“Sure thing,” she tells him, walking around behind the counter. “It’s cool if Chelsea hangs out?”
“As long as she doesn’t break anything,” he says with a wink, and then disappears down the side hall.
I sit down on one of the stools and sling my bag onto the counter as Asha smoothes her long hair back into a ponytail.
“I’m going to go load up the dishwasher,” she tells me. “We don’t really have one specific person who buses, so whoever has a minute just takes care of it. Noah was usually the one…”
She trails off, and at first I’m confused, but it takes only a second to put two and two together. Noah must have worked here, too. That explains the other day, when they mentioned that guy having to cover kitchen. And he’s Sam’s best friend, it’s no surprise they’d work together.
This has to be a joke. Maybe I’ve underestimated Asha, and the only reason she’s been friendly to me is that she’s setting me up for humiliation. I can think of no other possible reason why she would invite me to Noah’s workplace, a place full of people who know and, presumably, care about him. And anyone who cares about him likely hates me.
I grab my whiteboard and write furiously.
Why did you invite me here?
She frowns. “So I can help you with your homework. We talked about this.”
This was a bad idea.
“Why?”
You know why.
“What do you mean?” she asks, but in a careful way that leads me to believe she knows exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t want to have to spell it out for her, literally.
How much do you know?
She hems and haws before she answers me. “I heard what you did at the party,” she admits. She can’t look me in the eye as she says it. “Did you know what would happen? When you—told people what you did?”
I shake my head, because it’s true that I didn’t, but I don’t know how that makes any difference. I should’ve known. I shouldn’t have been such an idiot to not realize what would happen.