“It’s not like he would know,” I mutter, but at this point, I’m out of steam on this argument. Even if she gave in and agreed to invite him, I would be too afraid she’d make Vince feel unwelcome now.
“No,” she says, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head.
“Well, I’m not on board for a party anyway,” I tell her with a quick shrug. “If you want to hang out, I can hang out, but I can’t get away for a whole night with drinking and… the governor’s son’s kind of a twatwaffle anyway, so…”
“You won’t come to my party because I don’t want to invite Vince Morelli,” she says, staring at me in disbelief.
“It’s not because of that,” I say, trying to brush it off.
“Bullshit. Hoes before bros, bitch. What are you doing?”
“I’m always the one that makes sacrifices,” I snap. I don’t mean to say it, even if it’s true. “I’m always the one who comes to the group hangout even though you invited the chick who made out with Jensen when we were dating, or totally overlooks the fact that—knowing how much I liked him, you made out with Jace at the Fourth of July cookout, or—actually, can people just stop making out with every guy I’m interested in? Hey, maybe you can go make out with Vince now, or did I finally pick someone too beneath you?”
Lena’s jaw hangs open, disbelieving that her passive bestie is the one being a bitch for once.
“You need to take some fucking Midol,” she informs me, before ditching me to head to her first class alone.
—
Unsurprisingly, after that stupid fight with Lena, my day drags ass. I do finally perk up when I get to my class with Vince, even if he gets there just before the bell again.
At least when class is over, he doesn’t rush out again. I walk out with him.
“You look tired,” he observes.
“Thanks,” I return, dryly. He’s not wrong though.
Flicking a glance in my direction, he asks, “Wanna get out of here?”
I blink in surprise. “What do you mean?”
Cocking his head to the side, he says, “Let’s bail.”
“You want to ditch?”
“We can get some pizza before you have to pick up the kids.”
That’s an offer too tempting to refuse, and since I did alienate my lunch companion this morning, I spent lunch studying instead of eating.
“Will we get in trouble?” I ask.
In response, Vince rolls his eyes.
Twenty minutes later, sitting across from Vince as we split an enormous sausage pizza, I feel confident we made the right decision.
Picking a piece of sausage off and preparing to toss it in my mouth, I say, “Man, I never get toppings.”
Eyes wide, he says, “Why?”
Chewing and swallowing the piece of sausage, I say, “Kids. They just like cheese. Or pepperoni, so they can pick it off and still only eat the cheese.”
“Makes sense,” he says, breaking off a second piece of pizza. A gooey gob of cheese stretches until it finally breaks, and he piles it on top before taking a bite.
“This place is good,” I say, taking a drink from the red tinted plastic cup.
“You’ve never been here?”
I shake my head no. “We thought about trying it a couple times, but never did.”
Truth is, they just never have any good enough specials. There’s another pizza place nearby where you can get the same size pizza for less than half the price.
“How long have you lived here?” he asks, glancing at me across the table.
“Three years. I mean, we still lived in Chicago before that, but we were in the metro area. Before that, we lived in Boston—my mom’s actually from there. And then we lived way the hell outside of Chicago for a little while. My mom moved us in with her boyfriend and his sister and her three kids. It was terrible. Luckily the stress of living in a hell house broke that relationship down in a matter of months, but then my mom met this guy, Frank, and they started seeing each other. Frank lived in this neighborhood, and he wanted my mom to move closer—or so she said, because they were going to live together. Now, I don’t want to shock you to death here, but it’s outside of what we can afford—literally double what we were paying for our last place, but it was totally fine, because she and Frank were going to be together and Frank made a comfortable living.”
“But that never happened,” he surmised, nodding.
“It didn’t, because Frank? Married. So, we were stuck in a year and a half lease, living in a rental house we couldn’t afford, and now here we are.”
“Why did you guys stay after the year and a half?”
I throw my hands up in a dramatic shrug. “She said she didn’t want to uproot us again. I didn’t complain, because I like living in a house instead of an apartment, but the stress of living so far above our means is… not awesome. We have to pay so much for rent and utilities that, as you saw at the grocery store, we don’t have money to live.”