Heartthrobs Don’t Date Wallflowers (Texting the Boyband)

Chapter 10

ten

The waffle practically burned my fingertips as I pulled it out of the toaster and dropped it onto the plate. Poppy laughed at me as I blew on my fingers and awkwardly walked to the table, the plate propped up on my elbow, my phone in my hand. On the other side of FaceTime, she was sitting in her dorm room eating a Pop-Tart for breakfast.

I told her she didn’t have to call me if she wanted to go down to the dining hall for breakfast, but she said she preferred it this way and that she missed the days when we would eat every meal together.

“It’s not my fault you went to boarding school,” I said as I dropped the plate on the table and propped up my phone against the salt and pepper shakers so that I could eat with both hands.

“Not my fault you didn’t want to,” she shot back.

I rolled my eyes. “I wasn’t going to start boarding school in my junior year.”

My phone started to buzz like I was getting a call, and I frowned. A second later, there was an overlay over Poppy’s face with a notification.

Incoming call: Not Zesty.

Options: Decline call. Answer call and hang up. Answer and add to conference call.

I smirked for a second, imagining what it would be like if I added somebody else to this call with Poppy—especially since she had no idea who he was or that I’d been texting him for days. If I told her I didn’t even know his real name, what he looked like, or any other identifying information, she would probably call me an idiot.

“Sorry Poppy, I’ve gotta go,” I said. “But I’ll call you later today, okay?”

“Okay,” she chirped. I couldn’t really see her under the pop-up, but I doubted she was upset. Her classes started soon anyway. I selected the button to hang up on her and answered the other call. The screen filled like it was getting a FaceTime, but there was no video. Thank goodness, because I wasn’t ready for him to know who I was. Not that it was something I’d thought that far ahead about—the idea of whether or not we were ever going to introduce ourselves to each other—but I liked the anonymity a little bit. I liked being able to hide behind the screen, being able to share stuff with him that I wouldn’t necessarily share with anybody, knowing that he couldn’t tell anyone that it was me. There was something comforting about it .

“Hello?” I asked.

“Hey.” His voice crackled through the speaker. “I was just early for school, and I thought I’d call you.”

“Oh, so I’m just the most convenient number in your phone?”

“Well, I do have a lot of numbers on my phone,” he said, “but none of them are quite as appealing as yours.”

I was taking a drink of orange juice, but I snorted a little bit of the line. I was pretty sure it was supposed to be sweet, but the idea of him just staring at all these numbers in his phone and thinking that mine looked the most appealing was hilarious.

“That sounded weirder than I meant,” he said.

I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to say, “No, it wasn’t,” so I guess I just proved his point. Once I finally got my laughter under control, I glanced at the time. School didn’t start for another forty minutes, assuming he was a Summerfield student, which I was becoming more and more convinced he was based on the group chat.

“Why are you there so early?” I asked.

“My, uh…” He paused for a second and cleared his throat. “My brother needed to be here early for some club meeting and we all tend to drive to school together, so I told him I’d just come early and hang out.”

I was curious about the short pause before “brother.” I wondered what he meant. Was it that he was trying to hide who he was actually with and he thought saying it was his brother was the best way to do it? Or maybe he actually was talking about his brother, but he couldn’t remember if he had told me that he had a brother? Or he was just lying completely for some reason. Anything was a possibility, and I hated that, because while the anonymity was nice in some ways, sometimes it made me wonder how much I really knew about him.

“So, are you just hanging around alone?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “Actually, I’m wandering the halls and looking around. Spying on teachers, you know.”

“Oh yeah? Any of them doing something interesting?”

“What would count as interesting?” he asked. “Me walking in on them making out or something?”

I snorted again. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

He laughed. “Well, I passed my gym teacher smoking outside, and then when he saw me, he put out the cigarette and tried to walk away and act like it hadn’t happened. So that was a little bit weird.”

“Especially weird given that gym teachers are also the same health teachers who tell us not to smoke.”

“Yeah, it did seem a little bit hypocritical,” he said. “But then he tried to pretend that he was whistling, so I don’t know, maybe he thought that I was just stupid enough to believe that he actually hadn’t been smoking. But other than that, nothing too interesting.”

“What a shame.”

“Well, I did walk in on a couple making out actually in a classroom,” he added as an afterthought. “But it was students, so that was at least better. ”

I wondered if they were also there super early because they thought they’d get some privacy, only to be interrupted by him.

“So, uh,” I paused for a second, not sure if I wanted to ask this question, but curious all the same, “Do you go to a private school or a public school?”

His pause was long, and I cringed internally, wishing I hadn’t asked. We had some sort of unspoken agreement here where we didn’t ask identifying questions like that, and yet here I was. But I was curious. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know who he was, what his life was, what his name was. I wanted to know everything. Was that so wrong of me?

“Private school,” he said eventually. “You?”

“Same,” I said.

There was another long pause, and I wondered whether he was trying to put together the pieces as well. He’d seen what my phone number was. Had he noticed that I was in the group chat as well? Probably not, since I never messaged in it. There was a notification when Megan added me, but everybody had been talking so fast, I wasn’t sure any of them had noticed. But maybe this was helping him put it together. Maybe right now he was sitting there thinking, “Wow, she lives in the area code and she goes to private school, so she must go to Summerfield.” Did he want to know as much about me as I wanted to know about him? I wondered.

“So, what are you doing now?” I asked, when the silence became too long, too unbearable.

“Now, I’m on the basement floor of the school, walking past the gym. I just glanced in and I saw the girls’ cheerleading team practicing, so I tried to walk out again before any of them noticed me.”

“Ah, yes, we wouldn’t need them getting distracted by seeing you,” I said. “They’d probably think you were some sort of creeper watching them.”

He laughed. “Well, funnily enough, Luca came with me this morning and I think that’s exactly what he’s doing. But his girlfriend’s on the squad, so I can’t really judge him too much.”

So, Luca went to Summerfield as well, then. Or his girlfriend did, at least, so it seemed likely he did too. That only made me more sure that everyone in the group chat went to Summerfield, Not Zesty included.

“How many brothers do you have?” I asked curiously. “I mean, I know Luca’s not actually your brother but he’s like one since he lives with you, right? And then you mentioned another one earlier and…” I realized I was rambling and trailed off.

The pause was long again. And then finally he just went, “Too many.”

So something about that was too personal. He could tell me he went to private school, but he couldn’t tell me how many brothers he had. I wondered why. I wasn’t sure exactly what that would mean.

“Oh.” I tried not to sound too disappointed. I cleared my throat. “And I guess your sister is the only one who goes to boarding school?”

“Okay, honey, let’s go!” Mom’s voice called from upstairs before he could answer. I could hear her footsteps coming down the stairs, the high heels hitting the wooden floor.

“I have to go,” I said. I wondered if he felt as disappointed about it as I did.

“Call me later.”

I froze with my thumb over the hang-up button. “What?”

“Call me later,” he repeated. “I like talking to you.”

I bit my lip, trying to avoid the little squeal that was almost coming out of my mouth, trying to ignore the way my heart was hammering. It was such a simple thing for him to say, anything a friend would say easily. But something about him saying it, unprompted, made my heart pound.

“Okay,” I whispered. “I will.”