Michelle leaned back in her seat and beamed in satisfaction at what was on her phone screen.

  The ‘Caledon’s ??’ on the st line of her Instagram bio was there for all to see. She hadn’t realized that this was the missing piece to make their retionship truly official. Now she could rub it in everybody’s faces that she no longer had to sit by herself on rollercoaster rides or walk alone while her friends and their annoying boyfriends all walked in pairs.

  “Something funny?” Sylvie asked, sitting down at the desk in front of her.

  Smugly, she brandished her phone in her friend’s face. Sylvie looked most unimpressed.

  “It’s your Instagram page. And?”

  Michelle gaped at her, already offended. “Look at the st line in my bio!”

  Sylvie spared it the swiftest of gnces before looking back at her face, nodding slightly. “Okay. Cool. So you’re going to be like Haley and Autumn?”

  She’d completely forgotten that Sylvie and her boyfriend didn’t have the same thing in their respective bios.

  “And apparently all of Caledon’s friends,” Michelle said dreamily, withdrawing her phone to stow it in her pocket. “You’re the only odd one out now.”

  “Odd one out?! Sorry, but that’s you. Mich, this is called delusion.”

  She was just going to ignore that slight. Constantly correcting her friends that she was in a real retionship got exhausting. Instead, she replied, “You really are the only one out of us who doesn’t have that in your bio, though.”

  “That’s because it’s embarrassing,” Sylvie corrected, taking her baseball cap off her head and smoothing her hair out. “I wouldn’t put that in my bio in a million years.”

  She eyed Sylvie dubiously. “You said it was sweet when Autumn showed you hers.”

  Now that she was reviewing the memory in her head, Sylvie did seem to maintain a bnd smile throughout that interaction.

  Sylvie threw her hands up. “I was being nice! I’m not like you. You btantly cringed in her face.”

  “It was involuntary! She gave me the cold shoulder for a week!”

  “You deserved it. Not sorry.”

  “So why weren’t you being nice to me?” Michelle mented, shaking her by the shoulders. “You didn’t tell me it was sweet!”

  “I was being nice! Did I cringe, even though I wanted to? No.”

  “But you didn’t say it was sweet! Why don’t you think we’re such a sweet couple?”

  Sylvie shook her right back. “You literally expressed your disgust for this exact same thing that our friends did, and you want me to act like it’s the cutest thing ever?!”

  That gave Michelle pause. Why did that suddenly make her feel like a massive hypocrite?

  “Oh, fine,” she groused, losing the mood to argue over it any further. “I’ll just show Hailey and Autumn ter.”

  “I wouldn’t count on Autumn to call it cute if I were you.”

  Michelle sulked for half a second before realizing that her friend was right. I should have just sucked it up and told them it was adorable.

  “Whatever.”

  Waving a dismissive hand, Sylvie turned around in her chair to start getting things out of her book bag. “This is just such a half-baked idea. It’s going to be a disaster the second either of you starts crushing on someone else.”

  “That is not gonna happen.”

  For some reason, Sylvie tipped her head back to eye her with intrigue. “I’m so going to regret asking, but why not?”

  “Well, because we’re in a retionship?” Why would her friend ask something that was so self-expnatory? She of all people should understand.

  “And how would that prevent you from crushing on someone other than Caledon?”

  “Sylvie, pay attention. We wouldn’t crush on other people because we already have each other, duh!”

  The bnk stare she received from her friend sted for all of one second before she spoke in horrified tones, “Do you seriously think people in retionships don’t get crushes on other people?!”

  “Um … yeah?”

  Michelle did not like that slightly scornful gaze Sylvie bestowed upon her—it was the exact same one she used whenever her friends’ sappy lovey-dovey antics were too much to bear.

  Sylvie pointed a finger at her. “If that was actually true, why would people ever cheat?”

  “Cheat?” She could only sit there gaping like a fish. She’d totally forgotten about that. “But those are, like, really rare cases, right?”

  Just because she’d seen plenty of it online or in movies and shows didn’t mean that it commonly occurred in real life.

