You do not feel sick. You do not feel sick. Everything is okay. Just hold off until you get home.
Chanting to myself with my eyes closed doesn’t help. Nothing seems to help. The shrimp and chocolate cake wantout, and they want outnow.
“So, Carina . . .” Wyatt starts. I’m not looking at him. I can’t. I’m too busy trying to breathe, to keep everything down. He continues, “I had a really great time tonight, and I think we have fun together. Prom’s in two weeks, and I don’t have a date yet . . . so I was thinking . . . maybe you and I—”
“Pull over,” I interrupt.
“What?”
“Pull over!” I repeat, harsher this time, more urgently.
“Okay?”
The sound of his signal fills the car, but he doesn’t change lanes.
“Now,Wyatt!” I can’t hold it. I can’t. This is going to happen, and it’s going to happen now.
“There’s a white car in my blind spot, I can’t merge yet.”
With shaking fingers, I click off my seat belt.
“What are you do—”
I answer him by leaning out the window while he’s doing a hundred kilometers an hour on the highway and emptying out the entire contents of my stomach.
“My car!” he exclaims, but I tune him out.
I continue puking out the window while Wyatt drives.
I’m mostly sure nothing lands inside the car.Onthe car, I’m not too positive, but I’m not too concerned about that right now. I manage to pull my hair out of my face, and Wyattfinallystarts changing lanes to get to the shoulder. The second the car is slow enough, I open the door and hop out onto the dirt shoulder, continuing puking all my dinner out, and maybe even lunch and breakfast. My throat burns the entire time, tears stream down my face, and my stomach hurts. This isnothow I was supposed to end a “successful” date.
Eventually, I calm down enough to take some deep breaths, and despite the loud noises from the speeding cars on the five-lane highway at my back, it’s eerily quiet. So quiet that it’s hard to ignore. So quiet that I’m almost scared to turn around.
With no other option than my hand, I wipe my mouth and shake it off in the sparse grass. Even though I don’t want to, I slowly turn to face Wyatt. He’s standing beside his car, staring at me with an expression that’s part horror and part disbelief. He’s holding a box of tissues, but it looks like he’s used most of it to wipe off whatever landed on the outside of his car. I wonder if he pulled over so fast not because I was sick but because he wanted to save his car. The thought makes me laugh.
His face twists into confusion at my giggling, and I step closer to him to pluck the box of tissues from his hand. I use the rest to clean myself up; all the while, Wyatt stares at me like he’s considering ditching me here. The thought of him getting in the car to desert me on the side of a busy highway, covered in the remnants of my stomach contents, just makes me laugh harder.
This was supposed to be the successful date. We got along, he was nice and polite, he seemed interested in me—he was supposed to be my Emmett. He was even going to ask me to prom! And even though I set out to prove to Kalani that I could have a successful date and was overlooking the dullness of it, I went ahead and ruined it anyway. I’m pretty sure this is solidifying my chances of never getting a second date with him, or him as my prom date, especially if the way he’s eyeing me right now is any indication.
Kalani is going tolovethat I screwed this date up even without her interference. I didn’t need her to give fake tips or pay my mortal enemy or pick a drug dealer for the date to not work out. I ruined it all on my own, along with the help of some shrimp, which, looking back, was probably bad.
Once my face and hands and the front pieces of my hair are cleaned up, I shove the dirty tissues into the empty box and send Wyatt a small smile. “Sorry.”
He blinks at me.
And for some reason, that makes me start giggling again. He’s been boring the entire time, and after I threw up out the window of a moving vehicle on a five-lane highway, hestillhas nothing interesting to say. I wonder what Jay would’ve said and done. Probably more than clean his car before checking on me.
“Did I get any on the inside?” I ask, more so because I feel like that’s what I’msupposedto ask.
He shakes his head and clears his throat. “Um . . . no. Just . . . some on the outside . . .”
“Okay, cool,” I say, closing the distance between us and handing him the tissue box. His jaw drops as he takes it. “Let’s get home before I start up again, yeah?”
Without waiting for a response, I get in the car and shut the door behind me, leaving Wyatt standing outside like he doesn’t remember how to move.
I thought I wanted the date to work out. I thought I wanted everything to go perfectly. I thought I wanted to like Wyatt. But I just . . . don’t care. It’s almost a relief that I ruined his prom date invitation. I don’t want to go to prom with him. I never wanted to go with a date. I just wanted to have fun with my friends before we go off to university and life gets hectic. I’m still unsure how I feel about the chance that Kalani’s purposely setting me up on bad dates, but we’ve been best friends for years, and prom is in two weeks. We have time to sort it out, and we can go to prom the way we were meant to: as best friends enjoying their time together. Kalani and Emi might have a problem with me fifth wheeling, but they’re going to have to deal. I refuse to go on any other dates that they set up. Any future dates will be ones that I agree to, not feel coerced or guilted into going on.
Wyatt slips into the car, still holding the tissue box, and gently places it on the floor mat in the back seat. At least he doesn’t litter, but that’s totally an Emmett move because Wyatt is just like him.