I’m frantically trying to brainstorm a way to stop this train wreck of a conversation from happening, but I can’t think under pressure, damn it!
Dee finishes with her first foot and moves to the other, having no idea how panicked I feel sitting only inches away from her. “You’re a fan? Ro and I just went to see him perform this past weekend! He is so hot!”
“Oh, we know, trust me!” Leti says. “He’s the best part of French class!”
Boom, the bomb’s been detonated. I cringe, waiting for the fallout.
Dee’s eyebrows scrunch together in confusion. When she looks at me for answers, I sheepishly confess, “Shit, I forgot to mention that. He’s . . . in our class.”
She leaps from the bed like shock catapulted her off of it, completely ignoring the toenail polish she’s probably smudging all over the place. “He’s in your CLASS? Adam Everest is IN YOUR FRENCH CLASS?!” She and Leti are both staring at me like I’m a lunatic for not having mentioned it. “You FORGOT to tell me that? How can you FORGET to tell something like that!”
“Who is Adam Everest?” Macy peeps from the corner of the room.
Dee whirls on her. “Only a freaking rock god!” She spins back to me, and I have no idea how she isn’t making herself light-headed with all the spinning and pacing she’s doing. “I didn’t even know he went to school with us! How did I not know this?!”
“Dee,” I say cautiously, “your toenails are totally ruined.”
Ignoring me, she braces her hands on my shoulders. “I need to be in your class! I need to make a switch!”
“You can’t . . . It’s a two-hundred-level class. You would’ve needed to take French 101 first.”
She curses under her breath and slumps down on the bed. “God, I am so jealous of you.”
“Don’t be,” I say. “It’s impossible to concentrate.”
Leti chuckles and props his feet on Macy’s desk, but she doesn’t seem to mind or notice. “It’s true. I’m pretty sure Ro-bo Cop and I are going to fail.”
“It’d be worth it!” Dee is all smiles as she dabs a cotton ball in polish remover and starts wiping all the glittery pink paint from her feet. “Have you talked to him?”
I nearly let out an irrational giggle that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. Talked to him? Uh, yeah, that and then some. I bite my tongue.
“Nah,” Leti says. “He comes in last and leaves first and he’s always surrounded by bleached-blonde bimbos.”
“Ugh.” Dee rubs the last of the polish off and then begins to shake the pink bottle again, preparing to start over. “Ro, I swear I’m playing hooky one day just so I can walk you to class.”
Not if I can help it! She takes my silence as agreement, but I’m already thinking of excuses to prevent that apocalyptic moment from happening. If Dee ever finds out I made out with Adam and didn’t tell her about it . . . Yikes.
I get her mind off of it by telling Leti to slide his chair over to me so I can start painting some of his nails black like Adam’s. As I run the brush over his pinky, his ring finger, and his thumb on one hand, and his ring finger, his pointer finger, and his thumb on the other hand—because I remember very clearly that those are the exact nails Adam had painted—I can’t help wondering what it would be like to paint Adam’s nails for him. It’d be intimate and tender and . . . ack, I really need to get that deliciously slutty boy out of my head. I had my chance with him, and I didn’t take it.
End. Of. Story.
Chapter Seven
“I’M BORED,” DEE complains a little after eleven o’clock. She, Leti, and I are all crammed on her bed. I’m sitting with my back to the wall and Leti between my legs as I braid his hair into a million tiny braids like we’ve time-traveled to the nineties, and Dee is between his legs as he French-braids hers into pigtails.
“It’s late,” I counter.
When Dee suddenly gasps, I jerk, accidentally tugging on one of Leti’s braids.
“Ow!”
“Sorry!”
Dee yanks her pigtail from his fingers and holds his spot while she spins around. “Your car!” she says to me.
Oh no.
“Your car?” Leti asks.
After sobering up from the three margaritas she made earlier tonight, Dee is officially getting her second wind. Leti should have fled while he had the chance. “We still need to go get it!” she says.
And that’s how I end up in the backseat of her car, leaning forward between my very best friend and Leti. “I don’t even see the point in this, guys. I’m not even allowed to keep it parked on campus.”
“The point,” Dee replies, “is that it’s your last loose end. And you can keep it parked in the Walmart parking lot on Fifth Street. It’s not that far.”