  “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen! Seriously, sometimes I don’t understand how your brain works.”

  “But since you guys all got into retionships, none of you have ever talked about having a crush on someone else.” It made perfect sense for Michelle to conclude that, generally, once a person got into a retionship with someone, that was it. Until they broke up, neither person would even need to think about finding another person to date. After all, her friends behaved as though their boyfriends fulfilled their every need in life, especially their need for boys.

  “Because we’re not supposed to, Mich. If one of us got a crush on someone other than our own boyfriend, we’d probably tell her to either break up or ignore the crush.”

  “Wait, if you can just ignore the crush, then it’s problem solved, isn’t it?”

  Sylvie heaved a sigh that sounded like it used up the entire capacity of her lungs. “Sure, if you can ignore it. But that only works when you actually like your boyfriend, which you don’t.”

  “I’ve told you that I like him.”

  Michelle scowled at the hand Sylvie held up to her.

  “And I’ve told you that I’m not going to debate with you on what you mean by that.”

  “I don’t have to worry about crushing on anyone. I have a boyfriend.”

  A crush, by her friends’ definition, seemed to be someone you wanted to hold hands with or kiss. Michelle enjoyed looking at cute guys, but she certainly didn’t fantasize about holding their hands or kissing them like her friends did.

  If a cute guy talked to her—something which had happened at least a couple of times in her life—she’d enjoy looking at his face for the duration of the conversation, but that was that.

  She’d seen Hailey turn into a bundle of nerves and then freak out on her afterwards, asking multiple questions about what it seemed like the guy thought, or whether she looked calm throughout, or if the guy was looking at her again now.

  “I suppose. Considering what you’re like, if anyone’s gonna crush on anyone, it’d be Caledon.”

  “What? No way! We have an agreement.”

  “We just talked about cheating.”

  Sylvie was just trying to scare her, although for what reason, Michelle didn’t know. “Again, that’s rare! It’s not going to happen.”

  “And you’re so sure because … ?”

  “Name me one person we know who cheated! You can’t, right?” They’d grown up in the suburb together, and the st major retionship scandal in the neighborhood that Michelle could recall was old seventy-something-year-old Mr. Walter getting together with Tanya the daughter of his family friend. If there was any cheating around them going on, it was definitely well kept under wraps.

  Sylvie gave her the fttest stare she’d ever seen. “Did you just straight up forget about Adrian cheating on Vanessa with Rose in the eighth grade? That huge blow-up in the gym that you were literally there in person to witness?”

  “Oh, yeah! Oh man, how did I forget that?!”

  That had been dramatic. She remembered now. Egged on by some friends after tensions arose from dodgeball, Vanessa and Rose got into a fight involving screaming and hair-pulling and thrashing about on the gym floor. The whole school buzzed with gossip about it for weeks after that, and it wasn’t until a new teacher had come to take over a teacher who was retiring that people started talking about something else.

  “I bet there’s a lot more stuff like that happening around us. We just don’t know about it.” Heaving a sigh, Sylvie turned back around in her chair. “Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s not like you’d care if Caledon got a crush on another girl and wanted to break up with you.”

  Michelle scowled. Of course she’d care. If he wanted to break up with her, that would mean she’d no longer have a date to bring around her friends.

  Scanning the area she’d just stepped into, Michelle finally spotted Caledon strolling down the hallway right behind Dennis and Rachel like a typical third-wheeler. They were several feet away, walking in her direction. She strode towards them, her eyes locked on her target. He was still gazing at his phone, probably at their message log.

  She’d discovered that his st css had ended early when she went looking for him after school, leaving her with no choice but to ask him for his whereabouts.

  Upon getting within a four foot radius of them, all three of them turned their heads to her as if sensing her oncoming presence. Dennis and Rachel blinked.

  “Hey.” Caledon waved his phone at her, confirming that he had indeed just been looking at their messages to each other.

  “Hey, you’re not gonna crush on someone else and ditch me, right?”

  LotteStarburst