That Infuriating Feeling: An Academic Rivals to Lovers Novel (Chasing Feelings Book 2)

Chapter 10

June, Saturday, 10 Weeks Before the Semester is Out

I set down the pen I’d been twisting in my lips and folded my arms over the open notebook in front of me. It was only our third session for this ridiculous history project, and my morale was already in the gutter. The library lights were starting to feel bright and hot, and we’d been sitting here long enough that exhaustion was taking over.

Oliver looked down at his worksheets, annotating with a pencil. He always used a pencil. I hated that he always used a pencil about as much as I hated that chunk of hair that often fell in front of his face when he looked down. Like, get a proper haircut, dude, and a proper writing utensil.

I was done working for the day. I’d ticked all my boxes, and that was enough for me. So, I grabbed my laptop and pulled up Facebook, typing Oliver’s full name into the search bar to find some embarrassing tidbits about the beast. Whether I liked it or not, we were spending time together. The least I could do was use it to humiliate him. He continued to work away, unaware of what I was doing.

Pulling up his profile, it wasn’t difficult to see that he wasn’t much of a Facebook user, though there were certainly a few giggle-worthy photos from before college on there. I stopped on one in particular. According to the date, the photo had been posted on March 13, 2012. Oliver sat at a round table, undoubtedly in the cafeteria of his high school. He wore a flannel—shocking—and he didn’t seem to be much shorter than he was now. With his best closed-mouth smile, he looked at the camera and leaned his forearms on the surface in front of him. Frankly, he was the only normal-looking one in the photo. There were two other people in it.

A smaller boy wearing thick headphones sat to Oliver’s right, staring at the camera with his arms tucked by his sides. The black sweatshirt he wore was about three sizes too big and contrasted sharply with his pale skin. He had long, scraggly hair and an expression that suggested he wasn’t in the mood to have his picture taken. I dragged my clicker over the tag, which read Jonah Alexander.

I looked at the third person in the picture. To Oliver’s left was…an ass. A literal ass. The ass had his feet planted on the chair with his back turned to the camera, holding up his giant T-shirt and sticking out his baggy jean-covered butt obnoxiously over the table. I giggled. He contrasted the other two boys immensely. I dragged my clicker over the bum. The tag read Kailyn Tamara Vitale Azuaje.

Ah. Okay. Maybe it was a girl-ass.

I clicked on her name and navigated to her page. I desperately wanted to find more photos of her face, but the single profile picture I was able to see was from too far away to get a good glimpse, and her account had more privacy settings on it than Oliver’s. No surprise there. The butt-brandishing girl already seemed smarter than him.

I returned to the picture I’d been looking at on Oliver’s account.

The next image I flicked to was from the same moment. They were still at the round table. Almost everything in the shot was the same, except Kailyn had turned slightly toward the guys and leaned up, her long hair now swinging fully into view. She was moving from her position, though I still couldn’t see her face. Her baggy, charcoal T-shirt swallowed the air around her like a mischievous shadow.

In the next picture, she was a blur behind Oliver, who was looking to his right at that point.

In the final picture, Kailyn had tackled Jonah out of his seat and onto the floor. Oliver’s teeth finally showed from beneath his smile as he looked down at his two friends.

They were so goofy, so childish, and I found myself grinning at the haphazard group. Then I remembered who I was looking at. It was Oliver. I shouldn’t have been grinning. I should’ve been hating.

I zoomed in on his face in the photo in which he looked the youngest and most embarrassing and took a close-up screenshot of it. Then, I navigated to the shared document we were using for project notes and pasted it right at the top.

◆◆◆

Oli

I worked on creating a detailed outline for us to follow for both the essay and presentation, mapping it all out in my notebook. Just as I finished up on the last section, I glanced at our shared document on my laptop so I could cross it off our list. Instead of finding our to-do list at the top of the document, where I’d strategically placed it so it was easy to find, I found a picture of myself from freshman year of high school. It was zoomed all the way in on my squishy cheeks, and I desperately wanted to burst out laughing. It was a good move by June.

Instead of laughing, I pretended I hadn’t seen it and navigated to Facebook, searching her full name to find a photo to use as revenge. I got momentarily distracted sifting through her pictures, unable to find one nearly as embarrassing as the one she’d used of me. She was annoyingly breathtaking and apparently always had been. While there weren’t any recent photos at all, there were plenty from the past. She almost seemedlike a different—happier—person in those pictures, and relatively popular, always out and about with random groups. I hated my mind for teasing me about the fact that she totally would’ve rejected me in high school, as if she wouldn’t do that now.

