Page 54 of The Do-Over

The image of Josh’s lips touching Macy’s flashed through my mind but I shoved it away. “Can’t a girl just mix up her life a little?”

“An unhinged girl, maybe.”

“Well then, I’m that.” I might as well be, since the real explanation actuallywasunhinged.

He asked as we went around a food cart, “So is your dad going to kill you?”

“Probably.”

His eyebrows furrowed together. “How do you not seem concerned about it?”

I shrugged. “He’s just going to yell at me for a while and then it’ll be over.” He wouldn’t, actually, but I couldn’t explain that to Nick.

“We clearly have very different parents.” He gave his head a shake and said, “My dad is super cool but he woulddestroyme. Like, I am getting scared just thinking about my father’s reaction to something like this, and he doesn’t even have a nice car for me to steal.”

I took another sip of my coffee as we stopped to wait for the light to change. I asked him, “Are your parents still married?”

I was fascinated by people whose parents were still together. Itseemed surreal and impossibly beautiful to me, the idea of living out all of your childhood years with both parents, together in the same house.

“Yep,” he said, and we both started walking as the signal switched. I waited for him to elaborate and talk about his family, but he didn’t say anything else.

“You never answered about brothers and sisters.” I leaned a little to my left and bumped him as we crossed. “One? Two? Ten? Do you have any?”

Irritation flashed in his eyes and his jaw was hard when he said, “Do we really have to do the ‘Tell me about your family’ small-talk thing?”

“Oh. Um, sorry.” Coffee splashed onto my glove as I stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk.

“It’s fine.”

Yeah—sure it was. I looked straight ahead and wondered if it was possible to feel like a bigger dork, because his face had shown exactly how annoying he found me. All of a sudden, I was aware of the biting sting of cold on my cheeks as I struggled to think of something—anything—to say.

“Stop it.”

I glanced over at him. “What?”

“Stop feeling like that—I’m not mad.”

That made me roll my eyes. “How doyouknow how I’m feeling?”

“Well, your face got all pinched.”

“Pinched?”

He shrugged and gestured to my face with his free hand.

“Oh, okay—that explains it.”

“Ms. DONC.” He grabbed my elbow and led me out of the foot traffic, so we were standing beside a closed storefront. He looked down at me with that handsome face, his soapy scent ribboning around me, and said, “Tell me. What epic Ferris Bueller shit are we doing first?”

CONFESSION #12

I started drinking coffee when I was eleven. My mom left for work when there was one cup left in the pot, every day, and since it seemed like a grown-up thing to do, I did it.

That snapped my attention back to the present. Why had I been worrying about insulting him when it was the DONC? I blinked and said, “I don’t really have a plan, per se, but we should check out the First Bank building.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you have some investing to do?”

“No, I want to sneak up to the fortieth floor.” Now I grabbedhiselbow and we started walking. “Listen to this.”

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