Page 14 of Into the Mountains
“The notification!”
I can’t help but laugh. “Mom, that’s probably just a welcome email or something. There’s no way it’s someone responding to my profile for a date.” However, she turns the laptop screen to me and sure enough, there’s a notification from the godforsaken website lit up on the screen. I squeak and try to contort my body to fit underneath the table like I did as a child, hiding from the tickle monster.
“It’s not going to bite you, hon.” Her face ducks under the table. “C’mon, sweets. Be brave.”
Be brave. Sometimes being brave is harder than it sounds. I don’t want to be brave. I want to crawl into my childhood bedroom and hide under the covers until the sun comes up and the monsters under my bed disappear.
Looking at the hope on my mom’s face though reminds me why I agreed to do this in the first place.
I groan. “Fine.” I situate the laptop in front of me and take a deep breath before I make myself look. Navigating the website is easy. The hard part is figuring out how the hell this happened.
A notification sits there, covering part of the screen.
You have a new notification
What does that even mean? Mom must notice the confused look on my face because she answers my unspoken question.
“That means someone wants to go on a date with you.”
I put my hand on top of the screen, considering snapping the laptop closed and fully ignoring the date notification. “Question, how do you know all about this dating site all of the sudden?”
“Well, you know Betty has been alone for a while and she recently started talking about getting back out there and this is what she did.”
Betty is their next door neighbor and has been kind of like an aunt to me throughout my life. She doesn’t have any kids of her own, but always loved having me over. I helped her in her garden after school a lot, especially when her husband passed away two years ago. She had a really hard time with it, because the accident was sudden.
“Good for her.” She deserves someone in her life.
And maybe…so do I. Taking a deep breath, I push the laptop screen back open fully, the notification staring me in the face.
“It says a guy named Eli matched with me. So what do I do?”
She grabs for her forest green glasses on the other counter next to the fridge and puts them on before leaning over. “I think you just click here and it’ll take you to his profile and then you decide if you want to match with him.”
“And if I do, then what happens?”
“You talk, and then go on a date.” She says it in a tone like it should have been the most obvious thing in the world, which in hindsight, it probably should have been. But I have no clue what I’m doing. For all I know, this Eli person could be messing around.
“Wait, isn’t that—” I lean into her, blocking her view and before she can say anything else, there on my screen is the boy I was practically in love with through most of my high school years. The boy who was both a jock and an academic nerd. The boy who challenged me every single day to be better and smarterthan I was, to work harder just so I could beat him. The boy who annoyed me to no end. Elias fucking Hayes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ELIAS
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
SUMMER
“Man, I can’t believe you’re actually going back home for the summer.” My buddy, Alan, slaps me on the shoulder in the weird, friendly way guys do.
“I’m not going to my parents’ old place. No way in hell am I going back there. I’m staying with a high school friend of mine actually.”
“Oh, one of your nerd buddies?” my other friend, Asher, teases. He’s the one here for the full college experience. He doesn’t necessarily care about any of the classes, but mention a party on or off campus and he’s there within the next ten minutes without asking any further questions. Me? I ask questions. Probably too many, but I grew up in a household that taught me to ask too many questions. I didn’t learn that directlyfrom my parents either, it was something I had to figure out for myself.
I shove Asher hard enough for him to fall back onto the bean bag he was getting off of. He doesn’t bother trying to get back up, he just grabs a baseball on the shelf next to him and starts tossing it in the air. Asher is a good guy, but he’s still an idiot.
“So, what, you’re just gonna go home and do nothing all summer?”
“Not all of us have the trust funds to travel the world over break, Ash. And I don’t have the money to stay in the dorms, plus I don’t think that’s even allowed.”
