But clearly, Devi Sereda worked her ass off for every single moment of victory she earned.
I. Earned. Nothing.
It all just landed in my fucking lap.
Girls included.
Except… you know…her.
But the single most annoying, fucking aggravating thing about her? It wasn’t even that she hated me, annoying as that was. It was that she parked in Shane’s spot every goddamn day that year, and he didn’t say a word about it.
Lex told him what happened in the parking lot on day one. I knew he did. But since she so obviously despised me, I wasn’t about to acknowledge Devi Sereda’s existence to anyone, even my best friend.
Then Shane asked me one night, “Who’re you taking to grad?”
“No one.”
I wasn’t. I dated various girls at school, obviously. I didn’t plan to ride off into the sunset with any of them.
Neither did he, I was pretty sure.
“So, who’s that chick on the soccer team? You know, the one who always parks next to you?” He made no mention of the fact that she was parking in his former spot.
He also pretended he didn’t know who she was, like he hadn’t contributed to that conversation where my boys had deemed her a six. (He’d given her an eight. He was overruled by Johnny.)
Then he waited for my reaction.
“You mean, in your spot?” I said, feigning disinterest and picking blood from under my fingernail. We’d just come out of a hockey game where I’d been benched most of third period for fighting. People were hanging out in the parking lot, and I could feel a bunch of girls angling to approach. Probably waiting for me and Lex to clear out before they pounced on Shane.
Girls always knew they had a better shot with Shane than they did with me. Because Shane Madrigal was an unrepentant slut.
“I was thinking of asking her out,” he said.
What. The. Fuckery.
He jingled his keys and stopped to unlock his car. I could feel him smiling.
“What is it?” he inquired casually. “The scar?”
I could’ve just kept on walking. But I stopped and met his eyes.
“I kinda like it.” His hair ruffled in the breeze and he gave me that square-jawed hockey star smile of his. If I thought I could actually knock him out, I might’ve punched him in the teeth.
Instead, I jammed my fists into my pockets and yawned as I headed over to my car.
Lex snickered and kept stride with me; he always met us for beers after games. “You gonna marry that girl or what?”
I shot him a look. He shrugged, like,Don’t look at me, you’re the one who’s in love with her.
I could hear Shane chuckle behind us.
I knew he wouldn’t ask her out. Shane Madrigal never asked girls out. He just screwed the ones who offered to screw him, and it was pretty obvious Devi Sereda was not that kind of girl. She was a good girl, right down to her license plate. She didn’t date. Or at least, she didn’t date anyone from our school.
I had this theory, actually, that she was probably a virgin, though I had no way of knowing.
But thenhefucking asked her out.
Like a week later, Shane told me he took her to see some horror movie, because he was a real Romeo like that. Then he took her for cheesecake, drove her home and kissed her good night on the front step of her parents’ house. And I had to listen to every fucking detail of it over the cafeteria table the next day—while imagining peeling his fingernails off, one by one.
