Wish Upon a Sleepover by Suzanne Selfors

Author:Suzanne Selfors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Imprint

16

Basketball Dreams

I don’t know where Todd is taking us, and I don’t care. I just want to go home and erase this day from my memory. Autumn walks next to me, but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to ask me a bunch of questions, because she knows how I’m feeling. That’s how it is with best friends.

I go over the scene in my head. There were warning signs—the eye roll, the sneer, the tone of her voice. But I ignored them. I went right ahead and asked her if she wanted to come to my next sleepover. The final blow was the door slamming in my face.

There has to be an explanation. Did Hailey judge me because of my guests, just as I feared she would? That makes sense. But then I remember that she smiled at Todd, so she clearly likes him. That’s a point in my favor. And she doesn’t know anything about William, so that’s not a point against me. But what about Manga Girl? Manga Girl doesn’t like Hailey. She called her mean. If the feeling is mutual and Hailey doesn’t like Manga Girl, and now Hailey thinks that Manga Girl and I are friends … is that the problem?

But as much as I try to convince myself that this is Manga Girl’s fault, I can’t forget the moment when Hailey first came to the door. When Hailey looked at me, she sneered. And that was long before she noticed Manga Girl.

It’s me. She doesn’t like me.

“Four more blocks,” Todd says.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I tell him.

He jumps over a puddle. “We can’t quit, Leilani. You got your ingredient. Now it’s my turn. Wait till you see my special place. It’s awesome.”

There are puddles everywhere, and I almost step in dog poop that the rain turned to paste. An ambulance races past, its siren blaring. “Why are we going toward Pill Hill?” I ask. It’s called Pill Hill because it’s a hill with a bunch of hospitals on it.

Todd turns around and smiles. “You’ll see.”

I don’t care if I’m supposed to have a good attitude about my sleepover. I’m walking the slowest because I can’t stop thinking about what just happened. Devastated is not a strong enough word. Even if, at that moment, Hailey Chun is the only Hailey who doesn’t like me, I know it’s only a matter of time before she persuades the others to dislike me, too. I picture a line of toppling dominoes, with the faces of all the Haileys taped to them.

Autumn stays next to me. William walks in the middle, and Manga Girl walks super fast to keep up with Todd, whose legs are three times as long as ours. No matter what I look at—the sidewalk, the buildings, the back of William’s fur hat—all I can see is the expression on Hailey’s face, just before she shut the door. She looked like she ate a lemon.

I bump into William, who has stopped walking. So have Todd and Manga Girl.

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