Oh, Dakota

7- Stutter

“I really, really don’t want to go to school today.” I groaned into my phone.

“I know,” Marnie sighed sympathetically for me on the other end. She wasn’t really sympathetic but she was pretending to be for my benefit, which was nice of her. “But you gotta go.”

“I know,” I whined. It was Monday, so the first day of school after that dumb party on Saturday night. I spent all day yesterday moping around Marnie’s house because of it. I wasn’t really hungover at all, but she was, so I played nurse for a little bit while beating myself up internally about letting what happened at the party happen. I feel so stupid for actually doing that, kissing Caleb. And it wasn’t just kissing, it was tongues and groping and all of that teenage stuff that makes me uncomfortable just thinking about it. “Do you think he’ll remember?”

“Caleb? Probably.” She sighed. “Which is a good thing because now you can get together with him.”

“No, that’s actually tragic.” I whined, throwing my bag over my shoulder and looking at myself through the mirror in my room. I was wearing jean shorts that were rather short, a loose vest top with an Aztec-like pattern on it and some black Toms.

“You’re over dramatic.” She laughed. “You’ll be fine.”

I fixed a stray hair and then left my room, trotting down the stairs and into the kitchen where Owen was already sitting at the table and finishing a bowl of cereal. “No, I actually won’t. I’ll see you at school.”

“Right, I’ll see you soon.” Marnie chirped, ending the call.

I sighed and slipped my phone into my jeans pocket before grabbing an apple and sitting across from Owen.

“That’s all you’re going to eat?” He wondered skeptically.

I nodded. “I like apples.”

“You’re seriously impossible.” Owen informed me, getting up from his seat and putting the bowl in the sink.

“Take what you can get, O.” I sighed. “Today’s going to suck and when I vomit from embarrassment, I don’t want anything in my stomach.”

This made my brother laugh as he walked out the door with me following behind him, munching on my apple. “You won’t vomit because of embarrassment, I can assure you that.”

“You don’t know that!” I wailed, letting Owen drive for now. I was probably too hysterical to drive anyway. “You have  no idea what happened on Saturday because you were stoned.”

He grinned sheepishly at me. “Yeah, that’s true.”

“By the way, what was up with that? I thought you didn’t smoke.” I brought up.

He shrugged. “Yeah, usually I don’t but John had some extra.”

I grumbled a sarcastic response that he ignored and then I noticed that we weren’t headed towards the school, but we were going for Todd’s house. “We’re picking up Todd again?” I wondered.

He nodded. “He gets his car back on Thursday.”

“What did he even do to it?” I asked with an eye roll.

“I don’t know, you know what kind of driver he is.” Owen laughed. Todd was an awful driver, so he barely ever gets to drive it for reasons like this.

“Right, well we’re only picking up Todd, right?”

Again, he shrugged. “I don’t know, Kota, I guess we’ll find out.”

“O!” I whined. “Let’s just go to school and tell Todd to skip, you know he won’t mind.”

Owen shrugged. “Do you have something against Caleb now?”