Accidentally on Purpose

Chapter One

The look my best friend was currently wearing on her face was a bit troubled, as if she was trying to let me know how much of an idiot I was and that she was still struggling to find a way to tell me so gently.

"Hannah..." Even the tone of her voice told me the same thing—that I was a total featherbrained human being and she was embarrassed to be seen within a five-mile radius of me, yet she didn't know how to tell me that. "You're not actually doing that."

"And why ever not?" I made a show of flipping my blonde hair over my shoulder. It had gotten too long for my liking—the straight ends fell against the middle of my back and it was getting trickier to tie it into a neat ponytail in three seconds. I did a mental note in my head to stop by the salon sometime this week to give it a little trim. Maybe get a highlight? A complete dye?

"Hannah, stop playing with your hair! You're not listening." Gina huffed and crossed her arms in front of her chest, her natural curly hair bouncing a little. I'd always been envy of her cute curls. My hair was too straight, too blonde, too flat— "Hannah!"

"What? Sorry."

Gina let out a long, dragged-out sigh, and I waited. "You know what? Whatever. You won't even listen to me. I don't know why I even bother." I gave her my biggest grin and she softened, the corners of her lips twitching into a smile. "You're such an idiot. Why are you my friend?"

I rolled my eyes. "Because you love me?" I leaned over to steal a grape from her tray, popping it into my mouth. "You just can't admit how brilliantly genius my plan is."

"There's nothing genius in this!" she exclaimed, despite the fact that she was oh so done with me. "You should just as well dig up your own hole and lie in it. Hannah, I just honestly cannot see the logic in your 'genius plan'," she said, making a quotation mark in the air with her fingers.

"The logic is there, clear as crystal. You know we've watched Apple all these years—"

"You mean you, as you're so obsessed with him," she interrupted.

I ignored her. "—and never once we've seen anyone around here come close to becoming his friend, let alone hear him say more than one whole sentence. No one can crack open his shell by trying to become his friend, so why not try making him hate you?"

"See, that's what I was saying. There's no logic in here. What is your goal, exactly?" she asked, leaning her chin on top of the palm of her hands, her elbows propped on the table.

"I've told you. Tear down that tough bad boy walls he's put around him."

"By making him hate you?"

"Yep."

I could see that she was fighting the urge to laugh. "And then what, hope to God he'll somehow grow to love you instead?"

I beamed at her. "Now we're talkin'!"

She scoffed. "The chances of it happening is slim to none. You know how it works with Apple."

Simultaneously, we glanced at the said "Apple" who was sat in the corner of the room, all by himself as usual. "Apple" was our codename for my longtime crush, Jonah Gibbs. The name came up after I saw him walk in the hallway one morning, with a red apple mid-bite in-between his teeth. So the name came up and he'd been stuck with it without him knowing.

Real-time Jonah was wearing a long-sleeved white button-down shirt, with a navy t-shirt peeking underneath, a pair of dark gray jeans and white sneakers. That kind of broke the unwritten rule that the quiet, brooding high school guys were only allowed to wear everything dark, like they did in the movies. His head was down as he slightly bobbed his head up and down to the music he was listening through his earphones. The sandwich on his lunch tray was half-eaten, long forgotten by his fingers that are tapping on the table.