Page 2 of Choosing Her
I held onto the postcard as I walked into the dorms, then slipped it into the first trash can I passed. I wasn’t sure what Naomi thought I did with the postcards after she handed them off, but she’d never asked for one back, so I figured it was fair game for me to throw them out.
I walked into my room, ready to face-plant on my bed and not get up until it was time for dinner, but stopped short when I found two girls sprawled on my rug, doing homework.
“You know,” I said, as the door silently closed behind me, “you two do have your own room to hang out in.”
I probably should have been more surprised to see them in here than I was, but Poppy and Lilah preferred to hang out in my room whenever they had the chance. I’d stopped bothering to lock my door whenever I left, because every time I did, they ended up texting me to come by and unlock it. I was supposed to have a roommate, but she’d decided not to come to Hartwell Academy this year at the last second and another girl hadn’t taken her spot, so I was left with a two-person room by myself. Apparently, that meant my room automatically became a common room for my friends.
“But then we wouldn’t get to see you,” Poppy said, grinning up at me. Her wavy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail andshe was still wearing her uniform, like she’d come straight from class. Lilah was the total opposite, dressed in a pair of Hartwell branded sweatpants and a graphic tee, with her blonde hair falling loose around her face.
“I haven’t been here for hours. Youhaven’tseen me.” I started pulling off my riding clothes, not caring in the slightest about whether they would see me in my bra and underwear. After spending my whole life bouncing between boarding schools and summer camps, where I routinely shared rooms with other girls, I’d lost all sense of modesty. I peered over her shoulder at the textbook she had propped up on the ground. “Math?”
“We’re both going to fail this test,” Lilah groaned, pressing a hand to her forehead. Poppy looked like she was silently laughing at her roommate as she looked at me. I held back my laugh at Lilah’s dramatics as well and finished pulling on some pajamas, before dropping between them.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “I took this class last year. I bet I can help.”
Lilah looked at me with big eyes. “You already took this class?Why?”
She sounded so bewildered that it made me laugh. “I wanted to get ahead of my math courses so I have time to take all the courses I want next year.”
It was less that I wanted to and more that this was one of the few areas of my life my parents cared about whatsoever. They chose the exact courses I was going to take through all of high school and contacted the guidance office for me to make sure that I could fit all the courses into my schedule. Since Hartwell Academy prided itself on the academic success of its students, they were happy to accommodate anything my parents asked for. Not to mention, the generous and “entirely unrelated” donation my parents offered the school at the end of everysemester that went well for Naomi and me. Since they knew next to nothing about either of us, our grades were the only way for them to judge whether our lives were going well, so keeping them high was the biggest priority.
“None of it makes any sense,” Lilah complained. She turned the textbook so I could read it better and waved a hand over the whole thing. “None of it. I don’t understand.”
“Okay, well maybe we should start a little earlier,” I said. “I mean, at what point did you stop understanding what the teacher was talking about?”
She just stared at me helplessly, so I slid her notebook over to myself and started flipping back through the pages, hoping to find the beginning of the unit. Instead, I found about two pages of notes—concerning, given that we were a month into the school year—and a page titled HOW TO MAKE LEVI BARRETT FALL IN LOVE WITH POPPY.
“Lilah, no wonder you don’t understand,” I said, pushing the notebook back toward her. “You don’t take any notes.”
“Well, who needs math when I’m going to become a matchmaker?” Lilah asked. “The two have nothing to do with each other!”
“But graduating high school might help it,” Poppy said lightly. Where Lilah looked like math made her want to spontaneously combust, Poppy looked incredibly at ease as she scribbled down equations, kicking her feet in the air absentmindedly.
There was a knock on the door, and before I could even think of standing up, the door swung open and my sister stepped inside, her eyes immediately zeroing in on me.
“I need a favor,” she said.
She always just walked right into my room like this, as if we were in our house instead of at boarding school. I’d tried to tell her that the etiquette was different in dorms, but she rolled hereyes and said that since she’d been at boarding school longer than me—by one year—that she would know better than me.
She chucked a canvas bag onto the ground and it landed heavily next to Poppy’s textbook.
“Thanks?” I said, although it came out more as a question than a statement. Naomi grinned like I’d said something funny.
“It’s Caleb’s stuff. I need you to give it back to him.”
Lilah and Poppy both looked up at that, sharing a wordless glance. I didn’t need to look at them to know what they were thinking—why was my sister making me talk to her ex-boyfriend, when I disliked him even more than she did? And the answer would be simple: she didn’t know how much I hated him, because I’d never told her anything about us. How exactly was I supposed to explain to my sister that before she met her boyfriend, I’d kissed him?
Not that Poppy and Lilah knew that story, either. I’d let them believe that I just didn’t like Crossy because he annoyed me, not because he’d done anything terrible to me. And they already knew Naomi’s history of dropping boys the moment she got bored of relationships, so it wasn’t like their relationship had gone up in flames in a way that meant she couldn’t stand to see him due to their personal history.
“I’m not sure I can,” I said. “I’m studying and?—”
“Well, I can’t do it,” Naomi said. She always steam-rolled over people’s arguments in disagreements, so we couldn’t have rational discussions. It was a tactic I knew well, since she’d learned it from our mother. “I can’t see him.”
“Well, I?—”
“Besides, I’m going out tonight,” she continued. She wasn’t even looking at me now. She’d pulled out her phone and was using it as a mirror as she fluffed her dark brown hair. Two more things she’d learned from our mother: looks mattered more than anything and never let someone have your full attention.Everything she did was a power move of some sort to make the other person feel small. “I won’t have time to give it to him before curfew.”
I looked over her outfit of the tightest skinny jeans I’d ever seen and a crop top that pushed her cleavage up, and guessed that she was going on a date with a new guy, which meant she was probably going by the boys’ dorms anyway to meet him. Meaning, she absolutely did have time and just didn’t want to do it.
