Little Do We Know(73)

“And?”

“And then my dad knocked on the door, and things got super awkward. Aaron apologized to me in a text that night. He said he felt horrible for letting it happen, but I didn’t. I wanted it to happen again. And then when we were editing your video, we…kind of…kissed again.”

Luke was grinning at me. I reached over and smacked him on the arm that time. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” he asked, still smiling.

I chucked another gummy bear at his head, but he buried his face in the comforter and it flew over him and hit the wall instead.

“Okay. But I still don’t understand why you can’t like him. Aside from the fact that he’s a lying sack of shit and you’re way too good for him.”

I’d listed all the reasons I couldn’t like Aaron in my head, but for the first time, I said them out loud. Too old for me. Practically a teacher. Works for my dad. Alyssa called dibs. Has a girlfriend/almost fiancée.

As I rattled them off, they didn’t feel as important as I’d built them up to be. Until I got to the last one.

Beth.

He was still with her. He’d never said a word about breaking up with her. I had no idea if he was planning to. I couldn’t imagine he’d told her about us.

Everything had happened so fast, and it wasn’t like Aaron and I were planning a future together or anything, but he had a girlfriend. A serious girlfriend. My stomach twisted into a tight knot.

What was I doing?

“Have you talked to him since we left town?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk to him. Not yet.”

“Emory won’t talk to me either.”

I couldn’t really blame her. I hadn’t wanted to come to LA with him—that made it seem like Dad and Aaron had been right. Like they’d won. And I knew the second I climbed into the passenger seat of his car, I’d make things between Emory and me even worse than they already were. But Luke begged me not to make him go on TV alone, and after a lot of convincing, I’d reluctantly agreed. I figured I’d gotten him into this mess in the first place; I should probably stick with him until it was over.

And I couldn’t wait until it was over.

“I miss her,” Luke said out of nowhere.

“You’ll be home tomorrow.”

“No. I mean, I miss her miss her. I miss the way we used to be before the accident.” He stared down at the pattern on the comforter. “I got my life back that night. But I lost Emory. I never meant for that to happen.”

I remembered the card I found in his car after he’d been whisked away in the ambulance and I thought he was dead. He’d listed all the things he loved about her. Seeing her onstage. Seeing her in his jersey. The way she looked at him like he was the most important person in the room.

“Have you told her everything you just told me?”

He shook his head.

I grabbed his phone off the nightstand and handed it to him. “Go. Right now.”

“Right now?”

“Right this second.”

He was smiling to himself, like he was already plotting his words.

“Now who’s the glue?” he said as he typed.

I smiled, remembering that night in his car, when Luke told me to keep my voice in his video so Emory would hear it. I didn’t think the glue analogy had the same meaning, since I was the one who broke them in the first place, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.





“If you could do something dangerous knowing there wasn’t any risk, what would you do?” Tyler pulled up to the red light at the intersection a few blocks from my house and turned to Charlotte and me.

“Free-climb the face of Half Dome,” Charlotte said.

“Jump out of an airplane,” I said.

“Swim with great white sharks,” Tyler said. “If you had a hundred dollars to give away, would you give it all to one person or ten dollars to ten people?” he asked.

“Ten dollars to ten people,” Charlotte said.

“Five dollars to twenty people,” I said.

“A hundred to one,” Tyler said. Without skipping a beat, he asked, “Favorite Muppet?”

“Kermit,” Charlotte said.

“The Swedish Chef,” I said.

“Yoda,” Tyler said. “The original one, not the CGI one.”

“Ha! Sing!” I sat up straight and pointed at him. “Yoda’s not a Muppet.”

Tyler looked over at me. “Sure he is. He has legs. Look it up!”

“He’s still a puppet.” I slammed my hand on the dash, laughing. “Oh, you’re so singing.”

“Hey, easy on the Prius.”



We’d been playing all night at the diner with the rest of the cast. By that point, we might have been a little punchy.

I reached for my phone and did a quick search.

“Yes! Right here. ‘It is a popular misconception that Yoda is a Muppet,’” I read as Tyler pulled up to a stoplight. I twisted the screen so he could see the article. “You’re wrong!”

“So?” he asked.

“So, sing,” I said.

“Sing,” Charlotte echoed from the backseat. I lifted my fist in the air toward her and she gave it a bump.