Eve folds her arms. “Why not? It’s fun and flirty. You have to put your feelings out there at some point.”
“Because,” I say, my face growing hot. “It’s just too much. Tone it down.”
Rolling her eyes, Eve takes the phone back. “I thought the point was to help you.” But she dutifully types out another message, holding out the phone for my approval.
Smush is mad you didn’t bring him any snacks.
I hit send, my stomach clenching as I do. At least there are no embarrassing references to how cute I think she is. Even if Eve did use Smush as a shield, there’s no way I can just put myself out there like that. The thought of it makes me want to fold myself up into a dark corner where no one can see my red face.
Sadly that isn’t possible, though, so I settle for ducking my head so Eve can’t meet my eye.
“Tell me when she answers,” Eve says as she saunters back to her room.
“She’s typing,” I yell after her before she reaches the stairs. “Where are you going?”
Eve pauses to give me a look, one foot on the stairs. “I have finals, Harp.”
Panic shoots through my veins. I have no idea what Alyssa’s about to say. What if she tells me she never wants to talk to me again? What if she tries to flirt?
I have no idea which one terrifies me more.
“Please,” I say, my voice cracking.
Eve’s lips are pursed so tight, I can barely see them as she makes her way back over to me. “What did she say?”
She leans across the kitchen island so that we’re huddled together over my phone.
please tell him I’m very sorry
I bite my lip. “What can we do with that?”
Eve stares at me, sighing. “Well, if you’d actually flirt—”
“Absolutely not.”
“Fine. Send her a picture of him with his dopey face, then.”
I grimace as I type, but Eve nods approvingly as she reads over my shoulder. I breathe a sigh of relief as I hit send on the photo, a perfect joke to go along with it, and give Eve a grateful smile.
—
Every time I see the bouncing ellipsis that means Alyssa’s typing, I run down the hall to Eve’s room. She’s working on her final project for one of her classes, a short film script, so she’s up even when I kick down her door at 2:14 a.m.
She is not, however, happy to see me.
“Please go to bed.”
I hand her my phone instead. She sighs, shaking her head at me as she takes it, scrolling through our chat history. We’ve spent the past hours talking about Alyssa’s favorite sitcom, which Eve knew all about because she’s writing a spec script episode of the show for one of her classes. I’m struggling to keep up with the conversation, since I’ve only watched a handful of episodes with Eve. I like it well enough, but I can’t talk about it the way Eve can, the way she can get right to the heart of the story while making jokes so funny they could’ve been lifted right from the actors’ mouths.
From there, we moved on to talking about our favorite snack foods, where I barely needed Eve’s help at all, and have now looped around to talking about TikTok again. I peer at our text chain over Eve’s shoulder.
Your video was so clever
She responds instantly.
Thanks!! I was really nervous. Making jokes about it after helped a lot.
Eve meets my eye. “Just talk to her, Harp.”
“I am,” I protest. It’s not my fault that hitting send makes my heartbeat throb in my fingertips and my head spin with nausea as the fear of sounding stupid floods my veins.
Eve types out a message and turns back to her work. I drop my gaze to my phone, and a horrible swooping feeling tears through my gut.
want to talk about it?
I’ve barely processed the words and their implication when my screen comes to life with a FaceTime call request from Alyssa. My throat seizes, and I hit Eve’s shoulder.
She doesn’t look up at me. “You better go back to your room and take that.”
“I hate you,” I huff before spinning on my heel and tearing down the hall.
I take a deep breath as I shut my bedroom door, but no amount of oxygen could calm my trembling insides. I arrange myself cross-legged on the bed. There’s no way to get out of this, not now, not after what Eve said.
I hit accept.
“Hey,” I say, forcing a smile when Alyssa’s face fills my screen. Too much. I look like an alien with a toothache. Tone it down.
“Hey,” Alyssa says back. Her smile is perfectly normal. No, better than normal—it’s like a piece of sunshine has lit up my room, even though it’s the middle of the night. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to at”—she pauses—“at two-thirty-one in the morning.”
I laugh. “My new routine of waking up extremely late and funneling as much junk food into my mouth as I can does not lead to a normal bedtime.”
It’s all I can do not to close my eyes and shrivel under my bed frame as soon as the words leave my mouth. Funneling junk food into my mouth is not a cute image.
Alyssa laughs, though, which is nice of her.
“Same,” she says. “Plus the three bottles of Coke I had at nine probably don’t help.”
“Three? You have a problem.” I try to sound teasing, but I probably come off condescending.
She laughs again, though. “Oh, that was just after dinner. You should see my recycling bin. It’s not pretty.”
“Mr. Ray would be so disappointed in you,” I say, thinking about the lab he made us do on soda and disintegration after we spent half a class period complaining about the school taking away the vending machines.
“Mr. Ray is wrong on that and many other counts,” Alyssa says.
I raise my free hand in surrender. “Can’t
