Page 4 of Billionaires Don't Date Cheerleaders
Neil!!
He’s not my favourite member
But I’ll take anything
Sloane
How generous of you
The door of the change room slammed open and Coach Reynolds took a step inside and put her hands on her hips, surveying the room of girls who are very much not changing for their next class. I quickly slipped my phone into my backpack. I wasn’t risking getting my phone confiscated today of all times.
“Ladies!” Coach Reynolds's voice boomed through the changing room. Everyone fell silent and looked at her nervously. “Need I remind you that your next class starts in two minutes? Get changed and head off.Now, please!” She turned and left again, clearly expecting us all to listen.
Megan sat down on the bench between the locker rows and smirked at me as I hurried to pull off my gym clothes. She stretched her arms out beside her, then rested them gently on the wood, leaning back in a relaxed pose.
“Yet another reason not to like Take Five,” she said smugly. “They make you late for class.”
“Is that Take Five’s fault, or is it the fault of everyone texting me?” I finished pulling on my clothes, threw my hair up in a claw clip, and grabbed her hand. “Come on, we have to run to get to class on time.”
Megan pulled her arm out of my grip. “Forgetting something?”
“What…” I glanced back and saw her pointing at my backpack, which I’d left on the floor. I groaned and grabbed it. “Okay, now do we have everything? Good, let’s go.”
Our last class was chaos for the whole period, especially when Donna Myers—a fangirl whose love for T5 rivalled Grace’s—jumped up and announced that Finn Parker and Jude Turner were spotted at Sunset Cafe. It was possibly the least productive class we’d ever had.
“Do you have your car today, or do we have to walk?” Megan asked as we walked out the front doors of the school.
“Walk,” I sighed. “Tom insisted that he needed the car today.”
My brother was at the community college in town, so we shared the car. We didn’t have a good system set up for when each of us got to use it, though, we just chose based on whoever needed it more.
“What for?”
“Dunno. As a rule, I don’t take an interest in his life.” We finally reached the front gates—AKA the point where I no longer needed to be in proper uniform—and I stopped Meganby putting a hand on her arm. “Hang on, I want to change my shoes.”
“I’ve never understood how you find your flimsy sandals more comfortable than sneakers,” Megan said.
“I just hate sneakers,” I said. I did this every day, so she was used to it, even if she still found it really weird. I pulled a pair of sandals out of my backpack and dropped them on the ground. I used Megan’s arm as balance while I pulled off my sneakers and put on the sandals instead.
“Thank you,” I said. I stuffed my shoes back into my bag and then glanced at my watch. We’d made it out of school in good time, so I wasn’t in a huge rush. My parents insisted that I had to be home within half an hour of getting out of school, which made it difficult to make any stops but not impossible if we were quick.“Come on. If I hurry, I might be able to stop at Starbucks with you.”
When we got into the Starbucks, it was strangely empty. I guess, like Donna, a lot of people had seen the news of the boys being at Sunset Cafe and decided to try their luck by going.
“Do you mind ordering me a mocha?” I asked Megan. I held up my hand so she could see all the pen marks Jess had scribbled on me during our cheer team meeting at lunch. “I just need to use the bathroom and try to wash all this ink off me before my mom sees it and goes on one of her rants about how drawing on myself is a gateway drug to getting tattoos.”
Believe it or not, that was a lecture I had gotten many times in my life, and my mom seemed to become even more serious about it each time. It was up there with how make-up eventually led to plastic surgery. The most she let me do was lip gloss and mascara, which shegraciouslyallowed me to start wearing when I was sixteen.
“Yeah, of course,” Megan said. I smiled in gratitude and dropped some money in her hand, then skipped off to thebathroom. Megan always made fun of me for skipping and sashaying everywhere, but it was a habit I picked up from the especially peppy girls on the cheerleading squad, and once I started, I just couldn’t stop.
I hummed to myself as I slathered on some hand soap and started scrubbing. I wondered whether my parents had any idea how much I did behind their backs while they thought I was their perfect daughter—everything ranging from drawing on myself with pens to sneaking out the window every Friday and Saturday night to go partying with the football team. My mom would probably faint if I ever admitted any of it to her. It was ironic that I was a social butterfly with parents who tried to keep me away under lock and key, while Megan’s parents did everything short of begging her to go out while she sat at home reading constantly. I loved her to death, but I did think it wouldn’t hurt her to get out a little bit more.
It only took me a couple of minutes to finish getting the ink off. I glanced at Twitter again as I walked out of the bathroom and laughed as I saw how many people were posting about going to Sunset Cafe to stake out the band.
“Okay, I’m ready,” I said as I came into the main area of the coffee shop again. “Hey, did you see that…” My voice got caught in my throat as I looked up and took in the scene before me: Megan with coffee spilled all over her shirt, standing across from acelebrity—whose hand was outstretched as if he was going to touch her chest andmy gosh,I so did not want to know why.
I had to be losing my mind, right? Or had I somehow stumbled into some parallel universe where one of the biggest celebrities in the world came to our Starbucks and started talking to Megan?
“Sloane! Hi!” Megan said. Even though I was pretty sure she was trying to hide it, the panic in her voice was obvious to me. I wondered whether she even realized who the boy was or if shewas more concerned with the fact that he seemed to be planning to wipe up the coffee from her chest himself.
