Page 51 of Don't Hate the Player
“Empty calories, dude. Hits your stomach like a cotton ball.”
Jake snorts and climbs into my car. “I’m going to have to figure something else out for real breakfast.”
“We can stop on the way; we have plenty of time before By—before our teams arrive.”
For all the time Jake and I have spent talking over the past few days, we’ve managed to avoid the topic of competing. After that first night in freestyle mode, we moved on to playing a few five-by-fives and a battle royale or two, but even playing alongside each other in the tournament’s match style didn’t bring the topic up. It wasn’t as if we were avoiding it, but we just had other things to talk about—GLOitself, his first few weeks at Hillford West, catching up on the years since we last saw each other—and it simply hadn’t come up.
Sitting in a car on our way to duking it out for a shot at playing each other in the finals makes that a little harder to avoid. I put the car in gear and swivel around to make sure no one’s behind me before pulling out of the lot and pointing us east toward Philly. Jake keeps busy getting the doughnut box open and taking a sip of his coffee. From the look of pain on his face, it’s too hot for him to keep using it as an excuse not to talk.
“Hey, uh, how’s your friend Penny? I convinced a few of the guys at my lunch table to vote for her on Friday.”
“She’s fine. I was just talking to her, actually. She”—kind of accused me of having a thing for you—“really wants to beat Audra Hastings. Thanks for the votes.”
“Is it weird that Audra’s running now? Wasn’t she, like,notrunning a few days ago?”
“Don’t get me started on that. It’s a whole thing. Can I have a doughnut?”
Hopefully Jake doesn’t mind being my breakfast concierge while I’m driving. I may be reckless enough to put on mascara at stoplights, but I don’t mess around with multitasking. I’ve seen way too manyGrand Theft Autostunt compilations not to know how quickly a car can flip over, or knock down a bunch of pedestrians, or zoom off a highway ramp and knock a helicopter out of the sky in a totally awesome but definitely fatal explosion.
“Sure. You want your coffee too? How many sugars?”
“Is this packet sugar or pocket sugar?”
Jake grabs at his pants to double-check. “Packet sugar, we’re good.”
“Four, if you have that many.”
He twists around in his seat to dig around in his sugar pocket and pulls out exactly four. “Perfect, that’s what I got.”
“What about your coffee?”
“I drink it black,” he replies. “I don’t want to like it too much or I’ll start seeing it as a beverage instead of a utility. Anxiety, you know. And ADHD.”
“It’s definitely a utility after the week we’ve had.”
“For sure.”
Jake passes me a doughnut (chocolate frosting, good choice), and we both sit in somewhat happy silence while we eat. I pass the street that leads to Jake’s apartment, which brings us closer to Hillford West. It occurs to me that I don’t know how Jake got to the Dunkin’ Donuts from his place; it has to be a few miles even if the drive is a relatively straight shot.
“Jake, did you walk to meet me this morning?”
He takes a few moments to answer since his mouth is full of doughnut. Connor would have just talked around it. “Yup. It’s like two and a half miles.”
I didn’t even think about what picking him up away from his apartment would have meant. I just didn’t want his parents to see me and ask questions, and didn’t know if anyone else from school lived in his building.
“What! I’m so sorry. I would have picked you up closer if I knew you were going to walk. I thought your mom or dad would drop you off.”
“My dad doesn’t really know I’m competing either. I mean I definitely told him, but I don’t think he listened to my half of that conversation. My half of any conversation, really.”
Suddenly Jake’s issues with feeling invisible seem like a lot more than having issues at a new high school. I’ve never met his dad; his mom was always the one who would pick him up from parties. She seemed like a nice lady, kind of distracted, but Jake never mentioned having any issues with her. Not like that’s a normal thing a thirteen-year-old brings up between Pokémon battles with a girl he sees once a year.
“What about your mom, though? I thought maybe she’d drive you.”
Instead of an answer, Jake offers me another doughnut. It’s chocolate again, so I look back at the box and see he really only bought four chocolate doughnuts. That was a gamble, but his consistency impresses me again. Jake likes what he likes, and I like it too.
“My mom, uh. She’s not around anymore.”
I swear to god, I should eat this doughnut with a side of my own foot.
