Free The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth by Shelley Adina Page A

we’d snagged a table at Kara’s, it didn’t take Gillian long to spill to the others what she’d already told me. Both Shani and Carly looked heartbroken as they realized they were about to lose a charter member of the Happily Unavailable Club.
    “I can’t believe you’d do that to him.” Shani bit into her Raspberry Dazzle. “How can you break up with a guy for liking you too much?”
    Gillian’s eyes got a little too sparkly, and she blinked several times. “Now you’re making me feel selfish. And mean.”
    Carly swallowed a bite of carrot cupcake before she spoke. “We don’t mean to. It’s just hard for us to understand, that’s all.”
    “I’d give anything if Danyel would turn up unexpectedly a dozen times a day,” Shani said. “This long-distance relationship stuff really blows.”
    “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” Gillian’s gaze dropped to her plate, or rather our plate. She and I were each eating half of a Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate Ganache and a nice light coconut cupcake. So far I’d managed to consume both my halves while hers still sat there. “Maybe I just don’t have the capacity to care as much as you do.”
    I blew a raspberry at that notion. “Maybe it’s just a simple matter of chemistry. Instead of being Pepsi and Mentos, you’re Pepsi and—” I tried to think of an analogy. Chemistry is so not my thing.
    “Water?” Gillian gave me a rueful glance and took her first bite. I pushed the plate closer to her and nodded.
    “Both perfect on their own, but together, they’re just kind of…”
    “
Meh
,” Carly supplied.
    “He’s not
meh
, though,” Gillian protested. “He’s really nice and I like him a lot. I need space, and”—she paused and then said in a rush—“and if we’re going to colleges in two different parts of the country, what’s the point?”
    “Have you made up your mind?” I asked her.
    She glanced across the table. “Shani and I are both going to have to learn the Harvard fight song.”
    “Really?” Carly asked. “You decided on Harvard?”
    “What program, though?” I knew this was the sticking point for her.
    “Pre-med,” she said, as though it were the final line of a long argument.
    “Not art.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t have to give it up, but what you said the other day stuck with me. I’m going to need some kind of relief valve, and it’s not like I can be an art major and take advanced calculus to relax.”
    “
You
could,” Shani pointed out with no irony whatsoever.
    Gillian laughed, and then looked surprised at herself.
    “That’s more like it,” I said. “That’s the laugh I’ve been missing since our acceptance letters started rolling in.”
    “But Jeremy has always known he was going to Davis, and you were going to the East Coast somewhere,” Carly said. “Maybe he’ll have seen it coming and it won’t be so hard. Though if it were me, I’d wait until after the Cotillion.”
    “She can’t hang onto him just to have a date for a dance,” I pointed out. “That would make her a user.”
    “I just don’t think I can do it,” Gillian said. “Leaving everything else out, he was a good friend to me after I broke up with Lucas and through that whole awful exam-fraud thing. Maybe I’ll just have a talk with him. Then, if he decides to break up with me, it will be up to him. At least I’ll have tried to explain how I feel.”
    “And you never know, he might be good with it,” I said. “I think it’s just a case of him missing you already, before summer even starts. It’s like he’s storing you up for when he doesn’t have you.”
    “That’s so romantic,” Carly said with a dreamy smile.
    “That’s so unlike him,” Gillian retorted. “But maybe you’re right. I’ll talk to him sometime this weekend and just get it behind me. I have to tell him about Harvard, anyway. May as well make it one massive reveal.”
    “Do you want me to stay?” I asked her. “For