Long Story Short by Serena Kaylor

Author:Serena Kaylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter Fifteen

The next morning I dragged the stack of shopping bags out into our cramped little living room, pulling out tops and shorts, and two dresses I must have had heatstroke to agree to. Mia’s soft snoring paused for a moment, and I eased the door closed behind me.

I’d slept badly the night before, with visions of that raft and stumbling over quotes from Shakespeare. A little mouse running in circles reciting Hamlet, The Tempest, and Macbeth like the world’s worst fever dream. I had to have been out of my mind to agree to that competition. In hindsight it felt like some elaborate prank on weird, awkward Beatrice. Flirt with the nerdy homeschooled girl who doesn’t do well with social cues. Pretend like you want to kiss her after telling people that you didn’t think she was pretty enough to be Rosaline. It’s just like Bryce all over again. I squeezed my eyes shut until the world paused. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, and I wasn’t doing this for them. I had an entire life ahead of me at Oxford.

That was, after all, what I wanted.

I was out of bed before the dawn, having officially given up on sleep, and ready to take a few moments to myself before the whirlwind of another day started. No screaming through bathroom doors, no lukewarm showers or scrambling to get out the door always running late. It was here, sitting in our dingy common area and sipping on weak coffee, that I could finally find some threads of myself again. There were parts of me that were changing whether I intended for them to or not, but the familiarity of old habits was soothing.

The weak rays of early morning flickered through the window and cast a bleak light on all the shopping bags that were supposed to make me a normal person. I’d avoided them since their purchase, and Mia and Nolan had been careful not to comment on the fact that I was still walking around business casual as usual. I was chalking this impulse up to just another bad decision made over the past few days. I was never going to be that girl who ran around camp in a skirt or clothes in a color that wasn’t routinely found in nature. I didn’t like a lot of synthetic material, and I was hopeless with patterns. I was, however, practical. The practical side of me knew that I’d spent an embarrassing amount of money on clothes I could probably no longer return, but maybe there was something I could salvage from this. I tossed back the rest of my coffee and slowly stacked shirts with the pants and shorts that they were bought with. While the resulting outfits looked trendy and youthful, they were also not necessarily me. I rubbed my fingertips against a gauzy tank top with riotous splashes of dark pink and navy blue and smiled to myself at the over-the-top reactions Mia and Nolan had had every time I tried on one of their suggestions.

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