Page 54 of Heartthrobs Don't Date Wallflowers
I had no idea how to respond to that, so I just nodded, throat suddenly feeling like I’d swallowed a sandbag.
“Okay, well,” I said, fumbling with the door handle like I hadn’t just forgotten how to function, “thanks for the ride. I’ll, uh, see you later?”
I slung my backpack over my shoulder, avoiding any and all eye contact. But just as I went to close the door, he called out, “Hey.”
I turned back, a little too fast. “Did I forget something?”
“No.” He blinked at me, long and slow. “Just wanted to say, have a goodday, princess.”
My brain was basically melting at that point. I mumbled some sort of goodbye, spun around, and all but sprinted into the school, praying no one had seen us together—because if there was a way to stay low-key, pulling up with a literal celebrity wasnotit, even if we were so early that almost no one was here.
Which was why it took me until I was sitting down in first period and slowly catching my breath to realize exactly what he’d said.
Princess.
There was only one person in the world who called me that.
And it was most definitely not Zach Miles.
seventeen
I walkedthrough the whole day at school like a zombie, unable to focus on anything. I kept replaying Zach’s words in my mind.
Have a good day, princess.
There was no reason for him to call me that. It wasn’t like it was a normal thing to say to somebody that you barely knew, really. Why did he call me that? None of it made any sense. None of it. Unless...
I couldn’t even process the idea. I couldn’t even let myself think it. Because if the guy I was texting all this time was Zach... No. He couldn’t be.
He couldn’t be.
Between breaks, I would pull out my phone, waiting for a text from Not Zesty, something that would show me that he wasn’t who I thought he was. I had no idea what he could say that would prove it, but I found myself waiting for it anyway. Occasionally, I’d open the group chat and check on everything, but he didn’t text in there either, even though the others did. Iwatched Jude through all of English class that morning, noting every time it seemed like he was typing and how a message would come through. But everyone was replying so fast that I couldn’t time it perfectly to figure out which one of them he was. All I did know was that Jude being in the group chat only made it that much more likely that Zach was too.
No matter how many times I looked—and I was practically glued to my phone the whole day—no new messages came in from Not Zesty. I felt like he was avoiding me and there was only one reason I could think of for why he would do that—he knew he’d given himself up and he was waiting for me to make the next move.
I was ashamed to admit that when I watched the bonfire that night, I wore Zach’s sweater. I could tell myself all I wanted that it was just the first sweater I could find, that it was warmer than my other ones, that it went best with my outfit, but I knew exactly why I was wearing it.
The whole time I watched them, I waited for my phone to go off. I watched Zach in the backyard, too busy playing guitar to be texting, and waited for a text to come in from Not Zesty and prove to me that I had this all wrong.
But no text came through and I gnawing feeling that I knew why.
I would have stayed there all night if I could have, but the sound of a car turning onto my driveway around ten o’clock pulled me away—there was only one person who would be showing up this late.
“Poppy’s here!” I yelled as I ran back inside. I’d been looking forward to Poppy coming home for a visit ever since she left for school again after fall break.
But when she came running through the front door, duffel bags slung over both shoulders like some kind of chaos-filled airport scene, and shouted, “I got us Take Five tickets for tomorrow!” I was a little less excited than I probably should have been.
If it had been any other day, I would have screamed along with her. Sure, I wasn’t a massive fan of the band, but free tickets to any concert was something worth screaming about. But today? All I could think about was Zach and Not Zesty and wondering how on earth my sister managed to get tickets to see the one person I probably should have been staying far away from right now.
“How?” I asked, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me.
Poppy dropped her duffel bags right in the foyer and Mom sighed from as she walked in after Poppy and saw them. Poppy didn’t notice. She grabbed my hand and tugged me over to sit on the couch, still beaming like she’d just won the lottery.
Which, I guess, in her mind, she kind of had.
“Well,” Poppy began, clearly gearing up for a whole story, “at school, we had this raffle thing. You know, like, one of those campus events where they give away random prizes to make people show up to stuff no one wants to go to?”
I nodded. Not because I knew, but because I wasn’t about tointerrupt her now.
