Mark My Words

90 | Audience of One

Ray smiled, and Rosalie let out a short, broken laugh. She could make fun of Lennie all she wanted, but it wasn't the same if Ray wasn't there. It was weird, actually. "Well," Rosalie said with a shaky sigh, "I'll be keeping an eye on him for you."

"Yeah, send me creepy stalker pics. Like, ooh, paparazzi," she said in a valley girl lilt, hands lifted flamboyantly around her head.

"So I take it you two have already talked about long distance then," Rosalie said.

"Yeah, I mean, it'll keep me from hoeing around," she said. "Because we both know my attention span is gonna be scattered during classes. I don't need that distraction, you feel me?"

"I guess."

"You don't feel me."

Rosalie grimaced. "Not... really."

"Well that's because you've never been a hoe, Rosie-girl," she said. She shoved Rosalie in the arm and Rosalie rolled her eyes, shutting her locker and pushing to her feet. "Be a hoe! What's that saying? 'Be gay, do crimes'?"

"Now I'm kind of glad we aren't going to the same university," she said, slinging her duffle over her shoulder. "You'd be a bad influence."

Ray slung an arm around her shoulders and said, "The best influence. Promise me we won't ghost each other?"

"Promise."

"You gotta pinkie on that one."

Rosalie rolled her eyes but flung her hand up anyway, pinkie poised. Ray latched onto it and gave their hands a firm shake. "Wasn't so hard, was it?" Ray said, and Rosalie muttered that it wasn't as they maneuvered to the school steps for one last descent to the parking lot.

_____

"Ma, come on, my hair looks fine," Rosalie whined from the edge of the bathroom door, trying to escape the hold her mother had on her arm. "I gotta fit it all in a cap anyway!"

"We can still fit in the cap—just let me finish curling the back here," she insisted, waving Rosalie closer. Rosalie threw her head back and groaned, but relented to the pull of her mother's insistence. She pursed her lips and suffered through it, seething internally over the hour it took for her hair to assemble itself in some coherent way.

It'd be easier if I could just wear it up, she thought, but alas, the cap wouldn't fit then, would it?

After escaping, she made her way to her room where her shoes were. The clock was ticking, and if she wanted to make it in time to panic, but with the ease of knowing she was on time, they needed to leave right that second. So she slipped into her flats, grabbed her speech, her cap, and was off to the stairs as her mother raced after her, still securing her earrings.

Rosalie's royal blue Knight robe floated in a flurry behind her as she flew down the stairs and around the railing. She folded up her the pages of her speech and tucked them into the sleeve of her gown in the process of waiting for her mother to start up the car and get them on the damn road. Her foot tapped impatiently on the carpet, her mind racing over every mental screenshot she took of her speech.

Her mother reached a hand out and gave her wrist a squeeze. "You're gonna do great, honey," she reassured, but it did little to still her rapidly beating heart.

"Thanks, but I'll believe you once it's done," she said.

She checked her phone for the hundredth time that morning. No, she hadn't received any text messages she had anticipated from a certain someone that was not on her notifications list and hadn't been for several days. It worried her that Drew went dormant—they always seemed to spring up at the briefest inkling of a conversation with Rosalie. Now that she was trying to initiate the conversation (with over eight unanswered texts), Drew wasn't reciprocating.