Bite Your Tongue

[ 3 ] Best Laid Plans

a/n: O oh god I already forgot to update o geez wow I'm not used to having a schedule again lol WHY DID NO ONE YELL AT ME?? Please yell at me, I beg you, if nothing else do it for the shame kink 

I'm kidding I don't have a shame kink.

...Unless??

"So... how was the talk with my mom?" Rosalie asked, twisting around in the passenger's seat to peer back at Joanna, who had her legs kicked up along the backseat, elbow resting on the door handle ledge.

Joanna pursed her lips as if deep in thought. There were two things on her mind, and of the two, the frontrunner was how badly she wanted to punch Drew Mendoza in the face. "It was fine. We didn't get pulled over, so that was cool."

"I should hope not," Drew scoffed from the driver's seat. Joanna swung her foot out to kick the back of Drew's chair. Drew merely grinned. "Aren't you gonna ask me how my chat with your mom went?"

"I already asked you," Rosalie said.

"Yeah, but I want Joanna to know about it."

Rosalie rolled her eyes. Joanna glared at the back of Drew's stupid head. When Rosalie looked back at her, it took the force of God Herself to drag Joanna's eyes back where they were supposed to be: Focused solely on Rosalie. "Allegedly, my mom said Drew shows a lot of potential as a person."

"A lot of potential," Drew parroted back, with pride, "as a person."

"Wow," Joanna drawled. "Amazing. Incredible."

"You're just upset that Jenn didn't say you had a lot of potential."

"Joanna has plenty of potential with or without my mom pointing it out," Rosalie said. Joanna stared at the back of Rosalie's bun like a second one was emerging. When Drew made their off-handed reply back and Rosalie laughed, Joanna's eyes drifted out the window with a faint smile on her lips.

She spent a lot of time poking and prodding at the dimples in her skin where piercings used to be. She still had her septum piercing, since it was easy to take it out for games. She readjusted the positioning of it. Rosalie had gotten her a pack of new piercings that were... outside of Joanna's plain piercings.

"I thought—I dunno, it's kinda nice having a lot of different options even if you don't end up using all of them," Rosalie had said on the front porch of Jamie-Lee's house. Jamie-Lee was the lead organizer of their class's get togethers that summer. Joanna probably never would have stayed as close as she did to Jamie-Lee were it not for his insistent attitude about sticking together.

"We may all be splitting up, but we'll all still be friends! Even five years from now, it's not like I'll forget about you," he had said once, to which Joanna called him a sap and a romantic and he shrieked, voice cracking, "All of you guys! Not just—Not just you!"

Joanna had swooned a little, fanning herself like she was some regency noblewoman. Jamie-Lee had fallen to his knees, screaming that it wasn't like that! when Blake came in the room inquiring about the ruckus. He completely walked in on a scene fit for a Renaissance painting: Joanna, half-leaning against the table with the back of her wrist relaxed against her forehead, and Jamie-Lee, on his knees hugging her one leg, distressed.

But before then, when Rosalie pressed the box of piercings into Joanna's hands on Jamie-Lee's porch, Joanna had taken out the flashiest of the bunch and pulled her piercing out of her nose to replace it. Rosalie had stammered about having to disinfect the piercings first, but the deed was done, and Joanna wouldn't take that particular piercing out for another week.