Riot

I look her in the eyes, leaving no room for confusion. “No.”

Rowan sighs and leans back in her seat. She keeps quiet and stares out the window as I drive, but I don’t even make it a full minute before I say, “Was he even there?”

Not needing to ask who I’m talking about, she shakes her head without looking at me. “I haven’t seen him much this week.” She casts a glance in my direction, catches the frown on my face, and quickly adds, “He asked about you yesterday though.”

“What did he say?”

“He wanted to know what you were doing last night. I told him you were working.”

Working? More like narrowly resisting the urge to choke out customers with complimentary breadsticks.

“Do you want me to tell him he should call you?” Rowan asks, and I nearly jerk the car into a ditch.

“NO!” I stare at her like she’s lost her damn mind. “No freaking way, are you nuts?!”

She frowns and grips her seat belt. “Well, then you should call him. Call him or forget about him, Dee, because you’re going a little crazy.”

Understatement of the century. I feel like some crazy hormonal girl invades my body anytime Joel’s swoon-worthy face pops into my mind, and she makes me want to punch myself in the head until she leaves or I knock myself unconscious.

“Did you even turn in the proposal for your marketing project that was due yesterday?” Rowan asks, her tone revealing she already guessed the answer.

The short answer is no. The long answer is the excuse I gave my professor, which involved a dead grandparent and an orphaned cat.

“I told my professor I’d turn it in late.”

Rowan frowns at me. “That project is worth most of your grade, Dee. You can’t keep blowing stuff like this off or you’re going to fail. Maybe if you spent your energy obsessing over school instead of obsessing over Joel—”

I give her a warning look, and she immediately silences her lecture.

“I’ll do it this weekend,” I say.

“Mayhem is this weekend.” The guys are performing again, and we’ve never missed even one of their local shows.

“I’ll do it Sunday.”

After classes, I drop Rowan off at Adam’s and head back to my apartment to change into my work clothes. I arrive late, bitch out my boss for trying to reprimand me, and spend most of my five-hour shift thinking about what the hell I want to do with my life.

I definitely don’t want to be working in a place like this when I’m in my thirties, having to deal with customers like Miss Gable, who thinks server is just another word for slave.

Tonight, she seriously asked me to get her a salad with only hearts of romaine instead of our usual mix. When I complained to a coworker about it, he said that he usually picks all the other stuff out for her. I gaped at him until he walked away from me, and then I proceeded to pick Miss Gable’s salad apart—and give her nothing but the leafy parts. I told her we were all out of the hearts and promised her extra after-dinner chocolates as a consolation, fucking over the customer and the establishment with one fell swoop. I still landed an awesome tip, but that hardly made up for the old men who tried to hit on me or the insecure girls who forced their boyfriends to give me low tips because they stared a little too long.

No one would ever accuse me of being cut out for customer service. But the problem is, I’m not really cut out for college either. When I thought about college, I thought about boys and parties and more boys and more parties. I didn’t think about studying and homework and tests and actual learning. Last semester, I barely passed my classes with low Cs. This semester, I’m pretty sure I’m already failing. Midterms are next week, and my dad is not going to be happy when I tell him what my mid-semester grades are.

I doubt he’d ever stop supporting me financially, but I hate disappointing him. Not that that’s stopped me from doing it in the past . . . but I always feel like crap afterward.

My dad just loves too much. He loved my mom even after she left him, and I think he still loves her now. He blames himself for her leaving, and that makes me want to bash her head in with a rock. When I was eleven, she had an affair with some loser she went to high school with and she eventually ran off with him to Vegas. The most contact she’s had with me since then is a Facebook friend request I promptly declined before blocking her.

She didn’t love my dad enough, but that’s not what makes me hate her. What makes me hate her is that she pretended she did. She made vows she didn’t keep and left my dad to raise me alone. Sometimes, I wonder if the reason he loves me so much is that I’m a part of her, and every day, I’m worried I’ll turn out just like her.

Which is why I’m never saying those three toxic words to anyone. Ever.

Joel would never want me to say them, which is part of why I can’t get him out of my head. After five grueling hours of half-assed customer service and another twenty minutes of nightmare traffic, I flick on the switch of my room, kick my work shoes off, and fall face-first onto my bed. I’ve wiggled my phone out of my back pocket so many times tonight that I’m surprised I don’t have brush-burn on my ass, but that doesn’t stop me from wiggling it out one more time and groaning when I don’t see any missed texts or calls from the idiot guitarist who’s apparently lost my number.

With my cheek smushed against my comforter, I pull his name up on my screen and hover my thumb over his number, fighting the urge to call him and ask him to come over. With an irritated growl, I let the phone fall back to the bed and close my eyes.