Alex raised his eyebrows. He was wearing a soft-looking gray T-shirt, that tangle of brightly colored friendship bracelets looped around his wrist. “Why not?” he asked.
“Because he’s gonna think—” I broke off, waving my hand vaguely. “Whatever. Forget it.”
“Trevor’s my roommate,” Alex told me, like this explained something. “He’s a good dude.”
I shrugged. “I’m sure he is.”
“He is,” Alex said, taking a couple of steps closer. His skin was perfectly, immaculately clear, just a couple of tiny freckles near the side of his mouth. It kind of made me want to punch him. “You feel like taking a walk with me?” he asked.
I felt my eyebrows shoot up like I wasn’t even controlling them, like they were two independent creatures on the top of my face. “You’ve got time for a walk?” I couldn’t resist saying, even though I knew it was infantile. “You don’t have a duet you need to be working on?”
Alex made a face at that, sheepish, like I’d caught him at something embarrassing: painting his nails, maybe, or jerking off. “That was kind of a performance we put on back there, huh?” he asked.
I wiped my Cheeto-y hands on my thighs, leaving a pale film of orange dust on my skin. “It was kind of a performance,” I agreed.
“I know,” Alex said. He was close enough now that his hip bone was touching my bare knee, his body burning-hot through his T-shirt. “It looked like showing off. I just get real wrapped up in it when people are singing, you know?” he asked, sounding sincere. “It doesn’t actually matter who or what. My dad’s a minister, and my brothers used to hate sitting there all day on Sundays wearing ties and whatever. But I always kind of liked it, ’cause of the singing.”
I didn’t know if it was real, this aw, shucks thing he did all the time. A minister’s son, Jesus Christ. “The music moved you?” I asked dubiously.
That made Alex laugh—this openmouthed rumble that was deeper than his normal voice so that for a moment it felt like I could see how he’d be when he was older, when he’d grown into all his long, elegant limbs. He was going to be a lot more than regionally famous. “Kind of!” he said, shrugging sort of helplessly. He had a little bit of an accent, that southern lilt. “Don’t be mad.”
“Oh, I’m not mad,” I said. I wasn’t, either—after all, I had no reason to be. Olivia was my best friend; Olivia liked Alex. As far as I was concerned, I told myself, it was as simple as that.
But Alex wasn’t buying. “You sure?” he asked, slipping one bold finger into the belt loop of my shorts and tugging me a little bit closer.
I let myself be pulled for just a second, then sat back on my hands. God, what was I doing? “I’m sure,” I said firmly.
“Okay,” Alex said. “Then I believe you. But I also think you’re probably not taking that walk with me, huh?”
I grinned back at him then—it was impossible not to, his eyelashes and his collarbones, the pull in my stomach and chest. Then I hopped down off the counter. “You’re smarter than you look,” I told him cheerfully, tugging his belt loop once in retaliation and slipping past him out the kitchen door.
NINE
Olivia’s bed was already made when I woke up on Saturday morning, though I could hear voices in the living room; when I got up and went in to investigate, hoping Charla had made something besides oatmeal for breakfast, I found Kristin, Olivia, and Ash all getting ready to leave. “Oh!” Kristin said when she saw me. “You’re up!”
“Hey,” I said, tightening my sleep-messy ponytail; Olivia’s car keys dangled from her hand. “What are you guys doing?”
“We’re going to check out the mall here,” Ashley said, a little too brightly. “You wanna come?”
I glanced from Olivia to the others and back again, thinking, Thanks for the invite, but not wanting to betray myself by saying it out loud. Olivia was looking at something in the neighborhood of my left ear. “Sure,” I told them slowly. “Let me just get dressed.”
The mall was a twenty-minute drive from the complex, newly built and aggressively air-conditioned, filled with the kinds of high-end stores I’d only ever seen ads for in magazines. We had a mall in Jessell—we weren’t that much of a backwater—but it was nothing like this. The floors were a shiny white marble; a fountain burbled away in an atrium, giving off a clean, bleachy smell. I felt like somebody was going to accuse me of shoplifting if I breathed wrong.
“I figured it wasn’t worth it to wake you,” Olivia explained quietly as we trailed across the food court. “I mean, you hate malls.”
I nodded. “No, yeah,” I said, telling myself it didn’t bother me, that I was bringing this strange, unsettled feeling upon myself. “Of course.”
Kristin and Ash were in their element, flitting from store to store, trying on that dress and those sandals, shiny gold sunglasses and jeans specially designed to give your butt extra lift. Olivia and I had never really been recreational shoppers—it’s boring, if you never actually buy anything—but I was surprised how much she knew about different designers, keeping up with Kristin and Ashley as they chattered away happily.
“You know what would be so cute?” Kristin suggested, doing laps in a boutique where all the clothes were black and white and denim. “We should get matching T-shirts.”
“Yes!” Ashley said. “How adorable would that be?”
I thought it sounded kind of like something out of peewee soccer, honestly, but this didn’t feel like the time to say that out loud. When I looked at the price tag on the shirt they were talking about, though, my eyeballs almost fell right out of my head.
“Olivia,” I said urgently, catching her by the arm and pulling her behind a stack of jeans. “This T-shirt is, like, forty bucks.”
Olivia bit her lip. “I can lend you the money,” she said.
“No, that’s not—” I shook my head. “I’m not asking you to front me, I just think it’s ridiculous to spend that much on a T-shirt when—”
“They are really cute, though,” she pointed out. “And we’re supposed to get our first paychecks this week. We need to look the part, right?”
“Look the part?” I repeated, trying not to laugh. “You sound like Kristin.”
“What’s up?” Kristin asked, and I shook my head again. The last thing I wanted was for her to know I couldn’t afford it, that I could stretch forty bucks into a month of groceries back in Jessell. That it was one more way I didn’t belong here.
“Nothing,” I said brightly, holding up the T-shirt and smiling. I could always return it later, right? Nobody needed to know. “You’re right—these are perfect. What else are you getting?”