Page 5 of Choosing Her
I will give 20 dollars to whoever gets me out of this date asap
The boys all howled behind me, and I resisted the urge to bang against the divider between the two booths. Clearly, none of them were planning to come and help me. They were all enjoying this way too much. I would have to think over how I was going to get them all back for this soon, but right now, Ineeded to find someone else to get me out of here. With how the girl was sobbing, I wasn’t sure if she would notice if I just got up and walked away, but I didn’t want to risk hurting her even more when she was in such a vulnerable state by just walking out on her.
I quickly scrolled through my contacts, wondering if there was anyone else who could get me out of this, although I wasn’t sure what anybody could do to help. Make Hanna just as uncomfortable as she was making me so that she would decide to leave? I wasn't sure that was possible—it wasn’t like I had an ex-girlfriend to get back together with on the phone.
I definitely wasn’t calling Naomi to get back with, that was for sure.
My contacts list was too much of a mess, filled with a ridiculous amount of family members I’d only met once and every person I’d had a class project with, so it was impossible to find anyone good in this list. I switched over to my messages app, looking at the last few people I’d texted, who were more likely to be able to get me out of here anyway.
The group chat was first, of course, but they were all dead to me now.
Next was my mom, who probably would have been a good contender since she’d used me so many times to get out of bad dates herself, but I knew she would be at water aerobics right now and couldn’t pick up.
Next was my sister, Aspen. If she was closer, I bet she would have been happy to come interrupt the date in person, but since she lived at home, she wouldn’t be able to do that. Even with four half-sisters, I was the only one in my family to go to boarding school. I wasn’t sure how effective getting a phone call myself would be with Hanna busy wailing on the phone herself, but a quick scan of everyone else I’d texted in the past couple days—my dad, my other sisters, my step-mom—told me that therewas nobody other than my traitorous friends who could come interrupt in person.
It also told me I needed to make some more friends because ninety percent of my texts were to my family and that was just depressing.
Guess my only option was Aspen, after all.
Crossy
No time to explain but I need you to call me with an emergency
I’d barely pressed send, before my phone started buzzing. Hanna suddenly stopped yelling at her boyfriend and was frowning at my phone, which had lit up with a photo of me and Aspen from last summer on the beach. From her perspective, I could understand why she wouldn’t immediately guess it was my sister calling, but I didn’t think she could judge me for picking up a call from another girl when she was on the phone with herboyfriend.
I tried to sound concerned as I raised the phone to my ear and said, “Hey Aspen, is everything okay?”
I wasn’t as good of an actor as Aspen, who was in drama club at school and seemed to thrive off me asking her to do stuff like this, but I wasn’t here to win an Oscar. I just needed to sell this enough that I could walk out of this date with my head held high.
“You need to get home now!” Aspen screamed on the other end of the phone. If I didn’t know her, I would have assumed something was genuinely wrong. “Our dad’s in the hospital and we need to get therenow!”
I’d asked Aspen to do something along these lines a few times before and every time, she said something that couldn’t be possible. In this case, it was the reference toour dad, because we only had the same mom, but different dads. I asked her about itonce, and she told me she did it so I didn’t have to worry at all that she happened to be calling about a real emergency at the same moment that I’d asked for a fake one. It wasn’t something that I’d ever worried about, but I appreciated her thinking of it.
I did my best to put on a panicked expression as I looked at Hanna and said, “Sorry, I’ve got to go!” And then I didn't even wait for her to respond before I jumped out of the booth and ran.
Okay, so maybe I’d thrown out the idea of being a gentleman, but I’d done my best.
“Thanks, Aspen,” I said, once I was outside. “I owe you one.”
Her fake wailing stopped immediately. “Happy to do it. What did you need saving from?”
“Awful date,” I said. I heard the door chime as it opened again and I looked over my shoulder, scared that it was Hanna following after me for some reason, but I sighed in relief as I saw it was just the boys coming after me, all laughing so hard that I was worried they would pass out from oxygen deprivation. And let me tell you, if they did, I wouldn’t be helping them. They could save themselves, like they’d left me to do in there.
“Breaking the Saylor Curse?” Aspen asked sympathetically. As the only person who had seen me that night, when I’d come stumbling back into our cousin’s house, covered in a girl’s lipstick and with a stupid smile on my face, Aspen knew the whole story of what happened between me and Saylor. From that perfect first night to the moment I went to Naomi’s house for the first time and realized how badly I’d messed up.
“At this rate, it will never be broken.” I sighed and tipped my head up to the night sky. It had been over a month of going on these ridiculous dates and I wasn’t playing any better than I had been when I started. I couldn’t count the number of times Coach had pulled me aside and asked me what was going on. I wished I had an answer for him that didn’t have anything to do with my messy love life.
“You know what my vote is,” Aspen said.
I groaned. “Don’t start.”
From the moment I told her about Saylor being Naomi’s sister, Aspen had made her opinion clear: she thought I should tell Saylor everything that happened and make her magically fall in love with me. As much as I usually trusted her opinion implicitly, this was one area where I couldn’t take her advice. Saylor had made it very clear from that first moment we saw each other again in the summer that she wanted nothing to do with me, and I didn’t think there was any way I could get her to stop and listen for long enough to explain how everything went down.
After Aspen and I hung up, I whirled on the guys. “All of you are traitors.”
Mako, Tino, and Bear—my supposed best friends—all stared at me with fake innocent expressions. Well, Bear didn't really try to fake an innocent expression; he just stared at me in the same way he always did—flat and emotionless. But Tino and Mako, who I knew were the true masterminds behind leaving me to flounder tonight, were doing their best to look like they’d done nothing to me.
“I didn't know she had a boyfriend,” Mako said. Even though he had said it twice over text already, it took me hearing it from his voice and the genuine sincerity in it to actually believe him. It seemed like a pretty key fact to learn about someone you were setting up on a date, but I guess I could see how one of them would miss it.
