Page 5 of Choosing Her

The group chat was first, of course, but they were all dead to me now.

Next was my mom, who probably would have been a good contender since she’d used me so many times to get out of bad dates herself, but I knew she would be at water aerobics right now and couldn’t pick up.

Next was my sister, Aspen. If she was closer, I bet she would have been happy to come interrupt the date in person, but since she lived at home, she wouldn’t be able to do that.

Even with four half-sisters, I was the only one in my family to go to boarding school.

I wasn’t sure how effective getting a phone call myself would be with Hanna busy wailing on the phone herself, but a quick scan of everyone else I’d texted in the past couple days—my dad, my other sisters, my step-mom—told me that there was nobody other than my traitorous friends who could come interrupt in person.

It also told me I needed to make some more friends because ninety percent of my texts were to my family and that was just depressing.

Guess my only option was Aspen, after all.

Crossy

No time to explain but I need you to call me with an emergency

I’d barely pressed send, before my phone started buzzing.

Hanna suddenly stopped yelling at her boyfriend and was frowning at my phone, which had lit up with a photo of me and Aspen from last summer on the beach.

From her perspective, I could understand why she wouldn’t immediately guess it was my sister calling, but I didn’t think she could judge me for picking up a call from another girl when she was on the phone with her boyfriend .

I tried to sound concerned as I raised the phone to my ear and said, “Hey Aspen, is everything okay?”

I wasn’t as good of an actor as Aspen, who was in drama club at school and seemed to thrive off me asking her to do stuff like this, but I wasn’t here to win an Oscar. I just needed to sell this enough that I could walk out of this date with my head held high.

“You need to get home now!” Aspen screamed on the other end of the phone. If I didn’t know her, I would have assumed something was genuinely wrong. “Our dad’s in the hospital and we need to get there now !”

I’d asked Aspen to do something along these lines a few times before and every time, she said something that couldn’t be possible.

In this case, it was the reference to our dad , because we only had the same mom, but different dads.

I asked her about it once, and she told me she did it so I didn’t have to worry at all that she happened to be calling about a real emergency at the same moment that I’d asked for a fake one.

It wasn’t something that I’d ever worried about, but I appreciated her thinking of it.

I did my best to put on a panicked expression as I looked at Hanna and said, “Sorry, I’ve got to go!” And then I didn't even wait for her to respond before I jumped out of the booth and ran.

Okay, so maybe I’d thrown out the idea of being a gentleman, but I’d done my best.

“Thanks, Aspen,” I said, once I was outside. “I owe you one.”

Her fake wailing stopped immediately. “Happy to do it. What did you need saving from?”

“Awful date,” I said. I heard the door chime as it opened again and I looked over my shoulder, scared that it was Hanna following after me for some reason, but I sighed in relief as I saw it was just the boys coming after me, all laughing so hard that I was worried they would pass out from oxygen deprivation.

And let me tell you, if they did, I wouldn’t be helping them.

They could save themselves, like they’d left me to do in there.

“Breaking the Saylor Curse?” Aspen asked sympathetically.

As the only person who had seen me that night, when I’d come stumbling back into our cousin’s house, covered in a girl’s lipstick and with a stupid smile on my face, Aspen knew the whole story of what happened between me and Saylor.

From that perfect first night to the moment I went to Naomi’s house for the first time and realized how badly I’d messed up.

“At this rate, it will never be broken.” I sighed and tipped my head up to the night sky.

It had been over a month of going on these ridiculous dates and I wasn’t playing any better than I had been when I started.

I couldn’t count the number of times Coach had pulled me aside and asked me what was going on.

I wished I had an answer for him that didn’t have anything to do with my messy love life.

“You know what my vote is,” Aspen said.

I groaned. “Don’t start.”

From the moment I told her about Saylor being Naomi’s sister, Aspen had made her opinion clear: she thought I should tell Saylor everything that happened and make her magically fall in love with me.

As much as I usually trusted her opinion implicitly, this was one area where I couldn’t take her advice.

Saylor had made it very clear from that first moment we saw each other again in the summer that she wanted nothing to do with me, and I didn’t think there was any way I could get her to stop and listen for long enough to explain how everything went down.

After Aspen and I hung up, I whirled on the guys. “All of you are traitors.”

Mako, Tino, and Bear—my supposed best friends—all stared at me with fake innocent expressions.

Well, Bear didn't really try to fake an innocent expression; he just stared at me in the same way he always did—flat and emotionless. But Tino and Mako, who I knew were the true masterminds behind leaving me to flounder tonight, were doing their best to look like they’d done nothing to me.

“I didn't know she had a boyfriend,” Mako said.

Even though he had said it twice over text already, it took me hearing it from his voice and the genuine sincerity in it to actually believe him.

It seemed like a pretty key fact to learn about someone you were setting up on a date, but I guess I could see how one of them would miss it.

I turned to Tino, who shrugged helplessly and said, “She answered the ad. I just assumed she wasn’t dating anyone.”

I took a deep breath and pressed my hands against my eyes, telling myself that I absolutely could not strangle my friends. It will be traced back to you. Everyone saw them come out right behind you. If all three of them turn up dead, it will be highly suspicious.

“I told you not to make an ad,” I said through gritted teeth.

“How else was I going to find a thousand girls for you to go on blind dates with?” Tino asked. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a single girl who's interested in you?”

He was just asking for me to punch him. I dropped my hands and glared at him. He just smiled back, in the same way he always did. I’d been friends with Tino for more than three years now and I’ve never seen him upset. It was like some physical impossibility.

“Tino, you know almost everybody in the whole school,” I said. He was the most social guy on the hockey team and one of the most desired, too. Though, like me, he didn’t go on many dates, because he only had eyes for one girl.

“Yeah but I can’t go up to a girl and break her heart by asking if she wants to go out with my friend ,” he said. “The ad sets up the right expectations.”

I groaned again and spun around, stomping back toward the boarding school campus.

When I looked back, Mako and Tino had their arms thrown around each other's shoulders and were taking giant wide steps, looking like they were knocking into each other with every pace.

Bear looked like he wanted to be literally anywhere else, which was understandable because so did I, especially once Mako and Tino started singing "Piano Man" at the top of their lungs.

I turned around again and tried to walk faster, hoping that nobody would think that I was with them.

I turned off the main path and cut across the basketball court behind the dorms to get to the boys’ dorm quicker.

But maybe that was a bad plan, because the lights that normally illuminated the space were off, leaving me in darkness—and if I hadn’t decided to cut through the dark area, then I wouldn't have run headlong into a girl doing the same.