Ticktock Love

[2] To All the Shorts I've Loved Before

"Fifty-seven seconds," Julia announced, her eyes still glued to her stopwatch app.

Amber, whose hands were busy with fixing her already immaculate curls, whistled at this piece of information.

"I'm pretty sure that's a new record."

I stopped entering my locker combination and angled my head up. Thanks to her six-foot-two height, Julia towered over us even with her neck bent down. Her straight, blond hair partially obscured her face, framing her pointy chin and perfectly straight nose like a piece of artwork, but I still caught her raising her eyebrows at Amber's observation.

"Is it?" she put her phone back into the pants pocket and corrected her posture before verbalizing her question. "Wasn't it forty-five seconds when that airheaded freshman fainted?"

"That doesn't count," Grace, our ever-reliable mediator, scoffed. She held her manicured finger up, and her ombre nail polish glimmered in shades of pink. "One, he caught her because she was about to split her head open on that concrete wall. Two, it only counts when a girl touches him first."

"Touches him?" I laughed, tapping my fingers against the cold metal and casually inserting myself in the conversation. "Look at her. She's climbing him like she's ivy and he's an abandoned building."

"Well, in Aiden's defense, he doesn't really look comfortable."

All four of us glanced at the pair. They were surrounded by half a dozen girls, a handful of those focused on the only guy present. The girl who helped him set the record stood closest to him, and I watched as she 'accidentally' brushed against him for the second time, her hand lingering on his bicep for a second too long.

"I guess she's watched way too many Hallmark movies lately."

I heard Grace tutting to herself, but she said nothing.

"Naomi seriously upped her game this year," Amber asserted, her lipglossed mouth open in the perfect shape of an o. To anyone who didn't know her as well as we did, she would have seemed almost impressed. To Grace, Julia, and me, their ugly history painted her every word with disdain.

We exchanged an alarmed look behind Amber's back.

"Am I crazy," Grace ventured, changing the subject on purpose, "or is there someone else here who just doesn't see the appeal?"

Before I could demonstrate my perfect poker face to the world, Julia laughed and raised her hand at Grace, asking for a high five.

"Definitely not the only one."

Grace grinned in return, slapping Julia's palm with her own. At four foot eleven, she still had to raise herself on tiptoe to reach her hand, an admirable and slightly wobbly achievement in her elegant platform wedges.

The four of us had been a group since the second semester of our freshman year. Julia Castillo, the paragon of casual, zero-Fs-given attitude, decided to be my friend over mutual resentment of Holiday Mint M&M's. Grace Young, the most advanced polyglot in the five-mile radius and a terminally lost cause when it came to math, altruistically taught me when to correctly use the verbs 'ser' and 'estar'. And Amber Price, the headstrong, impetuous, wonderful Amber, who had been there for me ever since she made a kindergarten boy cry for stealing my crayons, that Amber now glanced at the most popular guy in our school and nodded.

"I'd do him," she voiced her opinion and shrugged when the other two made a disgusted face. She finally stopped messing with her hair and grinned. "Come on, I didn't say I'd date him. Those are two different things."

"But he's so basic."

"Aiden West is definitely not basic. Haven't you heard the rumors of him getting a wolf tattoo on his chest over the summer? Apparently, he's grown so much hair on it that the tattoo guy didn't even need to ink the fur."