Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Twenty: British Boy Bands and Salad

“DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING FOR MYSELF?” Aubrey screamed, making me jump and hit myself in the face with a spoon of Red Velvet Cake. She flailed wildly, opening her mouth and closing it again, looking like a sea monster on the brink of certifiable insanity. For good measure, I scooted away from the web cam a little bit, grimacing the angrier her gesticulations became.

Finally, she just threw her hands up before slumping down onto her desk, like her efforts at miming my idiocy was beyond her capacity. She shook her head like a dog trying to shake off soap suds, making this growling sound at the same time.

“You give me a headache sometimes, Lena,” she told me honestly. “Headaches, and chocolate cravings. Start over, but this time at the beginning.”

“I got dared to kiss him. I kissed him. And then I kind of sort of told him that I was happy we were such good friends.”

Aubrey slammed her forehead down onto the desk, more than likely shattering her frontal lobe.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I snapped when she lifted her head to glare at me, her eye twitching. “You look like the girl from The Exorcist.”

“Not the point,” she dismissed me, her hair sticking straight in the air and her eyes nearly crossing. “What I’m trying to say is that I can’t believe you can be so completely clueless when it comes to boys. I just . . . I don’t quite have the words.”

“I thought your dad owned an Oxford English Dictionary,” I replied.

“I’m not allowed to touch it,” she explained, and I nodded in understanding. “Look, Lena, I really don’t know what to tell you. Actually, no, that’s a lie—I don’t know what to tell you without knowing that you’re totally going to mess it up.”

“I take offense in that,” I teased, but it just made her face get all red, and that kind of scared the hell out of me, so I shrunk back and shoved a gigantic spoonful of delicious goodness in my mouth. She glared at me for another moment before her face suddenly went peaceful, and she took a deep breath.

“Okay, I’m going to deal with this calmly,” she told me, and I watched cautiously as she pulled out a stress ball and squeezed the living hell out of it. “Maybe you should just talk to him again, and not screw it up. Just try to act cool. I know that will be really hard for you, but I think that you should try anyway.”

“I’m cool,” I told her through a mouthful of ice cream, in the process drooling down the front of myself. Aubrey closed her eyes and sighed so heavily that I thought she was going to rupture her diaphragm.

“So all I want you to do is talk to him,” she told me, her eyebrows soaring. “Can you handle that?”

“Well, what do I say?” I demanded, wiping at my mouth and grimacing down at the drool on my shirt. I rubbed at it but it didn’t come out, so I just sighed and put the lid back on the ice cream, sitting it and the spoon down on my bed. “I’m not exactly a well of words, and you sound like you have good ideas about this situation.”

“Don’t say anything,” she told me.

“Sorry. Just tell me your plan.”

“Dude,” she said, “that was my plan. Just talk to him and don’t bring up what happened. Stray from even the slightest topic that might have to do with it. That way you can’t even mess it up, you know?”

“Why is your advice so terrible?” I demanded.

“I never said I was the advice guru,” she responded. “You just assumed that I would be.”

I sighed and ran my hand through my hair. “Sorry, Aubs. I just don’t know who else to talk to about all of this. The other girls, Kline and Norma . . . Well, Norma is hardly without Colonel, who hates Quinton for some reason unknown to me, and Kline kind of has a stroke every time his name comes up. I have absolutely no one else to talk about him with unless word’s gonna get around.”