kind of blistering-hot freedom fighter. “Nobody gets special treatment!”
“Especially nobodies,” Courtney adds, easily loud enough for us to hear.
“This nobody does,” Geraldine shoots back. “Sit down, sweet cheeks, before I come back and make you sit.”
“Sweet cheeks!” Lizzie looks like she might die.
I already have. Fire licks up my own sweet cheeks as I stand for the stop. I glance at Lizzie, but she’s already sinking in her seat, so my gaze goes right over her shoulder and lands … on Courtney.
Guess I’m on her radar now. While she whispers something to Shane, she stares hard at me. Scary hard. Nasty hard. Courtney-on-a-mean-mission hard.
The whole bunch of them burst out laughing, and Courtney starts poking Shane. “C’mon. I dare you.”
He looks at her, then at me, then at her.
The traffic refuses to cooperate, holding me hostage a full lane from the sidewalk.
Shane steps into the aisle. OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod.
“I can get out here,” I say to Geraldine, like she’s a cabdriver and I’m in New York or something.
Evidently she doesn’t hear the raw desperation in my voice. “Are you kidding me? I’ll lose my license if one of Pittsburgh’s finest is watching. You just wait a second, and don’t bother with those morons in the back.”
But one of those morons is walking right toward me. I clutch the pole, the metal slippery in my wet palm.
Every single eye on the bus is on him. And me. And him. And me.
“Hey,” he says, in that low, sexy Shane voice that Lizzie can imitate perfectly.
Except now it doesn’t make me giggle. It makes me want to throw up.
“Hey.” I manage the whole syllable without choking.
“You going to homecoming?”
My hand slides a little down the pole. “What?” It comes out like a half choke, half squeak. From my peripheral vision, I can see Lizzie’s eyes opening to the size of headlights.
“Home-coming,” he enunciates like English is my second language. He’s close enough now that I can see his eyelashes. Dark, but tipped in gold. The eyelashes of the gods. “On Saturday night.”
I somehow clear my throat, and then the heavens open up and so does the traffic. Geraldine hits the gas, and I almost fall down the first step, but cling to the bar as my backpack rolls around and hits me in the chest.
Could this get worse?
“ ’Cause maybe you’d want to go with me.”
Yes. Oh my, yes. It actually could get worse. “Excuse me?”
I know what’s happening, of course. He’s asking on a dare. As a joke. Behind him, I’m aware of howls of laughter, hands over mouths as the cool kids watch the drama play out.
And then … I have that thought. That thought no girl in this situation should ever have. Not that any girl should ever be in this situation, but if she is, the very last thing she should have is that thought. That stupid, idiotic, pathetic loser thought of a hopeless nobody.
What if he’s serious?
I just stare at him, digging around my Shane-numbed brain and finding … nothing. Forget a witty retort. I couldn’t tell him my name right now.
“ ’Cause if you need a date …”
“Yeah?” Did I say that? Why did I say that?
“My dog’s lookin’ for someone to hump that night.”
The entire bus explodes with laughter just as the doors open and the sidewalk beckons. All I can do is look at Lizzie as I step down, into the underworld where douche bags like Shane Matthews come from, blood rushing in my head loud enough to almost drown out the sound of Geraldine yelling at him to sit the hell down or never ride a bus in this town again.
I stand on the sidewalk as the doors swoosh behind me and the bus pulls away. I refuse to turn, terrified that if I do I’ll see Courtney looking out the window, her giant white teeth bared in laughter. In fact, I don’t move for a good fifteen seconds while those words roll over me like Geraldine’s bus wheels. The words about the dog?
No. The other words.
’Cause maybe you’d want to go with me.
Because for that one insane flash of a magical moment, I could pretend he really did ask me.
I know, that’s even more pathetic than Googling his backpack.
CHAPTER TWO
My buzzing phone pulls me out of the depths of self-pity. It’s Mom, telling me she’s already done shopping, so she’ll wait for me in the book section. No doubt she was ogling some high-end houses in Southern Living or some other magazine that makes her