Page 88 of The Summer of Everything

Signs Your Crush Isn’t Into You!!!

5. If your crush doesn’t care about you dating other people, GAME OVER!

“Yeah,” Wes whispers dryly. “But it’s a start, right?”

Nico doesn’t meet his gaze. He picks at a hole forming on the knee of Wes’s jeans.

“Well,” Wes says, darkly, “How wasyourdate?”

Nico tips his head back, his eyebrows lowered. “What date?”

“The redhead. The one you left the store with instead of being at open mic night.” Intentionally, Wes leaves out that he was also absent from the event. That’s beside the point.

“Eve?”

Of course she has a biblical, genesis of the world, name.

“Eve Gomez?” Nico asks, incredulous. “Eve Gomez, Wesley.”

Wes is lost.

“Eve went to high school with us. She transferred before junior year.” Nico snatches a slice of pizza. A lone pepperoni falls in his lap. He brushes it away before continuing. “She found me because Cooper tagged me on IG. She’s one of his followers.”

The entire Milky Way Galaxy follows @coopsarrow.

“She has mad connections at Disneyland,” Nico says. “The twins’ birthday is in October. We went to grab a bite to eat, where she told me about her budding musical career via some YouTube viral video.”

He shakes his head while chewing. “I haven’t landed a job around Palo Alto yet. She promised to hook me up with day passes so I could at least have a gift for the twins.”

Wes chugs the rest of Nico’s soda, unblinking. A throbbing knot forms behind his right eye. In his head, he’s repeating four words:It wasn’t a date.

“Wow, your face.” Nico points a half-eaten crust at him. “Me and Eve? She’s dating this really awesome nonbinary amateur DJ, dude.”

Yup. Wes is an idiot. He’s also doing the opposite of what he should be. He’s not moving on from Nico. As if this one misunderstanding disproves all the other bullet points from his list. Nico’s not into him; Manu is. But here Wes is, slack against Nico’s side, as he demolishes what’s left of the pizza.

“Okay, Wesley:Mario Kartor kill zombies?”

Wes doesn’t fight the tide. The pull of comforting doom rather than refreshing newness takes him under before he can catch his breath. Manu’s a promising unknown. Nico’s a certain unhappy ending.

“Whatever,” Wes whispers as Nico reaches for the game controller.

Either way, he’s going to lose.

Chapter Twenty

Marks & Marx, LLP ison the first floor of a two-story building in the middle of Venice. For a small law firm, it’s well known, but that’s due to all the bright billboards with Al Marx’s smiling, wrinkled face across the city. As an intern, Leo is given a tiny cubicle in a corner. Shelia, the office manager, has strict rules against visitors sitting at interns’ desks, so Wes is seated at a large, round wooden table in the conference room. The room reeks of dust and vanilla air freshener.

Wes sneezes twice.

“Bless you,” Leo mumbles, mutilating a pen cap with his teeth. He’s sitting across from Wes with a stack of files, leafing through pages and pages of documents.

“Thanks.”

Leo hasn’t said much else. Their silence is filled by the gurgling of a state-of-the-art water cooler in a corner and Wes’s humming. He’s got Sheryl Crow on the brain. Honestly, all Wes wants to do is have some fun before the sun goes down, but he’s stuck here with Leo.

Marks & Marx, LLP has a central theme: gray, beige, and dull.

Wes squints at the little worry lines creasing his brother’s forehead.When did Leo get this old?

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