Up in the Air

Chapter 30

Dedicated to s_strawberry. Thank you for the cookies and the kind words. But mostly the cookies.  Mostly the cookies. Here's to hoping you get what that means.

Cheap Hotel by Leon Else (though I can't find any YouTube videos for the song) because "you deserve more than the lover you chose".

Chapter 30

The next few weeks passed by with some sort of regularity.

Nate would drive me to school – Angelie no longer gave me the stink eye about it and instead went back to pretending I didn't exist – and I would wait for him in the library if he had football practice to catch a ride home. We would hang out at Annabelle's or at one of our houses and it was always nice when Amanda would join us.

A couple of afternoons, Daniel would drop by to hang out. We would pretend to do our homework or watch TV when, really, we would just fall asleep and nap on the couch. Everyone else in the house teased us about it whenever we got caught. It was very sweet, true, but some part of me felt a twinge of sadness because I woke up realizing that Daniel had fallen asleep first because the workload at Smithson was tiring him out so much.

Saturday mornings, I was at Julian's house – or villa as he'd temporarily moved back with his parents – working on our project, huddled in our own corners of the den until lunch came and Julian's parents would all-too-enthusiastically invite me to eat with them. I would decline but, as they pointed out with warm smiles, it was impossible to say no to a Pitt.

Daniel would pick me up after lunch with the Pitts and we would try for an actual date – an activity, usually a movie, and a meal afterwards. Eventually we would end up back at his house to study or nap – and it stopped strictly at the nap part.

Louis and Jenny had gone back to calling me a social butterfly while Allie frequently complimented me on how well I was juggling three guys at once.

I'd learned enough to simply roll my eyes and let their teasing pass. Eventually, we would all just slip back into the way things were before I had a spotlight placed on me. That, I think, was what I was most thankful for. Calm in the middle of the eye of the storm.

In all honesty, it felt good to be surrounded by people and not to stress – as much as before, anyway – about school.

I'd taken my SATs in junior year and, in a spur-of-the-moment thing, decided against re-taking them this year. All of my college applications had been sent out and the work I put in the past three years gave me a lot of breathing room school-wise. I wasn't about to morph into a slacker but there was no harm in taking my foot off the pedal especially, as Allie pointed out, my GPA's greatest threat had transferred to Smithson.

It looked like a senior year that I could – crossing fingers – enjoy. I could, at the very least, spend Thanksgiving break stuffing myself with food and binge watching sit-coms.

Becca, the afternoon before Thanksgiving Day, walked into my room armed with a tub of mayonnaise and a pack of turkey jerky and parked herself – growing tummy included – on my bed. "Whatchoodoing?" she cooed.

"The better question is what are you doing?" I grimaced, as she took a bite of what I imagined was pure disgustingness. "Shouldn't you be getting ready for your flight? You have to be at the airport soon, you know."

"Adam is finishing up with the packing," she explained. "He's nervous I might overexert myself and suddenly give birth while placing my bunny slippers in our suitcase."