Me: Nah, just bring me chocolate donuts for breakfast.
Mia: How do you not weigh five hundred pounds?
Me: Cardio.
Mia: You do NOT do cardio.
Me: Sure I do. Naked cardio. It’s a thing.
Mia: Getting ready now. Go do your naked cardio alone. See you in the morning.
She sends some eye roll emojis but then ends it with a black heart.
I send her back some eggplant emojis and one of two guys kissing.
If only I really were getting some naked cardio in, that’d be great. But no. While Mia is off grinding on jocks with big dicks and tiny IQs, I’ll be cleaning out my barely used office to please my father.
I can’t wait to get the fuck out of college.
At least then, I won’t be squirming under Dad’s thumb twenty-four-fucking-seven.“Wow, Mia, don’t you clean up well,” Sasha says, her nasally voice hitting my ears like nails to a chalkboard. Cliché, I know. But then again, so is Sasha. Dressed in her black BCBG halter neck cut out dress and Saint Laurent heels, with her Tory Burch clutch, she screams affluence and class and unoriginality.
And I cringe at the fact that I even know who she’s wearing, or that my outfit—a black Dolce & Gabbana minidress and Louboutin red sole pumps—costs triple what hers does. Sasha might come from a wealthy family, but in comparison to my movie star mother and award-winning surgeon father, her family are peasants, whereas my family is Hollywood royalty.
And again, the thought makes me internally recoil.
“Thanks,” I say, plastering on a fake smile while wishing I were cuddled up with Ashton in his apartment playing video games, instead of at The Lodge, an upscale nightclub in Hawk’s Landing, trying to fit in—something I’ve been trying and failing to do my entire life.
I’m matte in a glossy world.
Much to my mother’s horror.
“I did the honor of ordering for everyone,” Sasha announces, handing out pretentious looking drinks to everyone in our party. “Blackberry gin and tonic,” she says. “Only the best for my girls.”
Melina, Tori, and Jade, Sasha’s resident ass-kissers, beam in delight, while I do my best not to roll my eyes. She ordered us drinks. She didn’t cure world hunger. And really, gin and tonic? Can she be any more cliché?
I’m miserable already. Just like Ashton predicted. Sometimes I really hate how well he knows me. It’s hard to hide from yourself when someone can always find you.
“To being us,” Sasha yells over the music, raising her glass.
The cliché Sasha moments are plentiful tonight.
“To being us,” the other girls echo, raising their glasses and then taking dainty sips of their drinks.
It takes all of my restraint not to throw back my entire drink, especially when it feels like the only way I’ll ever make it through tonight is by being drunk.
The entire reason why I moved to Hawk’s Landing was to get away from women like the ones I’m with, yet here I am, making friends with them and planning to join the sorority they belong to. Why? Because it doesn’t matter how far I move to get out from under my parents’ shadow, I can’t help but want to make them proud. In this case, it means joining the elite sorority at Atlantic Pointe to impress them, especially Mom, but unlike her, I don’t seem to fit in anywhere.
“Should we dance?” Jade suggests, glancing out onto the dance floor. Most of the people dancing appear to be at least ten years my senior, which makes sense since this club is an over twenty-one club, and the only reason I got in is because Sasha knows someone who knows someone.
“Jade,” Sasha chides. “Please remember why we’re here.” She takes another delicate sip of her drink and sets it down, glaring her green eyes at her friend. “No respectable man is going to want to marry a woman who shakes her ass on the dance floor.”
Inwardly, I sigh. Then I down my drink because as much as I’d like to be ladylike like my mom taught me to be, I need the alcohol more.
Sasha, of course, catches me in the act. “Respectable men don’t like lushes either,” she scolds.
Good thing I’m not looking for a respectable man, then—or really any man—I think but don’t voice. The only man who has my attention is probably at home, either destroying my Minecraft house and killing all my pigs, or jacking off to gay porn—because he’s gay. Yep, it would figure that the only man who really sees me and understands me swings the other way.
“Ma’am, the gentleman over there saw your glass is empty and ordered you another,” a waitress says, handing me a new drink.
“Oh, Mia, it looks like you have an admirer.” Jade giggles, nodding to her left. I follow her line of vision, landing on a guy leaning against the bar sipping on his whiskey.