Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ✔︎

34 | Your Destiny is Calling

|photo by Diogo Fagundes from Unsplash|

Megan takes the wood-framed abacus off the shelf above my desk. It's an Allen family heirloom. Supposedly, the math-geek gene comes from my dad. "I think I have to admit the thing I don't want to admit," I say.

"Which is..." She lifts a row beads and lets them drop against the base. Her bossy eyebrow says she already knows the answer, but she wants me to say it.

"There's a very good chance I would've gone out with Conner anyway—even if Glenn had called to apologize."

Megan keeps lifting stacks of beads. Lift, clack. Lift, clack.

"Fine. It's even possible that I would've fallen for Conner even if Glenn hadn't broken up with me before I left Haddock. But I wouldn't have acted on it."

"True," Megan says. "Your loyalty is commendable. Is that the point, though?"

The point is Glenn was right to break up with me.

I say it out loud and Megan nods.

"So now what?" she asks. "Can you let it go, move on?"

"You mean let Conner go?"

"No, I was talking about your anger issues. I was under the assumption you'd already decided to let go of Conner."

"No, I said I didn't know if I could let him go."

"Then don't." Megan leans forward and grins. "Take a chance on fate."

I launch a pillow at her. She bats it away with the abacus. Then my phone vibrates on the dresser and she cracks up laughing. "There you go," she says. "Your destiny is calling."

"Great, now I can't get Glenn to stop texting me." Megan rolls my desk chair over to the dresser and trades my family heirloom for my phone. "Just turn it off," I tell her.

"Um, I kind of already looked and it's not Glenn. It's the other one."

"Conner?"

She nods vigorously. "It's a picture. Can I look?"

I give her the be-my-guest gesture, trying for nonchalance, feeling anything but. "He's not supposed to be texting me, either," I say. "We agreed to a no-cell-contact winter break."

She unlocks the screen and tilts her head. "Aw. You guys look really cute together." I hold out my hand and she surrenders the phone.

We do look cute together. "Conner's mom took this when we were at his house," I tell her. "There's no message."

"He's thinking about you. What more do you need to know?"

"How things went with Paige..."

Because right before I left, Conner told me he was going to spend some time with her. So that when I came back, he could give me a better answer to my question.

"Thea, it's 9:45 on a Saturday night and he's sending you a picture of the two of you. I'd say 'things' went about as good as your date with Glenn."

I text him back one word: Cheater.

"Hmm," Megan says. "I didn't really notice it in the other picture—probably because he was standing next to Chase."

"Notice what?"

"How much Conner looks like Glenn."

"He does not." She gives me her you're-in-denial smirk. "So I have a type," I say, defensive.