My Best Friend's Brother

Chapter Four

“There’s a party on Friday,” Elle told me, shoving another chocolate egg in her mouth. It was after school on Wednesday, and we were sitting in her room, pigging out on some of the chocolates her father had bought her and were left over from Easter. I glanced up at her, chewing slowly on the chocolate.

“Are you going?” I asked her, but I knew the answer. She shook her head and laughed a little. “Yeah, me neither,” with that, her head snapped at me, and she looked at me like I was crazy.

“You weren’t invited?”

“Well . . .” I bit my lip. Today, in English, Tyler had told me about it, and it sounded almost like an invitation. And at lunch time, he’d shouted something about it to me. Next to him, Dylan stopped throwing the football around and flashed a grin at me. Carrie wasn’t around, so she wasn’t there to ward me away as Dylan kicked the football over to me.

“Oh, I don’t play,” I had told him, and passed it back to him. He stopped it with his foot and starting doing some kick ups before passing it to Tyler who dribbled it and shot it into a manmade goal of two jackets. Dylan shrugged.

“Neither do we,” he told me, but I told him I had to meet Elle, and he laughed it off, telling me he’d see my later. I didn’t see him at his house, though, which I’d secretly hoped for. He was at Tyler’s house with a few other boys from school.

“Riley?” Elle asked, shaking my knee slightly to get my attention back. I hummed under my breath to let her know I’d heard. She giggled. “You were invited, weren’t you? It’s okay. You can go.”

“No,” I said, “not without you.”

“Why?” she scrunched her nose and burrowed her eyebrows together. She popped another chocolate egg into her mouth and chewed it greedily before taking a swig of her Tango. I did the same, though the taste of chocolate in my mouth was getting sickly. I shrugged my shoulders lightly.

“I haven’t been formally invited, anyway” I ignored her question, and it sounded more stupid out that it had in my head, surprisingly .I wanted to bang my head against a wall, but I didn’t. I downed the last of my drink and ate two more eggs.

“Oh,” she said, “well . . .” biting her lip, she paused. “It doesn’t matter. There are no formal invitations. You just have to be told.”

“Weren’t you told, though?” I asked, smiling at her, “and that’s how you knew about it?”

She shook her head quickly. “God, no. I overheard Carrie talking about it with Carlson and Matthew in English, and then she yelled at me for eavesdropping.”

I laughed with her and thought about English myself. Tyler had read about his opening paragraph on his essay, and it was really good, much better than mine. I wondered if he did tutoring sessions, not for math, but for English. H would be great at that.

“Um,” I thought about Dylan for a moment, and stared at Elle’s bed sheets. “Is . . . Is your brother in your English?”

She stared at me. Wide-eyed, and her lips in a straight line. She waited, studying my face, before shaking her head slowly. “No,” she said, “he’s not. Why?”

“Just wondering,” I smiled. “Hey, can you help me with my biology?”

Successfully, I had changed the subject, but I couldn’t help but wonder about Dylan and Carrie. Just the thought alone made me giddy. That I knew something that Carrie didn’t. Dylan didn’t like her!

It was like the perfect movie where the underdog takes down the cheerleader and laughs in her face, and in the end, the underdog dates the guy.

At school the next day, Tyler told me more about the party, telling me about the guy throwing it – Chris, the guy who sat at the front of our English class – and telling me the times. I bit my lip as he wrote them down for me, wondering whether I should tell Elle or not.