Her squeals give way to a little pout. “Boo,” she says, her brow puckering as she frowns. “Fine. I’ll help you if you still need help.” Then she flaps her hand at me. “Come on, get up. Let’s go. There is work to be done!”
I just sigh and resign myself to my fate.
If we werein a movie montage, the music playing in the background would be “Dancing Queen.” There would be footage of Juliet dragging me out of our room, down the hallway, and into Aurora’s room. There would be more footage of Juliet on her knees, begging Aurora to pretty please let us borrow her closet. We would see a dramatized Aurora as a judge in her chambers, deliberating carefully before finally determining that yes, she will allow me to borrow something of hers to wear.
“But you owe me,” Aurora says grumpily to me. She folds her arms where she’s seated at her desk. “You never let me wear anything out of your closet.”
“Because your chest is too big,” I say. “You’ll stretch my tops out.”
She doesn’t respond to this, because she knows I’m right.
Juliet smiles at Aurora. “You can borrow anything from me,” she chirps, like all three of us don’t know that there’s very little overlap between Juliet’s style and Aurora’s.
Juliet is ruffly and lacy and pink and sweet and soft. Aurora is boss-lady business attire unless she’s at home, in which case she’s jeans and a t-shirt. They don’t even wear the same size shoes. There are maybe three tops they share, and that’s it.
But now Juliet flings Aurora’s closet doors open like she’s been doing it her whole life. “All right,” she says, tapping her finger against her chin. “Let’s see…”
“What’s this for?” Aurora says, her attention back on her laptop. “Why can’t she wear her own clothes? Or yours, Jules?”
“She’s going on a date with Felix,” Juliet says. She just throws the words out casually, like they aren’t absurd, like they don’t make my pulse jump into double-time.
Aurora’s lips curl into a frown of distaste. “Ew,” she says. “Like an actual date?”
“No,” I say with a sigh. “She’s exaggerating.”
“It’s not technically a date,” Juliet concedes, “but she does like him, so be nice.”
Aurora turns to me in surprise, her fingers pausing on the keyboard. “Do you?” she says. “I wondered after that thing at the bookstore you told us about.”
“Their moment,” Juliet says with a nod, her eyes still scanning Aurora’s closet.
“I guess I kind of do,” I say.
“So she’s going to treat this as a possibly romantic situation and see how it goes.”
“Juliet is making me,” I say, slouching over to Aurora’s spartan bed and flopping down.
To my surprise, though, Aurora looks thoughtful. “It’s not a bad idea,” she says. “Just to test the waters. You guys have been hanging out a decent amount, but you’ve never treated him as anything but a friend, have you? And you’ve never given him any signals you’re interested?”
“No,” I say, “but the one thing I did throw out there, he volleyed right back in a firm rejection.”
This manages to pull Juliet’s gaze away from the closet; her hands pause in the middle of riffling through clothes. “Really?” she says, her eyes wide. “When? What happened?”
“I was trying to tell you earlier,” I say, shooting her alook—under which she wisely recoils. “I told him I might join a dating site, and he basically thought it was a bad idea, and so then I said what, should I date you, then?” I clear my throat. “And he said obviously not. So.”
“Hmm,” Juliet says, her eyes narrowing. “He thought it was a bad idea?”
“I kind of do too,” Aurora says with a shrug.
“We were both in weird moods,” I say. “We apologized later.”
“You apologized,” Juliet repeats cryptically, her expression still intent, thoughtful. “Interesting.”
I blink at her. “It’s not interesting. It’s just…an apology. It was nothing. Itisnothing.”
“Or,” Jules says, “maybe it was something. Maybe he thought it was a bad idea because he’s jealous. Did you ever think of that?”
“Of course I didn’t,” I say. “It’s absurd.”