How to Fall Apart

Chapter Thirteen

The next night Mom was so grateful that I had stayed home with Clark the night before that she let me take her car. I picked Alissa up and we got giant milkshakes from Sonic and then drove around for hours listening to bad 80's music. We sang along to the songs that we knew, surprised at how many there were, and made up our own words to the ones we didn't.

We had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a hold of Kenny at first to go hang out with him but then we decided that we were having too much fun by ourselves and ignored his calls when he finally called us back. Alissa flashed a car full of older guys while we were cruising down eighth street and was mad at me when I refused to pull over to meet them. Then she sang I Just Died in Your Arms half hanging out of my car to a middle aged man at a stoplight who had his window partially down to smoke a cigarette.

When we finally got sick of driving around aimlessly around midnight, we went to Perkins and ordered a pot of coffee and mammoth chocolate chocolate chip muffins. I watched Alissa as she added a little coffee to her creamer and shook my head in disgust. I added just one French vanilla creamer to my own cup. After putting away a couple of pots of coffee we were ready to leave. Just as we were about to go, some guys wearing letterman jackets from Central, the other high school in town, slid into our booth uninvited. They'd been sitting on the other side of the restaurant from us the whole time we were there.

"Hey, I'm Chris," the guy sitting next to Alissa offered her his hand. He had blonde hair with too much gel and very white teeth.

"Hello! I'm Sophie," she said without missing a beat, in a not completely awful British accent. I tried to conceal my surprise and play along. There was no way I was going to pull off a believable British accent so I hoped that wasn't part of her game.

"I'm Everett," the cute dark haired guy sitting next to me smiled, creasing his cheek with a dimple that made me think of Nate.

"I'm Natalie," I sputtered, drinking out of my almost empty coffee cup to cover my lie. Another boy had pulled up a chair at the end of our booth and sat in it backwards. Alissa was eyeing him like he was her next meal. He had shaggy light brown hair and arms that clearly spent a good deal of time in the gym.

"Spencer," he nodded at her, his eyes lingering on the neckline of her low cut shirt. Basking in the spotlight, Alissa spun a tale about how she's from Glasgow, England and her mother is very ill so she came to live with me, her dear cousin, here in the states. Her eyes appropriately filled with tears as she talked about her poor sick mum and then brightened as she said how lovely South Dakota is. She was quite the actress and the guys totally ate it up. The only acting I did was taking fake sips out of my empty coffee cup so I wouldn't laugh at Alissa's theatrics. The blond guy sitting next to Alissa tried for nearly an hour to take her eyes off of Spencer but she was not interested. Spencer looked bored but still ended up making out with Alissa in his car for twenty minutes while I made small talk with his friends inside. Everett was sweet but I told him I had a boyfriend when he started to think I might actually be interested.

"American boys are simply lovely." She told me in her British accent as she slid into the passenger's side of my mom's car. "Sophie likes Spencer," she dropped the accent and reached up the back of her shirt, hooking her bra.

"Maybe try to warn me next time we have multiple personality disorder, hmm?" I teased her.

"You can't plan something like that, Veda! That was improvising... it was art and you did a marvelous job!" She leaned over and gave me a big wet kiss on the cheek.

I was supposed to be staying over at Alissa's house and it was almost four in the morning. "So, should we go back to your house now or...?" I asked her.