My Jeep Girl

12• A Simple Date With a Cute Australian Basketball Player, no Big Deal.

"Of course she's attracted to him," Celeste chimed in.

I turned and quickly glared at Celeste before refocusing on my brother. "Yeah, he's cute. But I don't even know him, and I don't want a relationship."

"You say that, little sis, but I don't believe it. And you could use someone else in your life besides your crazy friend."

"Hey!" Celeste exclaimed, flicking Tyler's forehead while he laughed.

"You know you're crazy, Celeste," I said. "And I know that I am perfectly satisfied with my one good friend. Now, you have to get to your game so that you don't get benched."

Tyler saluted me. "Deal, captain. Just don't throw Alexander out of the window. He's into you, which makes you lucky. Maybe just... don't rule it out so quickly?"

"Whatever you say, big brother." Tyler grinned and spun around, running downstairs and out the front door.

Once Tyler left, Celeste and I finished getting ready for the game. Ethan came into my room at one point to bring us some cookies he made. Yes, my tiny little brother was allowed to make cookies unsupervised. They were actually delicious chocolate-chunk cookies, which was rather impressive for such a young little boy. He sat in my room while Celeste painted her nails (she said that she felt ashamed when her nails were bare and unpainted) and told us all about his latest Fortnite win before he ran downstairs to eat more cookies.

Celeste forced me to change my plain white t-shirt to a cropped one. She said that I needed to wear something slightly better than just a plain shirt in order to capture Alexander's attention. That was when I put up my argument that I didn't care about getting attention from Alexander, but yet Celeste still ended up winning the argument. I was now wearing a white lace crop-top instead while we sat on the bleachers watching the game.

We'd gotten to the game just after the team finished warming up, and I forced Celeste to sit with me on the opposite bleachers from the student section. It was way too chaotic over there. She agreed as long as I paid for her soda, so obviously I paid for her goddamn soda. Going to a basketball game was a big enough step for me, there was no way in hell I was gonna sit in the crowd of screaming students and obsessed fans.

I still didn't understand anything about basketball besides the fact that the goal was to throw the ball into the hoop in order to score. I also understood that Alexander was about to shoot a free-throw. Did I know why he was shooting a free-throw or what that meant? Nope. Not even a little bit. But yet there he stood on the free-throw line ready to shoot, squatting slightly and bouncing the ball a few times. The crowd was cheering for him, screaming 'Aussie' over and over again. He shot the ball and made it perfectly in the hoop, then turned to start running to the other side of the court along with the rest of the players As he turned, his eye caught mine and he smiled.

And that Aussie boy had the audacity to wink at me.

"Ooh, Alexander winked at you," Celeste said, nudging me.

I rolled my eyes and continued watching the game, ignoring her comment. We were in the second half of the game with just over 5 minutes left on the clock. Our team was winning 86-73. I never realized one could score so many points in a basketball game.

Celeste was trying to explain everything to me throughout the entire game, too. And even though she went into excessive details about the game, I could hardly understand a thing. My brain certainly wasn't retaining any of the information.

"You see? Your brother's on fire tonight. That's his 5th 3-pointer of the game," Celeste said. "He's on fire and almost as much as Jesse. He's already done, like, 10 3-pointers this game. He's a god."