“Absolutely,” Theo says.
“We'll see,” Josey says.
Theo sighs. “Josey...”
“You ever notice we don't have a lot of friends?” Josey says. “People don't like us.”
He smiles at her, and his hand creeps over and links his pinky through hers. “I thought you didn't care about that,” he says.
She ducks her head and gives him this shy little smile, her eyes just a little watery.
I hide my hands in my lap and link my own pinkies together.
5
My mom lets me borrow her car to drive down to Miami for Aanya's birthday. She kisses me and hugs me like I'm leaving her for a year, because my mother is a superstitious woman and thinks the one time she doesn't say a proper goodbye will be the time she gets the call that I'm dead in a ditch.
“Get it washed before you come home,” she says, handing over the keys. “All that Miami grime.”
I laugh. “You sure moved on quickly.”
She does this sappy little smile and says, “Yeah, well,” and I love her.
It doesn't hurt that she's been letting me get away with murder lately. Part of it is that she's so busy with the move and the wedding that she doesn't have time to police me, the way she used to in her single-mother-way. Some is I think, that she's trying to spoil me in this new family situation. Trying to show me that she and I are still the only members of the Dream Team. I'm milking it for things like getting the car for the weekend, but in all honesty I'm doing great with all these transitions, so I don't really need the special treatment.
I'm also completely full of shit, but whatever.
We had a week off from Alexis custody, which was a huge relief that I feel bad about. The kid just does not like me. She called me fat the other day, which isn't a big deal because I am a little, but she said it in front of my mom who is always concerned that her chubby-since-diapers daughter is going to out of nowhere develop body image issues, so that turned into a whole lecture for her that I'm pretty sure made her hate me even more. The two of us share a bathroom, and she does stuff like lock herself in there and play—I can hear her singing to her dolls through the door—for hours so that I can't get in.
So a week off from that was awesome, but honestly not quite as awesome as I walked around telling myself it was. My mother and Dominic are really excited about the wedding, which is great, but the greatness doesn't mean I want to hear them discuss how to address the save the dates for, and I am not hyperbolizing here, an hour and a half. This is so important to my mom, though; people have given her crap about how it's tacky for a woman her age to have a big wedding, but she's never been married before. She only went on few dates with the guy before an embryo of me showed up. My mother jokingly refers to me as a Catholic abortion, which other people find horrifying and I find hilarious. Stuff like that is why we're the Dream Team.
Jake answers Aanya's door and pulls me into a massive hug. “You. Have not been texting enough,” he says.
“I know, I'm sorry.”
“Too busy for us with your fancy new life?”
“Yeah, I've got a house now. I have to spend lots of time wandering from room to room.”
Jake looks at me like he's not sure if I'm serious.
And, God help me, it makes me miss Theo. Theo would know I wasn't serious. He'd think of something funny to say in response. He wouldn't look at me like that.
And I know that for a fact, because these I've been seeing quite a lot of him. At lunch the day after the diner I saw him and Josey sitting at a table meant for eight all by themselves. I was with a few girls from my History class who I thought were nice enough and we were standing around with our trays looking for a place we could sit, and they were scanning packed table after packed table until I pointed and said, “What about there?” and they made this whole show of pretending they hadn't noticed it before.
“Uh, there might be room over there,” this girl Kaitlyn said, pointing at a table over in the corner where there definitely was not room. They started shuffling towards it anyway and looked at me all expectantly.
“I'm going to try over there,” I said, and I swear they shrunk back from me like I was contagious. The part of me that wanted to back down, to say haha just kidding no lunchtime with the creepy seniors for me, was dwarfed not just by the part of me that said screw you I do what I want but also by the part that realized that as soon as I'd said I'd sit with them it was too late. It wasn't as if I had social history to fall back on.
So I plunked my tray down next to Theo's. “Hi.”
Theo smiled at me like his face was going to tear open, and Josey licked a bit of ketchup while she watched me in that same steady, narrow-eyed way she did back in the diner.
I stared right back, and finally she smiled, slow where Theo had
