Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye
Chapter 9
Sophomore year
I shovemy way through the double doors and into the cafeteria.
It’s all lit up, sparkling, and beautifully decorated. Aurelia lights up in the far corner when she sees me, and I take a second to rearrange the dumb suit my father made me wear to this dance. She scurries over to me, grinning and bouncing up and down.
“Gunnar, you’re here,” she says. “I knew you’d come.” She blushes and looks away and I get the sudden terrifying notion that my new friend might just have a crush on me. I don’t think I feel the same way about her.
I gotta nip this in the bud before it becomes weird. That is, if we all keep hanging out with her.
“I’m here to see Andie and Cole,” I say over the music. I know she helped organize this dance, and I hope this awful music wasn’t her choice . She reaches over as if to wrap me in a hug, and I give her the warmest smile I can muster as I catch her wrists in my hands and let them drop. “Seen them?”
“Yeah, they’ve been dancing together.” Aurelia giggles, bouncing on the balls of her feet again. She is cute, admittedly. She just strikes me as kind of immature. Like the kind of person who likes the pop musician crooning through the speakers right now. Andie and I have been getting into this weird, bassy European techno lately. Why aren’t there any girls out there who like that kind of stuff?
I make a silent vow as I head away from Aurelia that when I throw my own parties, I’ll make strange, intense, cool fucking playlists. And the Aurelias of the world won’t be allowed to mess with them.
When I reach them, Cole is doing a stupid chicken dance with Logan, and Andie is helpless from laughter. I slip my arm around her waist and squeeze her before she knows it’s me. Like always. A part of me wants to know if she’ll ever jump or squirm away, and if I’d let her or just tighten my grip if she did, but she never has. She always lets her head fall back and lean on my shoulder. It’s how we’ve greeted each other since middle school.
“You two have been dancing together all night?” I ask, nodding over at Cole. She turns to me, hooks her arms around my neck, and smiles up at me. Her eyes are wide and ocean blue, lined with black in a way I’ve never seen before. I lean my head back to take her in. Her full lips are rosy pink. “You’re wearing makeup.” She rolls her eyes, embarrassed.
“Aurelia and Larissa made me,” she says, looking at the floor. I touch her chin, gently, and bring up her eyes to mine. “Go on, make fun of me. Get it over with.”
“Shit,” I say instead. “You look so pretty.” She flushes, and I think she might move away from me, so I wrap my arms tight around her waist and sway. I’ve held her before. We hang out and lean on each other, rest our arms on each other, all the time. For some reason, it feels different right now. And that might be her fault. She looks like herself, but a grown up, serious version of herself. Something about her is different right now.
She screws up her face, clearly deciding I was making fun of her.
“Shut up, Gunnar.” She punches my shoulder and I laugh.
“Are you and Cole dating?” I find myself asking her. She screws up her face.
“Why?”
“Are you?”
She shakes her head, kind of, but her hair moves in front of her face to hide her expression. “It’s stupid. It’s this whole complicated thing,” she says, and I barely hear her. For a second I’m not sure what to say.
“You like him?”
“Of course I like him. You guys are my best friends.”
“I didn’t know you dated your friends,” I say, and I’m not trying to be a dick but she punches my shoulder again. “Do you love him?”
Her eyes well up with tears, and I panic and step back from her. What the fuck did I do? After a while, she nods.
I don’t know why it wrings all the air out of my lungs, but it does.