LOVEHATE

1

...so nearly one are love and hate, the two most powerful and devasting emotions that control man, nations, life.

-EDGAR RICE BURROGHS

Generally, my life was pretty mundane, which was how I liked it. I wasn't a person who lived for drama. This is why it was a surprise to me when my life got a bit more interesting after my sophomore year of college.

"Hey, Sadie!" Lillian said excitedly as she entered my bedroom one afternoon. "Look at this!"

I was snuggled under the black and white quilt my aunt had made me for my 16th birthday. I'd been in a goth phase and wanted an all-black quilt, but Aunt Evelyn wouldn't allow that.

My roommate hopped on my bed next to me and handed me her phone. I looked at the Instagram post in front of me. It was of a group of guys in front of a tent out in the woods. Bro camping trip, I surmised.

"What am I looking at?" I asked.

"This is Owen's account. He's the one in the red shirt," she said, peering over my shoulder.

She'd met Owen at a bar a couple weeks after school ended. They'd exchanged numbers and started texting. Soon they exchanged social media handles.

"It's kind of grainy because it's nighttime, but he looks cute."

She shoved me hard enough that I toppled over. "Do you not see who else is in the picture?!"

I sat up and looked again. The guy in the middle looked familiar. I touched the screen to see if he was tagged.

Shawn Mendes. Damn. His music wasn't my taste, but I obviously knew who he was. When I was younger, I thought he was adorable in a boy next door kind of way, but in the last year or so, the pictures I'd seen had a much sexier vibe. In this poor quality picture he looked like a regular person, which was probably why I hadn't recognized him.

"Owen knows Shawn Mendes?" I asked.

Lil stood up and started jumping up and down on my bed which instantly made me slightly seasick. "I think so! There are like ten different photos with him. That's the most recent, and it's only a couple weeks old!"

"Very cool. Maybe you can get the scoop on him if you two ever figure out a time to go on a date. And if you don't stop jumping, I might puke on you."

Lillian and Owen had been trying to get together but their work schedules kept clashing. I'd been listening to her whine about this for days.

"About that," she said, sitting back down next to me, "Would you want to trade shifts with me? That way I could go out to dinner with him tomorrow."

I stared at her and watched her squirm for a bit before answering. If I said yes right away, she'd think she could ask me to switch shifts frequently. I liked my schedule to stay as planned.

"Yeah, okay. What are the hours?"

"4 to closing. And thank you! I love you so much!"

"Yes, yes. You love me. I know."

Lillian and I were polar opposites. She was petite and blonde and bubbly and pretty much everyone loved her. I was tall and darker. My dad was Italian and I had his thick dark brown hair which I wore long, along with his olive complexion. My mom was also Italian, but her family was from Northern Italy. She was very fair completed, and I got my greenish-blue eyes from her. I was pretty cynical and sarcastic, so I was dark in that sense, too. And yet Lil and I got along great. We'd met during orientation before our freshman year of college and had been best friends ever since.