“We’ve kind of been texting since then.”
Cassie took a bite of her breakfast quesadilla for something to do. She didn’t taste it.
Acacia chewed slowly. Swallowed. “Are you going to tell Parker?”
“What?” Cassie sputtered. “No. Why would I?”
“If you’re gonna date her mom, it seems like it’d probably be polite to tell her about it.”
Cassie almost did a spit take of her orange juice. Her body shook with silent laughter as she managed to swallow it.
When she caught her breath, she said, “Sure, Kaysh, I’m in a long-distance relationship with Parker’s mom.”
Acacia shrugged like she didn’t buy that at all, but she wasn’t going to fight Cassie on it.
“Look, I’m not gonna be a bad friend to you and not let you talk to me about her, but I do kinda feel like that makes us both bad friends to Parker.”
“I don’t need to talk about her,” Cassie said. “It’s literally not a big deal. And speaking of bad friends—when would I even tell Parker? I haven’t seen her in like a week. I know there’s a honeymoon stage or whatever, but it’d be cool if she didn’t drop her so-called best friends quite so easily.”
“Can you really call yourself someone’s best friend if you’re dating her mom?” Before Cassie could protest, Acacia corrected herself. “Or sleeping with her or whatever?”
“Parker told me I could bone whoever I wanted.”
“Sure, but she didn’t say you could do it in secret,” Acacia said. “If you were boning my mom, I’d want to know.”
Cassie grimaced. “Your mom is more my mom than my own mom. Sleeping with her would basically be incest.”
“And yet you made out with my brother.”
“I keep thinking there will come a time when you don’t bring that up and it keeps not being that time.”
Acacia grinned. “There will never be a time.”
“I hate you.”
“You don’t.”
“I don’t.”
Acacia walked Cassie to class, even though she didn’t have anything till noon. She hugged Cassie goodbye, big, the way Acacia always did and said, “You’re a dumbass, but I love you.”
“Love you, too, Kaysh.”
Acacia wasn’t finished. “I’m always going to have your back. I’m just not sure this is the best decision you’ve ever made.”
“Maybe not.” Cassie shrugged. “But it’s sure not the worst.”
“No, yeah, the worst was definitely jumping off the roof of your trailer after you’d made yourself wings you thought would work.”
“Okay, I was gonna say dating Seth but I like yours better.”
“Ugh, don’t make me think of that earthworm.”
Cassie cackled. As soon as she and Seth broke up, Acacia started referring to him only as the earthworm, maintaining that he had a little pinhead that made him look like one. Cassie loved it every time.
Over the week, the group text quieted down, Acacia and Cassie keeping up most of the conversation. One time, three days after they’d eaten dinner in a group and two days after Parker skipped breakfast for the second week in a row, Cassie asked, “So, Parker, am I just not gonna see you anymore?”
She sent it right before chem lab when she’d be too busy to hover over her phone, worrying if she’d get a response. When she got out of lab, there were fourteen new messages in the group chat.
They were all Acacia and Parker talking about Parker’s latest art project.
Cassie’s question went unanswered. She didn’t ask it again.
Instead, while Acacia was sitting on the couch in Cassie’s apartment, one foot propped on the coffee table as she painted her toes bright red, Cassie asked, “Is Parker pissed at me?”
“Why would she be?”
There was really no reason, except: “’Cause I’m fucking her mom?”
Acacia’s head whipped around. Her eyes were wide. “Do you think she knows?”
“No.” How the hell could she know? Acacia obviously wouldn’t tell, and it wasn’t like Erin would, either. “But I don’t know what else I did.”
Acacia went back to painting her nails. “Why do you even think she’s mad at you?”
“We never hang out anymore.”
Kaysh shrugged. “She’s got a lot of projects going on, and so do you. Things will settle down eventually.”
Cassie tried to believe her.
But Parker had just … disappeared off the face of the earth. Cassie would’ve been pissed if she weren’t determined not to let it bother her. If anything, she was embarrassed. She’d never used the term best friend lightly, and to have used it on Parker only to be dropped as soon as Parker got a girlfriend didn’t feel great. In fact, the last time she’d used it on Parker, the other girl had joked that Acacia was Cassie’s best friend. Maybe she’d been trying to tell her something.
Any sense of regret Cassie had been feeling about the whole fucking her friend’s mom thing faded to the background. Parker was basically not even her friend right now. It’d been two weeks since Parker and Sam officially got together, and Cassie could count the number of times she’d hung out with Parker on one hand—hell, on one finger. And even that had been in a group.
Cassie should’ve known better. She barely knew Parker. Parker was just a freshman who roomed with Cassie’s best friend. Yeah, she and Cassie had gotten along for a while there, but apparently that was it.
But whatever. Cassie didn’t need Parker. She’d had to fend for herself for pretty much as long as she could remember.
It wasn’t like she was short on ways to spend her time. She had homework and classes, Acacia and work in the shop.
She had Erin.
Not that they were dating, or anything. That would be ridiculous.
Seth had been Cassie’s first relationship. Not her first anything else, but her first actual relationship. Cassie knew from experience that sleeping with someone did not mean you were dating. People could get what they needed from each other without it being anything other than the physical. Admittedly, it was more than that with Erin—Cassie actually liked her, which was a lot more than she could say for most of the people she’d fooled around with.
But liking someone as a person didn’t mean you were dating them any more than sleeping with them did. Nor did texting every day. They weren’t texting each other good morning and good night or anything, but it wasn’t unusual for Erin to be the first and last person Cassie talked to each day. Acacia could only take so much engineering talk, but Erin seemed to have endless interest. They spent an entire day texting about grad school—Cassie admitted to applying at MIT, plus Georgia and Virginia Tech, even though she was dead set on Caltech. She was confident—cocky, maybe—but not dumb enough not to have a backup.
Erin [11:23 AM]
Have you decided what kind of astronaut you want to be yet?