Blizzard

chapter 11

Saturday evening, Toni and Martha were lying on Toni's bed while Dot, Rachel, and Nora were setting up her room for movie night. Toni had already tidied up her room a little and, really, it was her room they were using each time so she found that she'd done her part just by letting them.

Dot and Rachel were hanging up the well-ironed white sheet that would serve as the screen and Nora was turning on the projector Toni had gotten for Christmas from her foster parents. Before that, they used to use Nora's portable projector. The one they now used was attached to one of the beams of the ceiling and had much better resolution than the previous one. The cable from the projector ran along the ceiling beam to her desk, where Nora was sitting with her laptop. She was currently connecting it to the projector and setting up Netflix, so that all that was left to do once everyone had arrived, was click on whichever movie Martha chose for them to watch.

After the first two movie nights, they had decided to take turns on who got to choose because at those times it had taken nearly an hour to choose which movie to watch because of their very different tastes. Tonight was Martha's turn. Toni just hoped she wouldn't pick some cheesy Christmas movie because they hadn't watched one in December. Instead, Dot had chosen Tomb Raider. Toni had been so grateful that Dot hadn't caved to Martha's pleas. Christmas movies were cheesy, cringy and so fucking predictable. Toni absolutely didn't understand the hype. And then there was also the fact that she couldn't exactly relate to all the 'family feels' that those movies seemed to overflow with.

Fatin and Leah were the last to arrive. Fatin had brought the drinks and Leah the popcorn kernels, which still had to be microwaved. Fatin took the small bag from her girlfriend and threw it onto Toni, who was still lying on the bed. "Go prepare it, bitch."

Toni rolled her eyes but obliged. "Hello to you too." She got up and was crossing the room to where the stairs began when Dot stepped in front of her.

"Wait, dude. There's something we need to tell you." She looked kind of apprehensive. "Please, don't be a child about this."

Toni frowned, "What? I'm not a ch–"

"Well, that's not really up for debate. Just know that you're cute when you're acting like one." Fatin said as she put the bag with drinks down.

Toni scoffed. Though before she could counter, Rachel interrupted their beginning argument. "We invited Shelby."

"You did what?" Toni looked at her incredulously, but the ex-diver just shrugged and sat down in one of the two one-person beanbags in front of the foot of the bed.

"We would have asked–" Leah said hesitantly.

"But you would have said no, so we just did," Fatin said unabashedly while looking at her freshly manicured nails.

"And after the party, we thought you wouldn't mind as much," Martha said with a hopeful but hesitant tone. She had propped herself up on her elbows, still lying on Toni's bed.

"Just because she drove me home doesn't mean we're suddenly friends or 'besties' or some shit," Toni grumbled. Okay, so maybe Shelby had done a little more than just drive her home and maybe she didn't actually mind that she was coming over as much as she would have thought she would, but she wasn't about to admit that. What bothered her though was that they hadn't told her before, although she did understand why.

Toni knew she should have seen this coming. The others had gotten so much closer to the blonde and had pretty much completely accepted her into the friend group. Not that she was as opposed to it anymore as she used to be. Or at all really. After the last few months, none of the things she'd expected from the blonde had happened, like dropping Martha and the others to go back to the obnoxious church kids at their school, one of which was her now ex-boyfriend.