Page 3 of You Belong With Me

“No there isn’t,” Dean said. “With us and your sisters, there will be nowhere for her to sit.”

Sebastian had three sisters, so if they were all coming along, Dean wasn’t wrong. But I hated that he was trying to use that as an excuse anyway.

Sebastian shook his head. “No, Lavender’s not coming, and Imogen and Ainsley are catching a ride with one of their friends, so it’s just gonna be us in the car.” He flashed a wicked grin my way. If I’d been standing, I knew my knees would go weak. “What do you say? You in?”

Honestly, I already had plans for my evening, and none of them involved going to a party at some senior boy’s house. I was going to stay home, take advantage of Dean’s absence, and marathon some Barbie movies on theTV with way too much junk food. But even though that was exactly how I wanted to be spending my night, I couldn’t tell Sebastian that. On the off chance he didn’t already see me like a little kid, he definitely would if I told him that.

But did I want to go to a party? It wasn’t something I ever thought to consider, because I’d never been invited to a party before. Well, maybe that wasn’t true. Clementine, who was on the swim team with me, liked to go to parties and she tended to offer open invitations to anyone who wanted to come. But this was different. This wasSebastianinviting me. It didn’t matter if I wanted to go—I couldn’t say no, unless I had cooler plans. And I definitely did not.

And as an added bonus, nothing would make Dean angrier than me tagging along.

“Sure,” I said. Then, not wanting to sound too eager, I added, “I guess.”

I thought Dean was going to kill me with the look that he sent me. And I just smiled back sweetly. He could try to boss me around all he wanted, but I wasn’t willing to let him stomp over every single high school memory that I was trying to make.

“Don’t you have to work on your project?” he asked in a condescending tone. “Which class is it again that you’re failing?”

I glared back at him. “It’s the second week of school—I’m notfailinganything. And even if I was, it’s Friday night. I’m sure I can put off my homework for a day.”

Sebastian looked at me curiously. “Which class?”

I’d been hoping that he wouldn’t catch that Dean’s dig had been about something real. I didn’t want to have to tellhim—the popular boy, who played soccer in front of hundreds of people every week—that I was barely scraping by in my public speaking class. But I knew Sebastian well enough to know that once he was curious about something, he wouldn’t just let it go, so I had to say something. And I obviously wasn’t going to lie about some other class, especially not with Dean sitting right there and ready to correct me, so I reluctantly admitted, “Public speaking.”

And I was not surprised in the slightest when he laughed out loud at me.

“Public speaking?” he said. “That’s the easiest class there is. All you have to do is perform a couple of speeches and you’re golden. How can you fail it?”

“I said I’m not failing it!Not. It is a very important word in that sentence.”

“Okay, how are younotfailing it, then?”

“Because she refuses to speak in front of people,” Dean muttered. He grabbed his Xbox controller and turned the game back on, even though Sebastian clearly had no interest in continuing to play. I guess he was just so bored of talking about me that he would rather play a two-player game by himself.

Sebastian raised his eyebrows at me. “Is that true, Nellie?”

I blushed at the nickname that had been given to me when he first moved here. He was the only one who called me that. He started after learning my real name was Eleanor, even though I’d corrected him again and again that I went by Nora. I hated it. It made me feel like a little kid—not that I’d grown up in Sebastian’ eyes, so it was probably exactly why he called me that.

“It’s not that I refuse to speak in front of people. It’s more complicated.”

“Okay,” he said, “Well, how’s it more complicated? Maybe we can figure it out.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

If I needed help in a class—and I hated to admit that I did need help in this one—Sebastian Novak was not the guy I’d go to. He may have been popular and a star on the soccer field, but I knew a lot about his grades from Dean and, suffice it to say, they weren’t great.

He held his arms up in a surrendered gesture. “Hey, sorry. I’ll just go back to playing my video game and leave you to not speaking in front of large crowds of people.”

Maybe I should have tried to explain. I was sure he could understand, even if he couldn’t relate. Public speaking and I just did not get along. It made my hands shake, made me nauseous, and in one particularly awful incident, I actually fainted in front of the whole class. But I didn’t want to be that version of myself in front of him.

Muffled yelling started to carry down from upstairs and Dean shot me a look. I bit my lip and glanced at Sebastian, who was very politely pretending to be interested in the TV screen instead of what was going on upstairs. I guess he had a lot of practice at ignoring his own parents’ fights, so it was easy to ignore ours too.

I was only eleven when Dean and I started betting on when my parents would get divorced, although we’d both suspected it would happen long before then. When we made the bet, he thought the separation was going to happen within a year. I thought they were going to stick it out through my time in middle school.

As it turned out, we were both wrong because here I was in my junior year of high school, and they were still together. How? I had no idea. Their arguments weren’t like those of Sebastian’s parents when the truth of his dad’s infidelity came out and they sounded like they were trying to kill each other. The arguments were smaller, but more frequent and over every small thing. Mom would find a bowl put away in the wrong spot and immediately go off on Dad for not respecting how she organized her kitchen, or Dad’s briefcase would get moved aside and he would say Mom was trying to get him fired. Every tiny thing that happened in the house was the other’s fault and every problem could only be solved by screaming.

Dean was still staring at me, silently begging me to get them to shut up. I glanced at Sebastian, who was still eating chips and staring at the TV like nothing was going wrong, but the tension he was holding in his shoulders gave away that he was uncomfortable. I drank the rest of the water from my glass then got up and walked toward the stairs.

Mom and Dad’s voices became clearer with every step I took and by the time I reached the landing, I could hear everything they were saying.

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