Fish Eyes

17

Where you been? Wendy texted.

Dalia fiddled with her phone, wondering how she was going to respond to her friend.

She had been kind of MIA since coalescing with Julia. Over the past two weeks, Dalia had failed to distribute equal time to her friends. She'd tried to keep up with Wendy and check in on her, but they never could step to the same beat. When Dalia was free, Wendy was hanging with Dean. When Wendy reached out, Dalia was with Julia. Dean got it worse than Wendy did, which said something.

It wasn't her fault, she told herself. She didn't want to just be alone when Wendy and Dean wanted to be in love. That was fair to her.

Even worse, Lawrence ranked even lower than Dean on the hierarchy. Dalia hadn't texted him once since she bolted on him at Joy and Glee. He even called a couple of times.

There was that one day in the kitchen before school when her dad said, "Lawrence asked about you. Are you guys buddies now?"

That threw the "I died" excuse right out the window. Her dad was making it so that she couldn't avoid Lawrence properly.

She mentally kicked herself over her demanding his friendship then discarding it. She was acting like a shitty teenage boy. Even though she couldn't completely blame herself over the distance between Wendy and her, she definitely could blame herself about ghosting Lawrence.

It wasn't that she didn't want to talk to him; she desperately did. She wished the two could meet in an unplanned circumstance and fall into each other's arms. She'd even fantasized about their children a couple of times.

She'd been contemplating texting him back, but after her brain did that, she checked out.

All she could do was think about how aggressive she'd been towards Lawrence. It was embarassing.

As she looked at Wendy's text in the menu browser, she scrolled down to where Lawrence had texted her a week prior. Her finger danced over the screen where his name was, debating on whether or not it wanted to click it.

The only problem was, her voice of reason disallowed her from doing that. She didn't want that feeling in her thighs and gut to ever return. It felt dangerous.

She ignored Wendy's text, exited the app, and faced Julia. "I like him, Ramirez."

"Duh, Glees."

Dalia scowled. "It's that obvious?"

"Yeah. The receptionist at Joy and Glee warned me that you all might be..." she grunted, "busy."

Julia wiggled her eyebrows at Dalia like she always did.

"Jules," Dalia spoke to herself.

"That's her name? Hm. But I don't think it's super obvious. Most of your slip-ups seem to happen outside of his sight, from what you've told me. Just be vigilant."

"Okay," Dalia said as she regained some of her confidence. "I've been doing that."

"There's no other way. Men are a waste of time, remember that."

"I know they are. Maybe that's why my conscious won't let me respond to this text," she held her phone up.

"So I have class now," Dalia got up and grabbed her tote bag. "I will hang later," she hugged Julia.

"We still on for Go-Karts later?"

"Totally."

As she left out the Writer's Cave, she bumped into somebody.

"I'm so sorry, I need to look where I--"

Wendy.

"Uh, hey, Wen, I was just about to answer your, your text," she stuttered out.