I sit down in my seat between Eli and Merida in the student section, eating nachos that I bought from a concession stand not even fifteen minutes ago and listen to the crowd in Rup Arena as everyone yells out ‘Go Big Blue’ or screams the C-A-T-S Chant over again. Almost everyone else around me happens to be standing and yelling with the cheerleaders as the camera that shows the game on ESPN quickly goes by the student section, but then goes away just as quickly as it came. The man stood straight up again from running bent over with the heavy camera and walks someplace else, carrying cords in the hand that wasn’t carrying a camera.
Merida sat down beside me again and takes one of my nachos away from the plate thingy that they are in. “So, did you get the job?” she asked.
I nodded and swallowed the chip that I had been chewing. “Yeah, and I start Wednesday afternoon around lunch time,” I say to her.
“Did anyone go with you?” she asks, leaning sideways into me.
“Um, yeah.”
“Who?”
“Luke.”
Merida sat straighter when she heard me say Luke’s name and I can honestly say she looks shocked. “And you didn’t kill each other?”
I shrugged and stand up from my seat with my nachos, putting another cheese covered chip in my mouth. I glance at Eli who is talking with Billy about how the second half should be starting soon; he doesn’t come to games that often, he barely knows anything about sports. I look back Merida after looking at Eli and give her a smile, she didn’t smile back.
“Are you sure you hate Luke still?” she asks quickly.
“Yeah,” I say. “Why?”
“You haven’t said anything bad about him, I mean, like I there has to be something since you are hanging out with him.” She crosses her arms and stares at the court right when the basketball players come back in from spending the past minutes in the locker room, most likely getting a lecture or two from the couches.
The crowd cheers and they start warming up again, and the cheerleaders get to their feet and wave their pompoms around and jump up and down. The other team, Boston University, have come out and are warming up as well at the farthest basketball net from the student section. Of course I cheer and yell as best as I can for the Kentucky Wildcats while having another chip with cheese covering it in my mouth, which leads me to inhaling a piece of chip and going into a coughing fit. Of course, Merida started laughing but Eli patted my back as I stopped coughing, trying not to laugh with Merida.
I rolled my eyes and bend down to get my drink, taking a sip from it and then setting it back down in the cup holder infront of me again. “Merida, we are just hanging out because of the stupid essay assignment that the teacher gave the class,” I tell her.
“It doesn’t take that long to get five things that you like about each other and then typing it up, Faith!”
“But-.”
“Seriously, what’s so hard about it?” she huffed.
I stayed silent for a few seconds, not knowing what to say back to her. “Because we hate each other it’s taking a while for us to find something we like about each other.” That may be a partial lie, though, because Luke said he found it easy to find things that he likes about me. “Are you guys still on that bet?”
Merida let out a laugh as I looked at her and she nodded at me with a goofy grin. “Why wouldn’t we be? Oh, has something happened?”
“I dunno, and no. Nothing has happened,” I said. What about the fact that he called me a cute dork, I thought, Nah.
