Bridgeport Academy » COMPLETE

4

"Oh, wherever's fine!" she said quickly. Then she turned back to Robyn. "Hey."

"Hey, yourself." Robyn leaned against the window and crossed her arms.

It was weird suddenly seeing Robyn again. Last year, Alex, Robyn, and Jasmine had been three peas in a pod. But then the E thing had happened and everything had changed. No one knew why Jasmine was the only one who'd been kicked out, but Robyn always had a particular talent for persuasion...

Freshman year, she'd convinced Teyana Taylor to go out with Iman Shumpert instead of Aubrey Graham, all because she had wanted Aubrey for herself. Clearly Robyn was good at getting people to do whatever she wanted, especially when she had something to gain personally. And in this case, maybe she was better off without Jasmine around. Last spring, Jasmine and Robyn's boyfriend, Chris, had been spotted behind the row houses at night...alone. Both Jasmine and Chris denied that anything had happened, but Robyn could get pretty territorial when it came to boyfriends. It seemed crazy that she would get Jasmine kicked out of school for possibly hooking up with Chris, but, well, Robyn was a little insane.

Robyn squinted. "Did your hair get longer?"

"Kind of," Alex mumbled.

"I like it," she declared. "It looks cute."

Alex slammed her bag down on the floor. "So what, you don't call me all summer?"

"I...I called you," Robyn stammered, widening her eyes.

"No, you didn't. You sent me one text message. In June."

Robyn stood up. "Well, you didn't respond!"

"I..." Alex trailed off. Robyn was right. She hadn't responded. "Did you hear from Jasmine?"

"Of course."

Alex felt a stab of jealousy. "Me too," she lied. She really hadn't heard from her best friend since she'd been expelled last May. They both stared at Jasmine's bare bed. Would it be empty all year? Or would Bridgeport stick them with some weirdo no one wanted to room with?

"Jas called me a whole bunch of times," Robyn continued, a little aggressively.

"Me too," Alex lied again, removing some of her blouses from her suitcase. "So, how's Chris?" She changed the subject. "Did you see him this summer?"

"Um...yeah," Robyn replied quietly, a twinge of hurt in her voice. "Did you see Quincy?"

"Yeah, some," Alex mumbled back. Her boyfriend, Quincy Brown, was the star football player for St. Lucius and was from an old-money family in Philadelphia.

"Did you visit him or did he visit you?"

"Well, I spent a week with his family in the Hamptons. That was really nice." Alex liked Quincy, but she really loved his family. They were wealthy and tasteful and the exact opposite of her parents. It didn't hurt either that Quincy was fine, with soft pink lips and large, deep eyes that practically drank her in. He had wanted to have sex over the summer, but Alex just wasn't ready. She wasn't entirely sure why, except that she'd never had sex with anybody before, and she really wasn't sure if he was the right person to do it with first.

Of course, indecision about losing her virginity wasn't the kind of thing a girl like Alex ever admitted out loud. She'd told Robyn she'd lost it ages ago to an older guy she'd met on a family vacation, even though really she'd hardly even let him feel her up. She had cultivated an image at Bridgeport: tough, experienced, sophisticated, and a little bitchy. Her mom was the complete opposite (helpless, naive, childish) and Alex didn't want to be like that.