Page 5 of You Belong With Me

“I told you,” I said, keeping my eyes on the door. “I’m sleeping over at Clementine’s. Dean and Sebastian are just?—”

“Why is Sebastian coming with you?” Mom asked sharply. “I don’t see a reason for him to go along to drop you off at a sleepover.”

“Why not?” I asked, trying not to let the impatience I was feeling seep into my voice. It was too easy to upset Mom and make her pull the plug on me going out at all. I had to tread carefully.

“Sebastian is…” Mom sighed as she took a step closer and I tensed up. “He’s older than you, sweetheart. And more experienced. I would hate for him to have different expectations?—”

“We’re just dropping her off, Mom.” Unlike me, Dean didn’t try to hide his annoyance. “Sebastian won’t even be getting out of the car. Can we go now?”

There was a long pause before Mom said, “Okay. But Eleanor, do you need me to pick you up in the morning?”

It didn’t escape my notice that she didn’t ask Dean what his plans were for the night. Sometimes, I got the sense that she preferred not to know. She was happy to turn a blind eye to whatever he got up to, as long as he didn’t end up in the back of a cop car or embarrass the family somehow. Me, though? She would have locked me up in a tower like Rapunzel if she could.

“I’ll walk,” I said quickly. My plan was to come back late tonight and tell them that Clementine wasn’t feeling well so I’d come home, but on the off chance that I endedup sleeping somewhere else, I didn’t need her showing up at Clementine’s house in the morning looking for me. If her parents opened the door, they wouldn’t lie for me, and then I would be grounded for a century.

Dean seemed to take that as the end of the conversation and finished opening the door, letting us step outside. I waited until we were off the porch, and therefore out of sight from the window, before I took off my jacket and left it in the small bin Dean and I kept outside for this exact purpose. Even though I didn’t go out much, I was very used to wearing outfits my mom didn’t approve of, because her standards for my outfits were basically me looking like I was going to church.

“You need to get better at lying,” Dean muttered to me as we crossed the lawn to Sebastian’s house.

“I got us out of it, didn’t I?”

He snorted. “Barely.”

I thought I’d done pretty well, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. Even though it was Sebastian who had invited me here, I knew Dean held a lot of control. If he decided he didn’t want me anywhere near his friends, he could end this night easily. Sometimes it was better not to rock the boat, and I’d learned when to pick my battles.

I didn’t know the Novaks well enough to walk right into their house without knocking, but apparently Dean did because he didn’t hesitate to throw open the door and walk straight into the chaos. With four teenagers in the house, their house was always a bit of madness but it was especially bad tonight, with most of them planning to go to this party.

Lavender was running upstairs as we walked in, butshe yelled a hello over her shoulder before disappearing on the landing. Imogen was just past the foyer, yelling for Ainsley, her twin sister. Ainsley either couldn’t hear her over the music that was blasting from upstairs or she was choosing to ignore her. The whole house had the suffocating air of too many hair products and perfume mixing together, and I barely managed to hold back a cough. And in the midst of it all, Mrs. Novak appeared from the kitchen, looking tired but smiling brightly in the way she always did.

“Nora!” she exclaimed, pulling me into a hug. “I haven’t seen you in forever. How are you, honey?”

Mrs. Novak was the sweetest woman I’d ever met and acted like a mom to every one of her children’s friends. It made me so sad how everything had gone with her husband, because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could hurt such a kind-hearted person.

“Sebastian is just upstairs but he’ll be down in a minute,” she told Dean. “Or you can go up, but I can’t promise you won’t get trampled by the girls.” She looked at me curiously. “Are you here to see Ainsley and Imogen?”

I understood why that would be her assumption, even if I never really hung out with the twins. The idea of me being here to hang out with Sebastian and Dean was so laughable that it would have been much more believable that I was here to see one of the girls. At least they were all on the swim team with me, so I had some connection to them.

“She’s coming out with us,” Dean said flatly. Clearly, he had not warmed up to this idea at all inthe couple of hours since Sebastian suggested it. But Mrs. Novak didn’t seem to notice his tone as she beamed.

“How nice! Isn’t it nice to have a sibling so close in age? A built-in best friend.”

She was speaking from experience, I knew, because all her kids were born incredibly close together. Sebastian and Lavender were Irish twins, born in the same year with Sebastian being a January baby and Lavender a December baby. Then Ainsley and Imogen were literal twins, who were born almost exactly a year after Lavender. The times I’d been out with them, people frequently asked if Lavender, Ainsley and Imogen were triplets. Sebastian had told me that because of their birthdays, they were all in different grades back in the UK, but because grades were based on birth year here, he and Lavender got put in the same class instead. He claimed they hated it growing up but now they seemed really close, so I wondered if Mrs. Novak’s comment about a built-in best friend was accurate for her kids.

“I think so too,” I said, even though Dean and I were the furthest thing from being close siblings like she was describing. But it was the image that we put out to the world because, of course, a perfect family meant perfect siblings who got along at all times.

“Sebastian!” Dean yelled up the stairs, apparently over this conversation. “Hurry up, I want to get going.”

I wasn’t sure why he was so desperate to get to this thing. I mean, wasn’t it a rule of parties that you didn’t try to get there early? I was still only going off movies, but I was pretty sure that rule was accurate. And since none of Sebastian’s sisters were ready, I had to assume we weregoing earlier than everyone. I wondered if there was some ulterior motive for him. Maybe he was meeting a girl? I couldn’t imagine any girl who could put up with his arrogance, but then maybe that was just me. I was probably a little biased against him.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Sebastian said, running down the stairs while pulling on his jean jacket. He only glanced at Dean briefly before looking at me, raking his eyes up and down my body. I blushed and wrapped my arms around my stomach, suddenly wishing that I’d kept my coat on for longer. But there was no malice in his eyes, not in the way that I’d come to expect from him. He just looked interested, like because this was the first time he had ever seen me dressed like this, he wanted to take the time to remember it.

“Well, don’t you clean up nice, Nellie,” he said. Then he flashed me that grin again. The one that made me weak at the knees and butterflies appear in my stomach, even when I told myself again and again that I had no interest in Sebastian Novak in any form.

“Right back at you,” I stammered out.

“Sebastian!” Ainsley screamed from upstairs. Sebastian shuddered.

“Let’s get out of here before I get blamed for something else,” he said, cutting past Dean and me to go for the door. Imogen reappeared from where she’d disappeared behind a wall and called something after us, but Sebastian was already outside, Dean hot on his heels. I shot a smile at Mrs. Novak, even though she seemed a little distracted by her daughters, then followed after the boys, ready to go to my first ever highschool party.

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