Page 9 of Fake Skating
Is that her?
I walked down the hallway, listening to Vinny’s conspiracy theory about Kyle and Cassie while my eyes stayed glued to the back of an unfamiliar blonde’s head. From what I could see, she was shortish, with wavy blond hair, and she was walking toward the history hall.
“Are you listening to me?” Vinny asked.
“Nope,” I admitted, my eyes laser-focused on those curls. “Not at all.”
It wasn’t because I was interested in anything about her— hell, no —but because I wanted confirmation of whether or not it was her. For some reason, I needed to know.
Was she here?
Was Dani actually walking the halls of Southview this very minute?
That just seemed impossible.
God, seventh-grade me would’ve fucking flipped at the idea.
“Zeus!”
I turned around and Tawnee was smiling, walking toward me, holding the scarf I gave her just before I left the bonfire.
“I told you I’d return it,” she said, and I had to force myself to smile.
And not look over my shoulder to track the blonde’s progress.
Tawnee was hot, Tawnee was cool, so why did I just want to crane my neck and see where the curls had gone? Dani was nothing to me, so I definitely didn’t need the mere idea of her to screw up any chance I had with Tawnee.
Although, to be fair, it was a long shot that Tawnee wanted something with me in the first place, because everyone knew she was still hung up on her ex.
“Thanks,” I said, and shoved it in my pocket.
“How’d you feel yesterday?” she asked, her expression telling me she thought I’d been wasted at the bonfire.
I hadn’t been, but I’d gone harder than I should have.
“Fabulous,” I said, smiling like I meant it. “Like a ray of sunshine, thank you for asking.”
She gave a little laugh as the bell rang, and I was glad when she went in the other direction.
Dammit.
I shouldn’t be glad.
I needed a reset, because two days ago Tawnee Flanigan was all over my radar, but this morning I just wanted her out of my sight so I could play Where’s Waldo? with some blonde’s head.
Dani was messing with my mind and I hadn’t even seen her yet, which was stupid. She was nothing to me anymore, literally nothing, and the sooner I stopped even remembering she existed, the better.
I put in my AirPods and cued up Hippo Campus. “Brand New” was the perfect song to make me stop wasting time and brain cells on someone who’d proved to me a long time ago that she wasn’t worth it.
“Dude, I met Mick Boche’s granddaughter.”
“What?” I nearly shouted the word at Richie as we walked into the lunchroom, but the confirmation that she was within these walls fucking rocked me.
“Yeah, Cassie’s showing her around, and Vin and I ran into them on the way to first period. She’s fucking cute.”
Vinny arched his eyebrow at me as if to say, Typical Richard, our hopeless romantic .
Richie grabbed a stack of like ten napkins because he was a neat freak and said, “She’s got that whole librarian thing working for her, where you just want to see what’s going on behind those glasses.”
“This isn’t Hallmark or Pornhub. Glasses are just glasses,” Vinny said. “She’s got bad eyes and probably a little stamp she uses in her home library that says ‘This book belongs to Miss Boche.’?”
“No less interested,” Richie said with a laugh.
“How do you know she’s Boche’s granddaughter?” I asked, unsure why I felt like I’d been zapped by a stun gun.
“Cass said her name is Dani; isn’t that what you said her name is?”
“Yeah,” I said, grabbing a tray and sliding it past the salad bar, though I suddenly had zero appetite. “That’s her.”
“I didn’t really get to talk to her because the bell rang,” he said, “but trust that I’m going to find her by the end of the day.”
That pissed me off for no good reason.
“I’d keep my distance if I were you,” I cautioned, the idea of Richie going after her making me insane even though I didn’t give a shit about her. “Because she was kind of a sketchball the last time I saw her.”
“What do you mean, ‘sketchball’?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound casual as I reached out to grab a chicken sandwich. “Just one of those people where you can’t really trust them because they’re all over the place. Sketchy.”
“Ooh, did the librarian dump you?” Vinny asked with a smirk as he set three pieces of pizza on his tray.
“No,” I said, because that was the absolute truth. You have to be with someone in order to dump them, and Dani was never with me at all. “We never went out; we were friends when we were kids, that’s all, and she was—”
“Sketchy, yeah, we get it,” Vinny interrupted.
“Tell me they have fiestadas today,” Kyle said as he ran up to us. “I need my lucky lunch.”
Kyle was our starting goalie and superstitious as fuck.
Like, worse than all of us put together.
“They have fiestadas,” Richie confirmed. “I saw three on Bauer’s tray when I came in.”
“If that skinny fuck made them run out, I’ll have to destroy him.”
“Are you even capable of destruction,” Vinny asked, “if you don’t have your lucky lunch first?”
“Oh shit,” Kyle said, shaking his head. “I don’t even know.”
I pretty much didn’t hear anything anyone said at lunch because I was irrationally annoyed that Richie had called her cute and my mom had called her gorgeous.
For starters, I didn’t give a shit.
But also, like, she shouldn’t be cute.
She wasn’t allowed to be gorgeous, dammit.
The last thing I needed was for Dani Collins to be beautiful and a student at Southview.
I had no room for distractions like that in my life. I put on my headphones and tried drowning out the chaos with “Come Apart,” but it was useless. The idea of her drove me nuts for the rest of the day, my head turning every time there was blond hair in my peripheral vision.
But by the time we got out early for the pep rally, at least I convinced myself it was normal behavior.
I was curious—that was all.
It was absolutely normal to wonder what a childhood friend looked like as an adult.
This wasn’t pathetic little Alec, searching for the girl he’d had a crush on since birth.
No; this was totally different.
I was different.
This was just me—Zeus—being curious if my shitty ex-friend had grown into a cute chick or not.
No big deal.