Chapter 2
two
Present Day
I woke up with my face smooshed against a fuzzy purple rug. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the most uncomfortable thing I’d ever used as a pillow, but it lost points for causing pieces of lint to stick to my mouth. I groaned and stretched, my back cracking as I did so.
“Be quiet,” Violet mumbled. I twisted around to look at her.
Her head and left arm were hanging off the bed, and she was still wearing her blue graduation dress,her red hair was sticking up in every direction, mascara was smudged around her eyes, and some drool was hanging from the side of her mouth.
“You look ridiculous,” I said. I rubbed my hands over my eyes and ended up pulling off my false lashes on one side. I grimaced in disgust as I looked at it. Why hadn’t I taken off my makeup last night?
“Look in the mirror, then say that again,” Violet said.
I guess I deserved that. I groaned again as I got onto my hands and knees, then slowly pushed myself up to standing.
I could barely keep myself up straight and felt like I might be sick, but I managed to stumble my way toward the bathroom. “Where are you going?”
“Shower.”
I would have liked to stay in bed—or on the floor, in this case—but our school stupidly scheduled the day after graduation as the time we had to come in and clean out our lockers.
We could go at any time before four o’clock, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to wipe all the remnants of the graduation party off, so it was better to give myself some extra time.
Standing definitely wasn’t the most comfortable position for me right now.
I rubbed my fingers against my temples, begging my head to stop pounding. “I have the worst headache.”
“Join the club.”
I chuckled to myself as I remembered how Violet had said over and over that she wouldn’t do anything she would regret last night, drinking included.
I guess all of that got thrown out the window pretty quickly.
The ceremony itself was pretty boring, but the after-party was where the fun was.
When Violet and I first got there, one of the cute boys in our grade gave me a drink and asked me to dance, and after that the whole night became a bit of a blur.
A very fun blur.
After showering, I changed into the spare clothes I’d left here yesterday and walked back into her room. Violet was sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through her phone. When I came back in, she looked up and blinked in surprise. “You’re dressed.”
“Well, I didn’t think I wanted to spend the whole day in my graduation dress, personally,” I said. “Now, I won’t tell you what to do, but I think it might be best if you get changed before we go to school. People might get a little confused about our different styles, you know?”
Violet huffed a laugh and stood up. “Yeah, you’re right. Wouldn’t want to confuse people.”
As always, she bounced back to her usual self very quickly and an hour later, if I hadn’t seen firsthand how terrible she looked this morning, I never would have believed it happened.
I, on the other hand, looked like a veritable mess.
I did my best to look as normal and presentable as possible, but there was only so much I could do when I still felt like crap.
“You should really be the one driving,” I said as we waited for our drinks in the Starbucks drive-through on the way to school. Violet frowned as she looked up from her phone.
“But it’s your car.”
“I don’t care.”
She laughed. “You’ll feel better once you have coffee.”
“Doubtful.” I rubbed my index finger and thumb along my forehead, wishing I could have just slept through the day. Nothing good came out of going to school voluntarily.
The car in front of us drove off, finally allowing us to pull up to the window.
“Welcome to Starbucks,” the boy working there droned on as he prepared the card machine for me to pay. “Your total is $24 today.”
He finally looked up at me as he turned the card machine toward me and did a double-take. It was so small that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been looking directly at him.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked as I pulled my card out.
He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe I was talking to him. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to either answer or give me the machine so I could pay. As it turns out, he did both at the same time.
“Have I seen you around before?” the boy asked.
I glanced at him briefly to double-check, but I was pretty sure we had never met.
If anything, he might have been a couple of years behind me at school — I didn’t really pay attention to anyone that I didn’t know, so I couldn’t be sure.
Either way, I wasn’t sure if he actually thought we had met or if he genuinely thought it was a good pick-up line.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I tapped my card on the machine, but instead of handing it back over to Violet as I originally planned to, I leaned down to grab my wallet from the floor by her feet.
I could feel the boy’s eyes raking over my back the entire time, and when I sat back up, I made sure to flip my long, wavy hair over my shoulder and blink at him innocently.
Unsurprisingly, the boy’s jaw had dropped open in the time I was looking away, and he seemed to forget what his job was.
I glanced at Violet, who shook her head and sighed.
She was well used to me playing with boys’ hearts by now.
“Could we get our drinks?” I asked, giving him a small smile. The boy blinked a couple of times and looked around haphazardly.
“Your drinks,” he repeated back to me. “Yeah! Um… I’ll be right back.”
He spun around and walked off. I laughed and looked at Violet again.
“You’re right,” I said. “I do feel better.”
“You cannot go out with him, Madison,” she said. “He looks—at most—fifteen.”
“Relax, I’m not planning on actually doing anything,” I said. I raked my fingers through my hair, wincing as they got caught in tangles. I guess I hadn’t done a very good job of brushing my hair this morning. “I’m just having fun. Maybe we can set him up with one of the underclassmen I work with.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure he’ll love that. ‘I don’t want your number, but can I give it to all my coworkers.’”
“Hey, he could do a lot worse than some of them.”
“I’m sure he could, but I don’t know that he’ll see it that way.”
I was stopped from giving any sort of response by the boy coming back with our two drinks. Where he’d had to go to find them, I had no idea.
“Here you go,” he said. I grabbed them carefully and handed each of them to Violet carefully. The edge of my fake nails scraped the boy’s hands as I took the small brown bag of food from him, and he pulled his hand back like I’d shocked him.
“Sorry,” I said. He glanced behind him, then leaned forward and cleared his throat.
“Hey, uh, I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, “but… do you think you would want to meet up sometime?”
Beside me, Violet basically choked on her drink. She tried to cover up her laugh with coughing, but I knew the real reason she choked.
