He gives me a flat look. “No. Your object of desire is safe from slander. You, however…” He laughs like friends do when they see a booger stuck to the side of your face but don’t intend to tell you it’s there.
Again, I ignore him. “I couldn’t care less about the article, then.” My image has never been important to me. All I care about is playing a good game. “Besides, we only dated for a few months. I doubt she could come up with that much dirt on me.” Mostly because I’m boring. I don’t party. I don’t drink during the season. I go to bed early and wake up early.
Jamal looks like he’s about to burst from jubilant anticipation. His smile is grinchy, his eyebrows are lifted, and now maybe I’m a little nervous about what Kelsey said. He claps me on the back on his way out of the locker room. “Come find me when you’re ready to read it, okay? I don’t want to miss seeing your face when you do.”
As Jamal is leaving, another one of my teammates walks through the locker room and heads for the shower while laughing at whatever he’s looking at on his phone.
“What’s up, Price?” I ask with a head nod even though he’s not looking at me.
He laughs bigger and passes by me. “Not you apparently!”
I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but something tells me I’m not going to like it when I find out.
“OH MY GOSH, I’m drooling. Imani, grab me a mop so I can clean up this puddle.”
“Shhhhh, she’s gonna hear us. Keep it down, you dodo!”
“I don’t care if she hears, she needs to know it’s unbelievable she’s not jumping that piece of—”
I clear my throat and fold my arms, tapping my foot like I remember my mom doing—although I refuse to think of myself as these girls’ mom because I’m absolutely not old enough. I’m more like their big sister. Yeah, their super cool big sister who they’d be lucky to hang out with!
“Hand it over,” I say, hand outstretched toward the group of sixteen-year-old ballet students hovering ominously around a phone. And yeah, now I feel like their mom.
“See, Hannah, you and your big mouth went and did it.” Imani rises from their little huddle in the corner of the studio where they were waiting for class to begin and pads gracefully across the hardwood floor to me.
The pink and blue bejeweled phone case lands in my palm, and I look down to find a photo of Nathan in a sexy ad of some sort, wearing nothing but his uniform pants and a really awesome pair of black cleats. His abs are rippling under the studio lighting, and there’s more than a little sheen reflecting off his taut skin from all the oil that’s been rubbed on him. I’m not even sure what they are selling here, but I’m willing to spend all my savings on it.
I swipe out of the photo even though I want to copy and paste the URL and text it to myself. “First of all, you girls shouldn’t be looking at this. He’s almost twice your age!”
“So! Sexiness knows no age.” Sierra—also sixteen—is the one to shout that little gem.
“Believe me, it does. Just ask the law.” They all roll their eyes. Sixteen-year-olds are terrifying. “And second of all, this is 100% photoshopped. He
doesn’t look like this in real life.” He looks better.
Hannah points aggressively at me. “Bite your tongue! He’s the hottest man in the world and everyone knows it. And we want to know how you can be best friends with that god among men and not hit it.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Ew, don’t say hit it. Where did you learn to talk like that?”
“You’re avoiding the question,” says Hannah. She’s the ringleader of sassiness in this class.
I cross the floor of the long slender studio to reach the sound system in the back corner. Remote in hand, I rise onto my toes and spin around to face the little fresh-faced jury now lined up by the floor-to-ceiling mirror, arms folded. These tiny babies mean business.
“I’m not avoiding the question. I’m just not dignifying it with an answer! Plus, it’s an inappropriate class conversation. My business with my friend is my own, not yours.” I want to boop each of them on the nose to drive the point home.
“But you love him, right?” asks Imani.
I put my hands on my hips. Ugh, more mom posing. “If I answer you, can we start class?”
“Yes,” the Spice Girls of ballet answer in unison.
“Then no, I do not love him, Sam I am. I do not love him in a car, I do not love him in a bar. I do not love him with a hat, I do not love him with a cat,” I chirp adorably while twirling and whimsically conveying this lie in a way I hope they’ll understand.
Their frowns are deep. They think I’m so uncool.
There is no way I’m giving these girls what they want: the truth. Telling them how I actually feel about Nathan would be like throwing thousands of Pixy Stix into a room of toddlers. They’d go nuts and I’d never have peace again. There’s also the very real possibility that they would find a way to contact him and tell him everything I say. Better to lie and pretend I don’t care about Nathan in that way.
“That’s so boring!” one of the girls moans. “What’s the point of even having a hot best friend if you’re not going to bang him?”