Page 2 of You Belong With Me

“Somehow I don’t think it would make a difference.”

He shrugged and dropped one arm from the steering wheel to rest it along the open windowpane. He always looked so relaxed whenever he drove. I never understood it. I had only just gotten my learner’s permit, but I couldn’t see a world where I would ever find driving to be a relaxing activity. At this point, I still held the steering wheel in a death grip and screamed every time another car showed up on the road. Nobody had much faith in my abilities.

“Can I change the playlist?” I asked, already picking up his phone and unlocking it. I’d learned his password ages ago. He hadn’t given it to me, but when he left his phone unattended one day, I’d tried guessing it. It only took me three tries—his birthday. I was sure he wouldchange it right after he figured out that I knew it, but he said he knew I would just figure out the new one so there wasn’t any point.

I didn’t like most of the music he listened to, so I scrolled past all his playlists until I found the one that I’d made and shared with him, simply named NORA’S SONGS. I added him as a collaborator, but he hadn’t added anything to it. I pressed shuffle, then turned the speaker back up as Taylor Swift’s voice started to filter through the stereo system. Sebastian pretended to grimace, but I knew that he actually liked this music. He just didn’t want to admit it to me.

Since Sebastian didn’t adhere to the traffic laws the rest of us mere mortals had to deal with, the drive home wasn’t long, so we only got through three songs—all of which, I noticed him humming along to—before he turned smoothly into his driveway. He barely killed the engine before jumping out of the car, while I took my time turning around to grab my bag from the back—and immediately noticed the white bra splayed out across the backseat, like it had been chucked there casually.

I immediately had a horrifying mental image of Dean calling Sebastian while he was in the middle of hooking up with a girl in his car, and Sebastian kicking her out to come pick me up. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to get rid of the thought and also trying to decide what I was supposed to do. Should I say something? He should probably get rid of the bra before his mom or sisters came out and noticed it. But was it just as embarrassing for his best friend’s little sister to comment on it?

Sebastian knocked on the window. “You coming?” heasked through the glass. Of course, me sitting here debating whether or not I should embarrass him by pointing this out was stopping him from being able to go anywhere. I quickly scrambled out of the car.

“Sorry if I interrupted something,” I blurted. “When you came to pick me up, I mean.”

I still wasn’t even sure if Dean had asked him to pick me up or if he’d been by the school and happened to notice me sitting there, but either way, somebody must have left in a rush to leave it behind.

Sebastian looked at me in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“The, uh…” I cleared my throat. “The bra sitting on your backseat. I assume someone left in a hurry.”

He ducked back into the car to look at it, but came back out a second later, rolling his eyes. “Oh, that’s just Ainsley’s.”

That did not answer my question at all.

“Why would your sister’s bra be in the backseat of your car?” I asked as I grabbed my bag.

“She has no time between swim team and her dance class,” Sebastian said. Now that he mentioned it, I did remember Ainsley running out of the locker room super quickly after our swim practice. By the time the rest of us finished washing our hair, she was gone. But even though the Novaks had lived next to us for five years, I didn’t know Sebastian’s younger sisters well enough to ask her where she was going. “So, I drive her between them, and she gets changed in the backseat of my car. Andapparentlyleaves all her clothes around.”

He paused with his hand on the door handle, like hewas considering going in to grab it, but then he shook his head and stepped away like he thought better of it.

“Why are you the one driving her? Swim team has to finish at the same time as your soccer practice, so then you must also have to run to the car, then drive her and…” I trailed off as I saw the pained look on his face and all the pieces in my mind clicked. Suddenly, I regretted bringing this up at all. Because there was only one reason why he was doing that: there was nobody else who could.

It had been a little over a month since his dad left, but there were still days that I forgot it happened. It had all been so sudden that it was hard for me to wrap my mind around it.

It was a gorgeous summer day when it all went down. Everyone’s windows were open, so the sound of his parents’ screaming at each other echoed from their house and into ours. The next thing we knew, Sebastian had been standing on our porch with Lavender, Ainsley, and Imogen in tow, asking if they could hang out there for a bit because they needed some space. A bit turned into three nights, and when they went back, their dad was gone—presumably to move in with the women he’d been caught cheating with.

“So, do you think Dean’s home?” Sebastian asked, clearly trying to change the subject. He’d parked in his driveway, so he cut across the lawn to go up to our house. I trailed after him slower, leaving him plenty of time to walk in and start chatting with Dean before I followed. Even though we hadn’t done anything wrong, and there was every possibility Dean had actually sent Sebastian to getme, I did everything I could to avoid leaving Dean with the mental image of Sebastian and me together. Getting smothered with a pillow one time was more than enough for me.

two

The first timeI met Sebastian Novak was when his family moved in next door five years ago. They’d moved from the UK, and he said things like, “cheers” and “mate” and called me “love,” which 11-year-old me thought was the cutest thing in the world.

But, of course, it didn’t take long for him to then go on to become best friends with my older brother. Any shot I dreamed I had with him disappeared the moment Dean said hello for the first time. There had been a line between me and Dean—he didn’t talk to my friends and I didn’t talk to his. At best, I figured Sebastian might see me as another little sister, of which he already had enough. But there were times that I wondered if I was actually just invisible to him instead.

It broke my little pre-teen heart to know that he probably didn’t even notice me when I thought he was the cutest guy I’d ever seen. When I looked at him and saw the dark brown hair that never seemed to lay quite right, or listened to his British accent that was so dreamy that I’dsuggested he should start doing ASMR because his voice would put me to sleep—which he didn’t seem to take necessarily quite as much of a compliment as I meant it as—it was hard to see him just as my brother’s best friend.

Then I started high school and realized just how different our lives were. He was a cool jock. I was a shy nerd. When I first joined the swim team, I thought that would help propel me into his world, until I found out the only girl’s sport that automatically made you popular like that was cheerleading. Everything else was fine, but it didn’t add to your cool factor and that was what I desperately needed to be noticed. So until I somehow figured out a way to completely change my social standing, a feat which seemed impossible and probably not even worth it, I’d resigned myself to never having a relationship with anyone in high school, but least of all with Sebastian.

I came downstairs twenty minutes after getting to the house, after changing into an old pair of shorts and managing to wrangle my wet hair into a couple braids to get it out of my face. When I walked by the living room, I glanced in to see Dean and Sebastian playing some soccer-themed video game on the TV. I laughed softly to myself as I thought about Sebastian spending all his free time playing soccer in real life, and then coming back inside to play soccer on a screen. He really was obsessed.

I bypassed them to go into the kitchen for a snack, and when I came back out, the game was paused. I threw myself down on the couch closest to the doorway and pulled out my phone, trying to act like I didn’t care that either of them were there. Dean hated when I came and sat with them, but what else was I supposed to do? Ialready spent enough time in my room to hide from my parents, I didn’t want to have to hide in there just because he had friends over on top of that. Sometimes, I went down to the other TV in the basement, but there was no natural light down there, so it got downright depressing during the afternoons.

“You coming, Nora?” Sebastian asked. I looked up at the sound of my name and saw Sebastian looking at me expectantly, but I had no idea what they were talking about.

“Coming to what?” I asked, at the same time Dean said, “She’s not.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes at Dean, then looked at me again. “We’re going to the party tonight down at Jacob’s place to celebrate the end of the first full week of school. It’s gonna be fun. You’re welcome to join. There’s plenty of space in my car.”

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