The best I could find was a picture from when she was probably about twelve, though it had only been posted a few years ago. She smiled brightly alongside a blonde girl whose tag read AlanaMiller. From the caption, I gathered that Alana was June’s bestie 4 lyfe and that she loved her 5ever. I hit the keys on my keyboard to initiate a screenshot of the young June’s face when my gaze snagged on a comment under the photo.

Fly high, Alana 3

I pulled my fingers away from the keyboard quickly and scrolled through the rest of the comments.

Hard to imagine a June without an Alana.

Sending so much love,June.

Hometown legends! We will always remember her!

We are all here for you.

The list went on, and on, and on. It was as if every person in LA proper had commented on the photo. My heart sank. I hardly knew what I would’ve done if I lost either of my best friends, though I can’t say I didn’t think about it frequently. Jonah’s tendencies were…concerning, to say the least.

I didn’t have the heart to take a close-up of June’s face in the picture and, honestly, I didn’t have it in me to find another one either. The poor fucking girl. A pit took form in my chest, an intense sadness for the person sitting across this table from me. I knew June’s walls stood tall, though I hadn’t been sure why. Maybe this was why.

I suddenly wanted to hug her, sit with her, take her out for a fucking milkshake; I don’t know. Anything to put a smile on her face. I obviously didn’t hate Juni as much as I tried to, and finding out that she was a real human with friends and precious memories really wasn’t helping my case.

I navigated back to our shared document and commented underneath the picture of my young self: Very funny. Then, I stood from my seat, rounded the table, and sat down in the empty chair next to her, looking along at her screen.

She was still scrolling through the few pictures on my account, giggling to herself at the particularly mortifying ones where my face was the reddest and I looked the most uncomfortable. It was the first time I’d ever seen her so blissfully amused, her cheeks crinkling into a grin as she chuckled, her hair pushed behind her ear to show her side profile. She looked obnoxiously beautiful.

“I bet you got all the ladies in school,” she teased, smiling at a picture of me holding up two peace signs in an Asking Alexandria T-shirt and neon green shutter shades.

“That would be a resounding no, whiz kid.”

“Still is,” she mumbled, clicking on Jonah’s profile from a tagged picture of the two of us together, shamelessly stalking my life.

“He’s my roommate now,” I said. Not that she cared. I stared at his profile picture, which was a cat wearing a halved tennis ball as a hat.

“Ah. Vitamin Boy. Seems like a goofy dude.” June flicked to his next picture, which was a golden retriever with a ferret on its head.

“Not at all. He left his profile up on Kai’s computer. She posted random stuff once a month for a year before he found out.” I chuckled to myself, thinking about how epic of a prank it was. She’d fully convinced Jonah his account was glitching because he spent too much time playing video games on sketchy sites, and she left just enough time between posting that it wasn’t too suspicious. I was just glad she never read his chats with me about how much he loved her. Then again, she was obnoxious, not invasive, so I guess it checked out.

“I don’t know who that is,” June drawled as if she literally could not care less who Kai was. She abandoned Jonah’s page, clicking rapidly on the back button until she returned to the picture of me and my two friends in the cafeteria from which I knew she’d taken that screenshot.

“That’s Kai.” I pointed to the girl with her ass to the camera.

June clicked on a new photo album. “I bet you two so fought over her.”

My lips curved up at that. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. When we first met Kai, she was about as awkward and unattractive as I was. I remembered the day like it was yesterday. Her jeans looked so tight and uncomfortable, and I could relate. Squeezing into clothes was not an easy thing to do. The T-shirt she wore had marks on the bottom like she’d been using it to blow her nose, and her bangs looked like they’d been cut with Crayola scissors. I gave zero shits what Kai looked like, but I can’t lie, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was about her that Jonah fell madly in love with that day. She did grow into herself eventually, for lack of a better phrase, but it was irrelevant to me. She was a cool friend and a good person, and that was that.

“Jealous?” I asked as June tried to zoom in on a picture of Kai’s face to get a better look, though the low-quality image was too pixelated.

“Oh, please. If anything I’m wondering if the poor girl needs to be saved from you two.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. She’s far too adventurous to settle for either of us.” I felt a little bad saying it, for Jonah’s sake, but it was true.

“Good.” June kept clicking through my photos and, fabulously, the next one was a photo of a pink-faced eight-year-old me wearing a platypus T-shirt, holding a stuffed platypus, standing in front of a platypus at the zoo. I was smiling so brightly in the picture, it honestly broke my heart.

The side of June’s face twitched as she fought to keep a solid expression. She turned to look at me silently, and I let a shameful moment of quiet stares stand between us.

“Care to explain this, Oliver?” she finally asked, her nose flaring with the giggles she held in.

I shook my head, pushing the corners of my mouth down. “That was a, uhm, trip to Australia with my parents.”

