“Isn’t there someone else who can help?” Ashley asks. “Did you call her and see if one of her friends could take her dog?”
“I don’t have her number.” Not a lie.
“Can you ask someone who works at the vet office to give it to you?”
“Well, I mean, I did tell Tina I could watch her dog.” Ick, lying. “Apparently her daughter’s wreck was really bad and she’s going to be gone for like a month.” I stumble through explaining how I’m staying up super late and getting up before the sun, and it’s made me kind of loony and that I’m sorry about my vestibule hysterics.
“Your hysterics were cute.” She looks away like she knows I’m noticing her blush. “So you’re taking care of Chewbarka till like November?”
“Yeah. I just, I mean, I’m sure it’ll be fine. A person can’t die from lack of sleep, right? Like you’d just fall asleep instead of dying. I think.”
“Maybe don’t run that experiment to find out.” We reach her locker and she spins the combination lock. She tucks a strand of purple hair behind her ear and I notice that her pastel pink nail polish is chipped. “So, my mom’s a dog lover too. She might be cool with us keeping Chewbarka till Tina gets back. If that would help.”
A spark of hope darts through me. “Really?”
“We already have a dog, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. As long as you think Tina would be cool with it.” She pops her locker open. “Maybe you could come by this afternoon with her? My mom gets home at four thirty.”
My knees go rubbery at the thought of relief. But then I tense. Oakmont’s a huge district that serves seven suburbs. Ashley could live ten miles from me. “Where’s your house?”
“We live at the Glenview Apartments. Is that close to you?”
Relief again. “I’m in Green Oaks. Not far.” I take out my phone and check the distance from my place to hers. “It’s two point four miles. I can bike that easy.” Unless I run into a tree or a car because I’m seeing double from a gnarly case of the tireds.
Ash closes her locker and hikes her bag onto her shoulder. “If you’re gonna hit your locker before the buses leave, you better hurry.” She points up at the clock.
“Oh, right. I’ll text you when I’m leaving the . . . wait, what’s your number?”
“It’s 555-3265. Last four digits spell ‘DANK.’ Easy to remember.”
I laugh as I put her number in my phone. “How’d you figure that out?”
“My friend Griffey did like two seconds after I got my own phone. He was jealous ’cause his only spells ‘LAMP.’ See you in a while?”
“Definitely. Thank you times a million. You’re the best.” I start down the hallway, then turn and nearly collide with her. “Sorry. Um, I just wanted to say thanks. Again.”
“Duh, of course.” She gives me another one-dimple smile.
My brain goes a little goofy at the lopsided cuteness of her grin. She steps around me and is swallowed by the crowd.
Mitch has swim practice three days a week, so we only ride the bus together sometimes. On Wednesday when we got off at our stop and he went left and I went right, he didn’t say anything. But today he’s nosy. “What are you doing?”
“Nowhere. I mean nothing. I just feel like walking.”
“With all your crap?” He whacks my bag with his trumpet case. “You suck at lying.”
“You suck at trumpet.”
“Not as much as you sucked at saxophone, dropout.”
I reverse course and head for home. He follows, pestering me to tell him where I was going. He finally gets bored of me ignoring him and takes out his phone. He opens Insta and the first meme that shows up in his feed is one of Fiona’s, because he likes and comments on everything she does on there like that’s not creepy or weird. On the surface, it looks like they’re friends, but he nearly lost his mind in June at Cole’s party when we played spin the bottle and I was supposed to kiss Fiona. I thought Fiona would be mad if I didn’t kiss her because it would look like I was rejecting her in front of everyone. But I knew Mitch and Cole would be mad if I did it, since they both liked her. Which is so far beyond awkward it needs a new word invented to describe it.
I kissed her, hoping they’d both get over it. But Cole can’t forgive me for breaking the bro code, and soon after that party Fiona started dating a jerk named Ryan, who’s two years older than us, and somehow Mitchell blames me for that. He says it’s because I sucked at kissing, so now Fiona won’t date guys our age, but really, he’s been mad at me forever because I’m closer to Dad than he is, and the Fiona fiasco is just a new excuse to treat me like crap. So even though she has a boyfriend, even though I’ve told Mitch a hundred times I don’t like her that way, even though he joked around her once that she’d friendzoned him and she gave him an earful about why that’s a sexist concept that needs to die—he still acts like he’s mad at me for kissing her. When really, he’s mad that Dad and I did photography together and liked the same bands and Dad didn’t shout huzzahs at Mitchell’s sportsball games enough (which, hello, is because Dad’s an artist guy, not a sportsball guy).
I don’t know why Mitchell’s brain works that way, where he transfers all
