Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Thirty-Four: His Dare

“Alright, pencils down,” Tyler called, inspecting his fingernails. He glanced away from his hands to shoot us an invigorated grin, looking oddly proud of himself. “Dudes, I’ve been waiting to say something awesome like that for, like . . . ever.”

I barely managed to contain my laughter.

“Pass your papers to the front,” Tyler instructed us, pacing the rows and picking up the twenty-five question test on the best rock bands and artists of the sixties and seventies, which is probably the only test in my entire life that I could walk away from and say that I totally . . . rocked.

Bun um bum.

The metallic bell shrieked through the school and I breathed out a long sigh of relief, tossing my pencil into Marvel before standing up from my feet, straightening my trench coat self-consciously. I ducked my head and maneuvered out of the door, relaxing only when I was up the hallway and the History of Rock classroom was too far behind me to spot.

I took a deep breath.

It wasn’t that I was avoiding him.

But I was kind of avoiding him.

I didn’t really want to, and I didn’t mean to, I swear. It’s just . . . For whatever reason, I had this funny nervous feeling in my stomach. It was all tingly and every time I even caught sight of a certain boy next door it would turn red hot and I would blush and stutter and overall act like a complete moron. So after spotting him this morning where he was hanging out with his friends and having the humiliation of him smile at me, only to have me too busy gaping at him to notice the poll that was about to become acquainted with my face . . .

Okay, I was kind of avoiding him. In my defense, I was sure I was going to die of embarrassment if I stuck around a little longer anyway.

When I had walked into lunch and saw him sitting with my friends at my usual lunch table, I had tucked and rolled down the hallway until I was safely hidden away among the paperbacks in the library, hunkered down in the corner hoping no one would notice me. The librarian called the SRO—aka the school cop—in when she spotted me. Needless to say, today’s outfit didn’t inspire confidence.

History of Rock had been just completely terrible. When I wasn’t tapping my pencil nervously and spastically against my desk, I was forcing myself not to look at him. And when I was forcing myself not to look at him, I tended to do stupid things that instead made the entire class look at me.

I don’t know what happened on the Ferris wheel the other day, partially because my mind was consumed with utter terror, and I was almost afraid of where we stood now. It just felt like something happened, even if nothing did.

Call me a pansy, but at the first mention of something going down and I’m running out of there.

Hopeless romantics are usually romantics that are hopeless at finding the right guy. I was a hopeless romantic because I was absolutely hopeless at anything relatively romantic.

Including confrontations. Kill me with a spoon; I hate confrontations.

I heard Quinton call my voice loudly from behind me, echoing down the hall. I winced and resisted the urge to hit my head against the wall, trying not to look in too much pain and I turned around to face where he was cutting through the crowd, smiling widely as he made his way over to me.

Upon seeing him, my stomach immediately erupted into butterflies and I blushed. I nearly facepalmed.

Well, this was a good start.

When he caught up to me, he was grinning, looking so much like Quinton that I immediately felt myself start to smile back, my whole body relaxing in response. Maybe I had been completely imagining it all because there was none of that mysterious emotion on his face like there had been on the Ferris wheel. I kind of wouldn’t be surprised if it had all been inside of my crazy little mind.