Dating Sarah Cooper Read Online Free PDF Page A

is your typical jock who’ll date the hottest girl who gives him the time of day.”
    “I’m hot,” Sarah defended.
    I let out a quiet groan. She was really, really hopeless. “Okay then, Sarah. Do what you want.”
    “Wait, am I not hot?” she hissed to me. Our teacher had just entered the classroom and was beginning to lecture at the front of the room.
    “Of course you’re hot,” I told her quietly, and rolled my eyes when the girl sitting closest to us turned to raise an eyebrow at the two of us. “Just… can we talk about this later?”
    “Fine,” she huffed, and we agreed to leave it until the next time we saw each other: Lunch.
    We ate lunch with four other girls every day and a couple of guys. The girls were Hannah, Dina, Josephine, and Bonnie. Hannah was our only cheerleader friend, but she was nice enough, and was also the reason Sarah and I were invited to so many social events.
    Dina and Josephine were a lot like Sarah and I in that they’d been best friends for a long time. They were friendly and down-to-earth and easy to talk to, and I liked them the most out of everyone in our little lunch group.
    Bonnie, although she seemed nice, too, was pretty quiet, and I think she only sat with us because she was friends with Graham, who was by far the kinder of the two guys that joined us at our table every day. The other was Connor, who could be cool on the rare occasions when he wasn’t being an ass. He only sat with us because he had a thing for Sarah. And Hannah. And sometimes me, whenever he was particularly down on himself after rejections from his top two choices.
    They were mostly Sarah’s friends, but I liked them okay. I was used to being around people who knew her better than they knew me. I’d always been a little shyer than her, and she’d always been the one everyone liked a little bit better. But that was okay with me, because Sarah needed to be liked, and I didn’t necessarily feel like I needed it in the same way that she did. It had hurt a lot getting teased in middle school, but I had a thicker skin because of it. And if the worst criticism anyone had of me now was that I was only able to get popular because I was friends with Sarah, well, I was doing pretty well for myself, then.
    Anyway, we didn’t actually talk about Sam at lunch, mostly because for all of her obsessing over him, Sarah never talked much about him in front of anyone other than me. She didn’t really share much about herself with any of our other friends, actually. We were all into talking about when the next group hangout was or who had just started dating whom or whatever the other latest gossip was, but there weren’t very many genuine conversations about meaningful experiences or about what our feelings were. Or at least not the deep feelings, and even as shallow as Sarah’s crush seemed, I knew she was embarrassed that she liked someone as much as she liked Sam.
    All in all, that second day back at school was pretty uneventful, beyond Sarah getting some hope that Sam Heath would someday know her last name. Those seven hours from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon were as boring as they always were.
    At three fifteen, however, well… shit kind of hit the fan.
    I hadn’t seen Jake in any of my classes and had therefore concluded that we didn’t share any, and so the first time I saw him that day was when Sarah and I met him at the front office. On the way there, she told me, “So Jake’s actually in one of my classes. He said ‘hi’ to me today and everyone kind of looked surprised when I answered. It was a little weird.”
    “People are stupid,” I sighed out.
    When we reached the front office, Jake greeted us, all smiles. “Wow, you guys came! I’m actually kind of surprised.”
    “Well, we said we would,” Sarah replied. “So here we are.”
    Jake let out a breath, then shook his head, almost in amazement. “Okay. Wow. This is gonna change things a lot around here, you know that,