Crazy, Sweet

Chapter Ten

I peeked above the stack of pictures in my hand and inspected the classroom to see if anybody was paying attention to me. When I was satisfied that the class was preoccupied doing other things while we waited for the professor, I slinked back in my chair and went through the photos Seth had handed me in an envelope earlier when we passed each other by the hallway on my way to this class. 

They were photos from the Saturday we spent together—shots of the disastrous kitchen, us hanging out by the pool with our cheeks bright pink and hair slick and glistening with water, our goofy expressions with ice cream smeared on our face like war paint, us and our bikes by the neighborhood park and other random shots of pure silliness and good times.

I was pretty hesitant at first when he whipped out his compact digital camera and started snapping the first few shots at the beginning of the day but being Seth whom pretty much nobody can say no to, cajoled me into loosening up and I don’t regret holding the memories in my hands now.

My favorite, I decided with a blush creeping up my cheeks, is of a close up of our faces while we were lying down on the daybed, my tongue sticking out from the corner of my mouth while he was pressing a kiss on my cheek. I remember pummeling him with a pillow right after this shot was taken, feigning indignation at him for stealing a kiss.

“Ali! What’s up, girl?”

A high-pitched female voice popped my cloud nine and before I realized it, Stephanie Dallas, a nosy and noisy, extremely tall redhead who attends a lot of the same classes as mine, plopped down on a seat beside me and grabbed the stack of photos from my hand. 

“Steph, wait, give that back to me!” I immediately lunged for the photos she was casually shuffling through before her expression lit up with recognition then shock. 

“Oh my God, Ali. Is this Seth Wallace in these photos with you?” she asked out loud with an amused yet stunned grin on her face. 

I tensed as several other people’s heads turned to me.

Stephanie didn’t seem to mind the attention she was drawing as she continued to shuffle through the photos, twisting and turning to ward off my attempts at lunging for the photos again. “You guys look so cute! I didn’t know you two were dating.”

“We’re not dating!” I snapped, finally leaping up and successfully snatching the photos back except for a few of them that slipped off the stack and floated to the floor. 

Stephanie smirked and helped me pick them up. “Oh, don’t get so worked up now, Ali. It’s great that you’re seeing someone—especially when it’s Seth Wallace. Hello? But who knew he’d be interested in, you know, smart girls. Don’t get me wrong on that. It just seemed as if he was always dating pretty but ditzy girls.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for the sensitivity, Steph—always your best trait, but broadcasting it to the class was really unnecessary.”

Stephanie, never the shy and sensitive type at all, just laughed and patted my shoulder. “Oh, Ali. When you’re dating someone like Seth Wallace, this kind of thing doesn’t stay a secret for very long. You’ll have half this campus hating you pretty soon.”