Page 19 of A Slice of Love

In high school, she was all frizz with big, bulky glasses covering her pale face. She always reminded me of Anne Hathaway from that damn movie my sister Thea used to make me watch over and over.

I guess Frankie had her ownThe Princess Diariesmoment, because right now she looks a hell of a lot more like Mia Thermopolisafterthe makeover.

I’ll never admit this out loud, but even though Mia was hot as fuck after that transformation, I always kind of preferred her with the frizz.

Which is exactly why I could barely stand having Frankie as my lab partner our senior year.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like being around her. It was the exact opposite.

Every morning she’d walk in smelling like oranges, probably from that boxed orange juice she’d toss into the trash when she stepped through the door. She’d shuffle her way to our table, slide onto her stool next to me—the one I’d drag just a few centimeters closer each day—then reach into her bag for a piece of orange-flavored gum, offering me one too. It didn’t matter that I turned down her every offer; she was still the politest lab partner ever, and she’d still try.

Without fail, this was our routine.

I made sure to take my vitamin C every fucking day so I wouldn’t get sick and miss a second of the seventy-five minutes I had with her. It was the first time in my high school career I didn’t have any absences.

It’s not like I showed up for the conversation. Hell, we probably only spoke a handful of sentences to one another out loud the entire time we were in school together.

But that didn’t mean we didn’t talk.

Every day I had to sit next to her while she sat in silence, chewing on that damn bottom lip of hers and hiding behind the ball of frizz she called hair.

It was annoying…yet I couldn’t stop stealing glances at her.

I loved the way she’d let her glasses fall to the end of her nose before pushing the center piece until they were tucked back into place. I adored the way she’d line up her notebook and pencils in the same order, ensuring everything was straightened out before she flipped open her notebook, always adding the date in the top right corner in the most precise handwriting I’d ever seen. And when her mind would wander, she’d chew on the ends of her pencils until they were all marked up and unusable.

I’d never wanted to be an inanimate object so badly in my life.

By that first Friday, the silence and miles spanning between us were killing me.

Ineededto talk to her.

On a whim, I scribbled a frivolous note and slid the paper her way.

I’m 75% sure Ms. Day just farted.

I watched as the corner of her lips ticked up and she reached for the third pencil in her lineup, chewing on the end of it for a moment or two before finally bringing the utensil to paper.

Only 75%?

Just two words, and I knew I had her.

We managed to fill five notebooks during those 180 days. She’d take it home one evening, and I would the next. Sometimes our entries were lengthy, packed with our deepest, darkest confessions. Sometimes it was nothing but a doodle—well, a masterpiece in her case, and in mine, a crude drawing a kindergartener could have out-scribbled.

Nothing was off limits.

Our aspirations, fears, strongest desires, and embarrassing confessions…it was all there between the pages.

Inside those cheap notebooks, there were no rules, no social ladders, no lines.

It was just us.

We spent the entire school year like this, our stools moving ever closer together, elbows rubbing as we worked silently side by side for months.

Until we hit a snag in whatever it was we were doing.

We had an end-of-the-year project due and were required to work on it outside classroom hours.

The moment our teacher proposed this, I knew I was screwed.

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