Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
And, like Tia, Renata Brady was muscular and broad-shouldered and wanted to look softer.
“This dress is super rare. There are only fourteen Renatas, and they had a tiny run, only ten units for each design.”
“How much did you spend?” Ray asked.
“I found it in a thrift shop for fifty bucks,” she told him. “They had no idea what it was. Calm down.”
“And this bag.” I zoomed the picture in on the cartoon girl. “I always liked the pink Poppy-Chan best.”
Ray looked at Tia. She groaned.
Ray turned to me. “Is the bag rare?”
“Yes. During the last recession, Coach released a very small run of these bags in Japan. They got a bunch of crap for it, because these are aimed at teenagers, and people complained that it was manipulative and would make kids beg their parents to buy them luxury bags. Coach pulled Poppy-Chan off the market in a year. They hid these so well, even most Coach employees don’t know about them.”
“Yes, but they’re still in the Coach database,” Tia said. “If you give them the serial number, they can confirm if it’s authentic.”
“Tia?” A warning vibrated in Ray’s voice.
“Two hundred and twelve bucks on eBay and only because someone else wanted it and kept bidding a dollar over me for, like, hours.”
What was it with Ray and the money questions? It wasn’t like the Maderos lacked money, and she wasn’t spending that much. By most Prime standards, this was pennies.
“See? This tells me a lot about you,” I said.
“Like what?” she growled.
“You don’t like expensive things. You like rare things—special, secret finds that you have to search for. They make you happy. You like going out in an outfit like that exactly because you know something about it that others don’t.”
She opened her mouth and closed it.
“Phillip doesn’t get it.” I scrolled through the comments under the pic, found his, and showed it to her.
what’s with the weird bag
She spun away from me. Ray had abandoned the punching bag a few feet short. She marched to it and kicked it hard.
“His family is looking for him,” I said. “His mom is losing her mind. They turned his laptop over to me. Did you know that he was a Derek Areston fanboy?”
Derek Areston was an alpha-male bro. He made his money hawking his self-improvement courses and writing books about how testosterone made you rich and sexy.
“Whatever,” Tia said.
Ray let out a derisive snarl. “Areston is an asshat.”
“Phillip doesn’t just follow Areston. He hypes him up on Reddit.”
“What?”
I pulled it up on my phone. “The Vertex Blueprint: Wealth, Women, and Relentless Drive is peak, man. Absolute fucking peak. It’s peak, Tia. Peak cringe.”
She marched over and grabbed the phone out of my hand. “PrimeAlphaProtocol? Is that Phillip?”
I nodded.
For a second she looked like she would smash my phone into the ground, then she thrust it back at me and stomped away.
Phew. Crisis averted.
“This is why I don’t get it,” I told her. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who would put up with that. The secondhand embarrassment alone is so much.”
“He didn’t used to be like that,” she squeezed out.
“But he is like that now. I figured out why you broke up with him, by the way. It was this.”
I pulled up Emelline Lily’s Insta and found the right pic. In it, a willowy girl with long legs and dark hair posed in a short, black bodycon dress. The dress was strategically cut. Three horizontal slashes stretched over her torso, baring wide sections of her tan chest and flat stomach. She was holding a flute of golden liquid that was likely champagne but could pass for cider if someone freaked out about underage drinking. Her makeup was perfect, her eyebrows were razor-precise, and she held her glass while staring pensively at the evening city from a high-rise balcony. The caption said, “A very long day.”
“This isn’t even a good thirst trap.” I shrugged. “Like she barely tried.”
Tia pummeled the bag, sinking a flurry of punches. The bag danced, bouncing farther and farther down the rail.
“What the fuck did he do?” Ray growled.
I pulled up the comments and showed it to him.
“‘Your body is fire emoji.’” Ray frowned. “A heart. A face with heart eyes. Heart on fire…”
Tia charged at us, her eyes blazing.
“She goes to Heritage, Ray! She sits one row down from me in History. He left that stupid comment about Poppy-Chan, and then he went and slobbered all over her, and the saddest thing is, she doesn’t even fucking know he exists. He’s probably falling all over himself in her DMs, and she is leaving him on read. He’s pathetic. This whole thing is pathetic. He spouts stupid bullshit, he ignores my texts, and now he’s embarrassed me in front of the whole fucking school. He embarrassed himself! Everybody saw it. People are making jokes about me. Someone slapped together a meme. Emelline is a princess, Phillip is a chihuahua with a hard-on, and I’m a troll chasing after both of them.”