Alex didn’t seem to have noticed.
“I’m glad I don’t have a crush,” Emma said, reaching over to hand Avery a Hershey’s kiss. “It looks horrible.”
Avery sighed. “It’s not exactly fun.”
That was about as negative as Avery got. Not exactly fun.
“It’s demoralizing.” Charlotte’s voice was little more than a whisper but when Charlotte spoke we all listened because it was such a rare occurrence.
“One day Robert will see what’s right in front of his face,” Lulu said, reaching over to pat Charlotte’s hand.
Lulu was kind of like a mom like that. She had a maternal instinct like you wouldn’t believe.
“What about you, Simone?” Hazel asked.
I blinked in surprise, my half-eaten bite of apple sitting there in my mouth as I temporarily forgot how to chew.
I must have looked like a deer in headlights because Avery leaned over with a grin. “Come on, you can tell us who you’re crushing on. We won’t tell anyone.”
“Who would we tell?” Max added in a dry voice.
“I’m not—I don’t—” I started to protest out of…what? Habit? Not really. It wasn’t like anyone was grilling me on a regular basis about who I liked. Jax was the only person I spent a ton of time with outside of school and he seemed to take it for granted that I wasn’t into boys and dating.
This wasn’t exactly true, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble. He saw me as a sister and while it was all fine and good for us to talk about his lady friends and his feelings for Rose, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell him that I had a crush of my own.
Probably because my crush...? It was one of his friends, the bass player for his band.
It wasn’t that I thought Jax would disapprove, I just didn’t want to see the look in his eyes when I told him. Because he would know, just like I did, that it was useless.
Tony, like every other hot guy in the universe, didn’t even know I existed.
The girls were staring at me, but no one said a word as they waited for me to stop stumbling through my protests and just answer the question.
“I have a crush, but no one knows,” I said.
There. Was that so hard?
Avery craned her neck like she could guess my crush just by looking.
“Who is it?” Emma asked, all eager excitement.
“He goes to Fairmont,” I said. That was the public school on the other side of town, where Jax and I both lived. Lakeview was a private school and way outside our parents’ pay grade but we’d both been lucky enough to be accepted on scholarships.
That was one of the reasons Jax and I were so close. We’d grown up on the same block and existed in this weird limbo together where we went to school with the rich kids and lived amongst the not-so-rich. We had lives on both sides of the divide, and Tony… He fell on the Fairmont side. He lived on our side of town but I knew him because of Jax’s band that rehearsed in his garage.
I explained all that to the girls, and that information was met with way too much excitement. “Ooh, a musician,” Avery said.
“A fellow artist,” Lulu said with an approving nod. “That’s fitting.”
Lulu and I partnered up a lot in art class so she knew better than anyone how important that was to me. “One would think…” I said.
Max narrowed her eyes. “Does he know you’re an artist?”
“Not exactly,” I said, my attention on the apple as if it was the most interesting piece of fruit I’d ever seen. “That would require that he know who I am.”
“Ahh,” Hazel said in a sage tone at the end of the table.
“Ouch,” Max muttered.
“Maybe he does,” Avery offered.
“That sucks,” Lulu said.
“He’s an idiot,” Emma said.
Charlotte just sighed and leaned against my arm for a second in commiseration.
“Yeah, well…not a big deal,” I said. I’d gotten used to crushing on Tony from a distance. As Jax’s best friend it was understood that I’d be at a lot of their band practices. I usually sat on the sidelines and did homework or worked on a sketch.
It was fine.
Totally fine.
“Maybe Jax could say something,” Avery said.
“Mmm,” I shook my head with a grimace. I so did not want Jax getting involved. First of all, it was humiliating. And second, it was hopeless.
“Even if he did, it wouldn’t do any good,” I said.
“Why not?” Max asked.
“Because even if he knew I was alive, I wouldn’t know how to talk to him.”
Every single girl at the table gave a little sigh, because…yeah. I was pretty sure that despite our different personalities and backgrounds, we all shared that one common denominator.
We had no idea how to score a date. We didn’t know how to flirt and entice, or whatever it was other girls did to get the attention of the male species.
Silence descended and it lasted so long I sort of forgot that we were talking about me and my pathetic love life.
Shockingly, it was sweet, shy Charlotte who broke the silence. “Maybe we should learn.”
Everyone stared at her, including me. “What did you say?”
She shrugged, her cheeks turning pink under the group’s undivided attention. “We’re smart,” she said. “We’re not horrid looking or smelly or anything…”
Max snickered a bit at that. “Wow, thanks for the compliments.”
“You know what I mean,” Charlotte said with a roll of her eyes. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to…” She waved a hand as she looked for the right word.
“Flirt?” Avery suggested.
“Yes.” Charlotte nodded. “Flirt.”
Everyone fell silent again, and it was Hazel who spoke up. “Charlotte’s right. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to get what we want.”
Spoken like…Hazel. The captain of the girls’ swim team, she was one of those people who seemed
