Page 24 of Come As You Are

“This deck needs to mind its own business and gets its own social life.” I fold my arms behind my head and lie back on the floor, suddenly feeling exhausted. “Boy drama is such bullshit.”

“Yep.”

There’s a note in her voice that suggests I’ve struck a nerve, and I rise up on an elbow. “Got some experience in that department, do you?”

“Literally none, in fact.”

“Come on, do you really never have any? Like trulyany?”

“Never,” she says flatly, and I get the feeling even myquestion is somehow disappointing her. I’m so wrapped up in my own ridiculousness that it takes me a minute of awkward silence to figure it out.

“You don’t like boys, do you.”

“Nope,” she replies, just loud enough to be heard over the shuffling of the cards.

“You’ve had some girl drama, haven’t you.”

“Yep.” Theppops like a verbal gunshot. She turns to put away the cards, and I take the moment to try to decipher whether to keep asking questions or just change the subject.

The ping of an incoming text spares us both, and she scoops up her phone and snorts.

“Your brother?” I justknowhe’s checking in to make sure I’m behaving myself.

“He’s such a moron.”

“And a loser,” I chime in, even though right at this moment, I feel slightly, mildly, a tiny bit friendly toward him. But Sabrina doesn’t need to know that.

“Hey—only I get to call my brother a loser,” Sabrina says as she taps back a text, but the corner of her mouth is curved up enough for me to know she’s only half-serious.

“Well tell the loser I said hi, then.”

She does, and thirty seconds later, she says, “He says this is a very sad idea of a cool night, and that you’ve downgraded Graysons. Hey! I think I’m offended.”

“Tell him I said to bite me.”

“With pleasure.”

She sends off a text, and the reply comes quickly andmakes her snort. “I will spare you his reply. But also, I have got to get out of this room; I can’t look at these walls anymore. You wanna go up to the lounge? There’s gotta be something to do there.”

I shrug and together we head up to the third floor, which houses the dorm mom Mrs. Fletcher’s apartment, a computer room with exactly one desktop and printer, and a cozy lounge area full of couches arranged around a large coffee table and facing a TV. One wall holds a kitchenette, which is really just a long counter, a fridge crammed full of labeled food, a sink, and a microwave. There’s also a bookcase with a few scattered titles people have dumped here after reading, a couple of old board games, and a little gold-tone statue of a Camden cougar.

“God, this is so much cleaner than the Rumson lounge,” I observe as I walk over to the kitchenette and start opening up the cabinets, suddenly ravenous for the microwave popcorn I didn’t get to have at the Student Center tonight. “Boys are disgusting.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice.”

“Ah, got it!” I spot the box of popcorn and grab a plastic-wrapped packet. “So, as long as I’m staying, how about you tell me more about your girl drama.”

She rolls her eyes. “There’s nothing to tell. We broke up. Now Molly’s still at our old school with her new girlfriend, and I’m here with my brother.”

“And me,” I remind her with a sunny smile, unwrapping the popcorn and putting it in the microwave. “Don’t forget me.”

“I could never,” she says dryly.

“So is Molly why you came to Camden?”

Sabrina screws up her face into an expression that narrows her cool gray eyes to slivers. “No. Yes. Maybe.” She exhales sharply. “Salem was coming here, and my parents are very big on things between us being even, so they said if they were paying for him to go to boarding school, they were going to make the same offer to me. The idea of boarding school had never even crossed my mind, but at that moment, the idea of getting the hell away from Molly just sounded so damn good. And I figured if Salem could handle it, so could I.”

“And what was Salem doing here? He didn’t actually tell me why he got kicked out of your old school. Though ‘weed and truancy’ were mentioned.”

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