“Sorry, I have a boyfriend,” I said, the lie slipping off my lips a little too easily. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “But thanks.”
“Yeah.” He looked a little disappointed, but not so much that I felt guilty. “Have a good day.”
“You too.”
I pulled away without rolling up my window or putting the food away. No need to stick around and make everything even more awkward.
“Shut up,” I said to Violet as she continued to snicker.
“Hey, I think it’s good you’re putting yourself out there,” she said. “You haven’t dated anyone in weeks—”
“Three and a half weeks, thank you very much,” I said haughtily.
“Which is like a lifetime for you.”
I shook my head and grabbed my drink from the cupholder, taking a long sip. The hot coffee felt like it was burning my mouth, but I wasn’t complaining—anything to remove the pain from my head.
“Oh, we should go over my checklist,” Violet said. I laughed as she dug her paper out of her bag. “Okay, cleaning out our lockers is the last thing we have to do for school. Then, tomorrow you have that thing for work—you know what it is, right?”
“Of course,” I said. I was actually more surprised that she knew I had to go in.
Before my first actual week of work, I had to go in briefly to fill out some paperwork, “meet” my supervisor, and go over my expectations for the summer.
I understood better why they needed me to do it last year when I was new, but doing it now just felt like an unnecessary reason to have to see my awful supervisor, Courtney, who absolutely hated me.
I wanted to limit my time near her as much as humanly possible.
“Okay.” Violet checked something off on her list. I glanced away from the road for a second to look at her list, but I couldn’t read anything from this distance.
“Did you really have ‘remind Madison about her work meeting’ on your checklist?”
“Well, I knew you wouldn’t have it on yours,” Violet said.
“I don’t have a checklist.”
“Even more reason for me to have it on mine,” she said. “Okay, so tomorrow evening is Jaxon’s pool party. And the day after is his second pool party.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Why are there two?”
Jaxon was the most popular guy in our grade, and he had an end-of-year pool party every June, so I wasn’t surprised about the one tomorrow. But I didn’t understand why we were going to a second one.
“This one’s just for us, and Sabrina and Eli,” Violet said. Her cheeks tinged red as she added, “One of the perks of dating him.”
Right. Even though it had been a few weeks, I wasn’t used to the idea that Violet and Jaxon were dating now.
He’d been in love with her basically since the moment he’d met her, but she had been insisting forever that she could never fall for him.
If I was being totally honest, I always thought they would get together eventually.
Still, I had a little whiplash from how it had all come about—they had suddenly announced they were together before our grad trip, then afterwards, Violet admitted to me that it was actually a fake relationship for mutual benefits between them, but, then at prom, they officially got together.
I would get used to them being together soon, but right now, my mind still felt like it was spinning.
She chewed on the lid of her pen as she looked at her list in deep thought. “Now, onto summer plans…”
“Violet,” I said. I dropped one of my hands from the steering wheel to grab her hand and squeeze. “Please tell me you haven’t scheduled fun into your summer.”
I couldn’t really see her, but it wasn’t hard for me to imagine the way she must have rolled her eyes.
“Don’t make fun of my schedules, Madison.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I didn’t schedule fun,” she said. “I just have a list of some stuff we should do.”
“Okay…” I said hesitantly. “I guess that’s fine.”
“It’s more than fine; it’s great,” Violet insisted. She moved my hand back to the steering wheel, always a stickler for safety. “This way, we know we won’t waste the whole summer doing nothing outside of work. Don’t you want to have fun before we go to university?”
I sighed. “You know I do.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the main thing—the person—I wanted wasn’t on that list. Not to mention that my brother would kill me for even thinking about it.
“And my list will make sure that you do,” Violet said as we pulled up to a red light. “Hey, is that Courtney?”
Just the sound of my supervisor’s name sent a chill down my spine and made me want to hide in the backseat of my car.
My motto of the summer last year had been that the only time Courtney liked me was when she couldn’t see me.
Anytime I had a break, I would get out of the pool before she could even realize what was going on, and would beeline for the changing room or one of the other designated areas that I knew she never ventured into.
“Where?” I asked.
“Over there, by the cable box,” Violet said. My eyes scoured the intersection, looking for her classic dirty blonde high ponytail. “Oh, she’s kissing that boy now. I can’t see her face.”
I finally saw what Violet was talking about and it took two seconds flat for me to recognize that it was definitely Courtney. I may not have seen her often outside of school or work, but even in her regular clothes, I would recognize her anywhere. Just like I would recognize the boy she was with.
A lump formed in my throat as I watched Charlie Owen pull away from Courtney and brush his thumb across the side of her face.
I shouldn’t have been surprised; like me, he was always dating a new person every other week, and the two of them ran in similar circles.
Heck, Courtney had spent half of our staff meetings last year flirting with all the lifeguards, Charlie very much included.
It was naive of me to assume that he would never flirt back.
“I think they put more espresso in this drink than I wanted,” Violet said, completely oblivious to the mental anguish she had caused me by pointing out Courtney.
“I wonder if…” I was pretty sure she was still talking, but I didn’t catch it as I watched Charlie and Courtney start to kiss again.
Her back was pressed against the cable box now, so she was mostly hidden from view, but there was no missing him.
No mistaking the way his hand slipped into her back pocket or how he would pull away occasionally to whisper something in her ear.
Gosh, would this red light ever turn green? It was like the universe wanted me to see this and remind me just how off-limits Charlie was to me.
I probably stared at them for too long, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away. I wondered what he said to her when they were hugging like that. Did he tell her he loved her? That he wanted to spend every moment of the day with her like I did with him?
Did he tell her she was the best kiss of his life… or was that reserved only for me?