even walk inside, it’s just a tiny box with a window where you can walk up and order. There’s exactly one person working—a girl named Hayley from my history class.
“What can I get you?” she asks with an extremely wide grin for Max.
“Hmm, what should I have…” He taps his chin thoughtfully and shoots a grin my way. “What’s your most expensive ice cream?”
Hayley squints in confusion. There aren’t real ice cream choices at the DairyFreeze. You get soft serve from the machine and you’re happy about it.
“That was not part of the arrangement,” I remind him and cross my arms over my chest. “I’m not made of ice creammoney.”
“All right, fine, I’ll take a vanilla and chocolate twist. But make it the largest size you can do, please.”
I shake my head and step up to the window. “I’ll take the same, but a small.”
“You never have any fun,” he whispers.
Hayley comes back a minute later with my regular cone and another one as long as my forearm.
“Whoa,” Max says.
“You said you wanted the biggest cone I could make,” she says with a wink. “Happy to oblige. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Looks like it’s not only the girls in band who are noticingMax.
“You’re going to be so sick,” I tell him when I’ve paid and we’re seated at a plastic table next to the window.
“When are you going to learn to stop underestimating me?” He takes a big bite. “I can finish this, no problem.”
“There’s literally no way you can finish that. She probably used all the ice cream in the machine to give you that.”
“She was really nice.”
“She was flirting with you.”
He glances back at the window. “Was she? I couldn’t tell.”
“Are you going to homecoming tomorrow?” I blurt before I can stop myself.
He freezes right as he’s about to take another bite. “Uh, nope.” He studies me. “Are you?”
“No. Nova and I are hanging out instead.”
He bobs his head, and we sit in silence. Okay, that was super awkward, but now I know for sure that he isn’t going. Not that it’s a big deal or matters at all to my life.
“Your hair looks especially good today,” he says and takes an extra big bite of his ice cream cone.
I jolt at his unexpected words. “What? No, it doesn’t.”
“I said what I said.”
“My hair almost never looks good,” I argue. “It’s impossible to control.”
“You’re just biased against it. I think it looks great even if it’s ‘frizzy.’ ” He says the last word with finger quotes, as if frizzy hair is a made-up concept that only I believe in. I can assure you, it is not. “It reminds me of when we were younger, and you’d have to constantly push it out of your face when you were playing a board game.”
“Yeah, another added bonus of the curls. They make me look perpetually thirteen.”
His gaze dips to my mouth and back up to my eyes. “You don’t look thirteen anymore, Hazel.”
His words send heat racing through me. What is going on with us? At least when we were at each other’s throats, I knew what to expect. He’d be rude and I’d be rude right back. It was simple. Now, I barely know how to have a normal conversation with him.
