Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
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Liam sits on my desk chair, and I sit on my bed and stare at the math exercises I'm supposed to do tonight. It's already 1am and I'm tired, but I know I won't be able to sleep until I get this done.
But math is different from English homework. I can't overthink math. I can't get frustrated at the source text and wonder whether the things I think are wrong or right. There's only one answer in math, so I can't procrastinate by worrying about what the teacher will think if I come to a weird conclusion.
Math is not Liam's strong subject, anyway, so he's not even helping right now. He's just sitting at my desk, swinging around in the chair, and taking in the things in my room that are new since the last time he was in here.
"Didn't you used to have a bunch of polaroid photos of me and Gracie and Oscar?" Liam asks, staring up at the wall above my desk.
"Not anymore," I say unnecessarily, without looking up from my homework.
"Where did they go?"
And then suddenly Liam is rifling through my drawers, and I have to launch myself off the bed so I can stop him from finding anything. My hand lands on his upper arm and he pulls back and swings around again.
"Where did that notebook with all the girls' names go?" Liam asks.
I glare at him.
"What was that, anyway? Loren Epworth? Hannah P? Jess Turner?"
"You wouldn't understand," I say, mimicking his words from earlier.
Liam keeps swinging in the chair. I fall back onto my bed and keep doing math exercises. There's a good ten minutes where we don't talk, and then when I look up I realise it's because he's reading something, and I momentarily panic, thinking he must have found another notebook, but then I see that it's just a piece of paper covered in triangles.
Liam eventually looks at me. "You really like triangles, huh, Cook?"
"You going to call me Cook now?"
"Am I allowed to call you Leens?"
"If you call me Cook, am I allowed to call you Keller?"
"My name's Somner."
"So you go on about the fates of the Cooks and the Kellers, but you don't even think you are one," I say.
"In case you haven't noticed, I am almost the spitting image of my mom," Liam says. "The name Keller is written on my face. I don't have a single thing from my dad, except his name. So I'll hold onto it, thanks."
"Alright, Somner."
"So what's with the triangles?"
"What's with the cigarettes?"
He's got the packet in the pocket of his sweat pants, and every so often his hand lingers there, as if he's making sure it's still there.