“For tourism and sightseeing, right?” She was obviously waiting for me to admit I’d gone just for the monotremes.

I shook my head again. I wish I could say my parents spent thousands of dollars on tourism and sightseeing. No, they genuinely spent thousands of dollars because I really liked platypuses and Australia was the only place to see one. But I mean, come on, they’re a fucking biological phenomenon. Electroreceptors, venomous spurs, and no stomach? Please. The tourism and sightseeing were afterthoughts.

It was odd to think that the father who barely spoke to me was the same one who’d bought me that T-shirt and funded that trip for my eighth birthday.

Ouch. Definitely didn’t want to think about that.

Momentarily deciding to forget the fact that June abhorred me, I picked a strand of her hair up off her shoulder and slid my thumb over it. I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to. There was something kind of familiar about sitting here with her and chatting about my mortifying past. She looked down at my fingers and then up at me before turning back to the computer without protest.

As much as we “hated” each other, I could tell June was strangely comfortable with me. She didn’t have to pretend to be nice and sweet. She didn’t really have to try at all. I fell at her feet either way, unfortunately.

“What’s your favorite animal?” I asked, hoping we could keep this momentary lull in our rivalry a bit longer.

She thought silently, pursing her lips and squinting her eyes before saying, “Dragons.” Fitting. She pointed to the picture on her screen. “Yours is dogs, right?”

I flicked her shoulder, and she snorted. My entire being lit up at the little oink-like sound. It was the best thing I’d ever heard. But my momentary joy flickered and snuffed out as she zoomed in on the next picture, which was of me and my cousins. She inspected the cityscape behind us.

“Where even are you guys in this one?” she asked.

“London,” I said quietly. I really, really, really did not want to talk about my family. On the rare occasions I met with the people in that photo, I was either bombarded with teasing about how much of a freak I was or thoroughly ignored. “That was our last family reunion.”

“Why have it all the way over there?”

“Because that’s where I’m from.”

June’s head whipped so hard to face me that I thought she might’ve broken her neck in the process. “You’re…English?” She folded her lips into her mouth and bit down on them, her cheeks puffing with a stifled laugh.

“Is that funny to you?”

She nodded quickly, her face about to blow like a balloon. She looked fucking adorable. It was really annoying. “Is there any chance I could get you kicked out of the country?”

I rolled my eyes. “No, there is not.”

“Dammit.” While I hoped she’d move on without any more questions, she continued to look at the photo intently. “And your family? Are any of them here?”

Shit. “Some.”

“Is everyone originally from England?”

“No.”

“Your parents must be so cool and cultured.”

“My mother—” I cleared my throat. Fuck. Did we really have to talk about this right now? Couldn’t she skip to the next picture or something? “My mother is cool.”

I felt her look my way once more, but I avoided her gaze, smearing my pointer finger over the table and watching the smudges it left behind. She did eventually flick to the next photo, and it was of me as a baby in the arms of a blonde man wearing an apron.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Oliver.” I wanted this conversation to end, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop responding. When Juni called, I answered.

“Who’s Oliver?”

I pointed to the picture, to the cafe in which the man holding me stood. “That’s where my parents met, at his cafe. They were both regulars. I guess his name stuck, because now it’s mine.”

“I love that,” she said under her breath with a smile. She actually seemed kind of fascinated by us. All of us. Perhaps she was an inspector of people, rather than a connector. “My parents found my name in a book of names or something. How stupid is that? It’s like they didn’t even care enough to think of one themselves.” She mumbled that last part as if she truly believed it.

“I don’t think that’s what that means,” I said softly.

She shrugged and clicked to the next photo. Shit. It was one of me with my parents. “Jesus, fuck, Oliver. Is that your dad?”

I sighed and stood, rounding the table to my usual seat. She could look at my pictures all she wanted, but I didn’t want to anymore. “Yes.”

“What is he, the world’s sexiest man? I mean, my god.” Awesome. Now on top of hating him, I had to be jealous of him, because June was apparently in love. I pulled my tongue ring between my teeth frustratedly. “And your mother? These humans are freaking gorgeous. What happened to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about my family.” I straightened my notebook in front of me and folded it over itself, having finished the work I set out to do today. “And it’s a beautiful name. Juni.”

Her stare burned into me as I gathered my things in silence.

“Well played, Oliver.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even compliment the girl without her thinking I had some sort of ulterior motive. Whatever. I was feeling far too many emotions to be able to sort myself out at the moment. Hatred for my family, stress for my schoolwork, worry for my friends, feelings for June and sadness for her late friend, fear of falling… It might’ve been rude of me, but I picked up my bag and left, wishing her a good weekend over my shoulder.