The Unexpected Everything(48)

“How’s life? What,” he said, looking at me directly, like he was about to ask me a very serious question, “is the haps?”

I laughed at that. “You didn’t bring your guitar, did you?” It had been the thing Wyatt and I had argued about the most last summer. When he’d had a beer or two, suddenly his acoustic guitar appeared, and even though he was good, in my opinion, that didn’t matter. Suddenly, all conversation stopped and the night became about Wyatt strumming chords. Toby loved it, though, and spent way too much time speculating on whether he was writing her a song, despite the fact that nothing really rhymed with Toby.

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Thought I’d wait and give you a private concert.”

“No.” I groaned, then looked over and saw one of his eyebrows was raised, which was how I knew he was kidding. Wyatt’s deadpan made it hard to tell sometimes. “Oh,” I said. “Gotcha.” I looked over at him and noticed that practically every girl in the vicinity was looking in our direction. “So how’ve you been, Miller?”

“I should be asking you that, Walker,” he replied, as he nodded toward the tables and started to lead the way over. Wyatt always called me by my last name, and even though I rolled my eyes at it, I secretly liked it. “I hear you had a hot date tonight,” he said, taking another drink from his cup.

“Not so much,” I said, falling into step next to him and spotting where we were going—the farthest picnic table, where my friends were.

“Oh.” He shot me a sympathetic look. “Well,” he said with a shrug, “always more fish in the sea? Etcetera?”

I nodded. That was pretty much what I’d been thinking the whole drive over here. “Something like that.”

Toby saw us coming and jumped up, then started to sit back down again, then stopped in the middle, doing a kind of half-lean thing that I’m sure she thought was natural but actually looked incredibly uncomfortable. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again. “I see you found Andie, huh?” she asked, then laughed loudly. After a few moments, she stopped abruptly and took a long drink from her cup, her face flushing as red as her hair.

“I did indeed,” Wyatt said, crossing over to Bri and handing her the other cup. In my peripheral vision, I could see Palmer surreptitiously wipe the excess foam off Toby’s nose.

“Don’t try to change the subject,” Bri said, mouthing her thanks to Wyatt and then pointing at Toby. “This is an intervention.”

“How is saying hello to Andie changing the subject?” Toby asked.

“An intervention for what?” I asked, looking around at my friends and starting to relax. I was already feeling better, just being around them. The date was starting to fade into the background a bit.

“Emojis,” Tom, Bri, and Palmer said at the same time.

“Andie,” Toby said, turning to me, “tell them they’re being ridiculous.”

“No,” I said, laughing at Toby’s outraged expression. “You’re out of control with them. I heartily approve of this. How do I join this intervention?”

“I’ve honestly worried sometimes that you’ve forgotten how to form whole sentences,” Bri said, her voice overly serious. “You’re my best friend, Tobyhanna. And I’m concerned for you.”

“Emojis are fun!” Toby protested, her voice rising. “It’s not like I’m the only one who uses them. You all do.”

“I don’t,” Wyatt said with a shrug.

“See?” Toby said, pointing at him in triumph, then frowning a second later when she must have realized this didn’t help her argument.

“You need to dial it back,” Palmer said as she pulled out her phone. “Like this afternoon, you texted me ‘I’m so whale, dancing girl, dancing girl, blushing smiley, nervous-teeth smiley, star, star, pizza.’?” She looked up from her phone. “What was that supposed to mean?”

Toby didn’t respond, just pointedly looked down at the ground, and I wasn’t sure if this was because she was being criticized in front of Wyatt, or because the message was actually about him. Judging by the way Toby had glanced in his direction while it was being read, I had a feeling it might be the latter.

“We’re only encouraging you to maybe use more text-based communication,” Bri said, a little more gently. “You know, for a fun change every now and then.”

“Emojis can express everything you need them to!” Toby said.

“Oh, really?” Palmer asked, the look coming into her eyes that I knew all too well. If Toby hadn’t been so riled up, she would have noticed it too. It was the look we had all come to fear. When Palmer looked like that, suddenly she was yelling, “Fire drill!” when at a red light, which meant we all had to get out of the car, run around it, and change seats before the light turned green. It was how I had ended up not being able to use the past tense for a whole month of AP History and the reason Bri still refused to eat wraps. Palmer was about to throw down a challenge. “Then I bet you can’t go the rest of the summer using only emojis.”

“And if I can?” Toby asked, ignoring the fact that both Bri and I were shaking our heads at her. This was Toby’s Achilles’ heel, and always had been—the moment she should walk away, she dug her heels in more, even when she was given an out, and her stubbornness always came back to bite her.