Excuse my French

quatre. meilleures amies

"Hey, did you get the pizza?" Lila said to me as soon as I stepped onto the bleacher next to her. "I'm so fucking starved that—oh!" She yanked the plate of pizza from my hand with so much force that the poor thing almost went flying off. "Oh-my-goodness-thank-you-so-fucking-much—can I marry you?"

I pouted. That was supposed to be my piece of pizza. I'd specifically bought a piece of pepperoni pizza for myself and then a piece of cheese pizza for Lila so that she could at least pretend to adhere to her diet. "But—but I—" I mumbled.

It was too late. Lila had already gone through half the slide of pizza. With a sigh, I sat down on the bleacher next to her heavily and began to nibble at my own piece.

A couple seconds later, Lila said, mouth still full and chewing, for that matter, "Do you know when the game's ending? I'm freezing my ass off here."

I clucked. "You're the one who spent the past hour sitting on these bleachers and playing on your phone. You made me fetch all your food for you." I glanced around us. There weren't too many people surrounding us, which really was a shame. Home games didn't get as much support from the school community as they should. "By the way, where's Liv?"

Lila swallowed, temporarily creating a double chin, before responding thickly, "Getting a textbook from her car."

"What a killjoy." I groaned jokingly. "What's the point of going to a game if you're just going to study? She might as well stay in the car and fuck up her brain with physics there."

"Oh, Audrey, be nice," Lila said mildly. She was watching the progression of the ball across the field toward the home end. "But I really would prefer to avoid all mention of physics until at least eleven tonight, please."

I put down my piece of pizza on my napkin and followed Lila's eyes. The little lacrosse ball was getting whacked across the field—in fact, toward the home goal or whatever it was called in lacrosse vocabulary—so quickly that I couldn't even see it in the glaring stadium lights. It was much more helpful and interesting to watch the person that everyone else was watching. I scratched my chin. At least that was who I hoped had the ball...

I felt Lila inching toward me on the bleacher and instinctively slapped her hand away from my piece of pizza. "If you wanted more pizza, you could've asked me," I said sharply.

My face was betraying me though. Shit.

From the way that Lila waved a hand at me and only kept reaching for my pizza, I could tell that she knew this perfectly well. "No, seriously," I insisted. I turned my thighs away from her and slid down the bleacher a good six feet. "Stop it!"

"But you love me!" Lila followed me on foot. Damn it, why did she always make me look so dumb? I shot her a disgruntled look, but she only persisted. "Give me my pizza, Audrey!"

"No!" I spun away from her. The only good option I had (other than swallowing the pizza in one gulp—and I had no desire to choke to death on this particular day) was to create an impregnable defense around it, so I curled up into a ball around my pizza.

"Oh my God," groaned Lila. Even though my face was tucked neatly under my arms, I could still see her standing right next to me with her hands on her hips, shifting back and forth on her feet. "It's mine, Audrey! I paid for it!"

It happened so quickly that I didn't even realize that Lila was capable of something like that. But in a split second, I found myself somehow on the ground after banging the back of my head onto the bleacher with a magnificent bang. And Lila? She was practically sitting on top of my legs, grabbing for my pizza on top of my napkin.

I must have let out a scream and flailed my legs or something because Lila shot off immediately. "Tch, it's mine," she muttered, crossing her hands over her chest. She looked around our area on the bleachers. "And now everyone is looking at us."