This laugh-out-loud debut romance introduces perfectly imperfect Payal Mehta, whose plan to get her longtime crush to finally notice her is destined for success, but only if she ignores her budding feelings for her archnemesis...
Payal Mehta has had a crush on popular, athletic, all-around perfect Jonathan Slate ever since he smiled at her in freshman–year Spanish class. At a party during spring break of her junior year, Payal finally works up the courage to ask Jon to hang out. However, her romantic plans are derailed when he vomits on her Keds. Twice. But when Jon offers to take her out to lunch as an apology, Payal is convinced this is the start of their love story.
Over chalupas and burritos at Taco Bell, Payal's best jokes are landing as planned. Jon is basically choking on his Coke—and then it happens. "Do you have a boyfriend?" Payal is (finally) about to get the guy. And then he tries to set her up with his Indian friend. Payal's best friends, Neil Patel and Divya Bhatt, are just as mad about the microagression as Payal is, but they think she’s a little too hung up on him.
Determined to teach Jon a lesson by making him fall for her, Payal ropes in her archnemesis, Philip Kim, to help. It’s the perfect plan. Minus Philip’s snarky, annoying quips and lack of faith in its success. But as Payal lies to the people she loves, hides the too-Indian parts of herself in front of her crush, and learns that maybe Philip isn't the worst, she starts to wonder if what she's been looking for has been scowling at her all along...
Release date:
September 24, 2024
Publisher:
Kokila
Print pages:
304
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Chapter One For twenty minutes I’d been holding this red SOLO cup of the most sickly sweet nail polish—smelling vodka-and-red-juice mixture. Holding ingestible paint thinner wasn’t something I’d planned on doing with my evening, but . . . there were thick lines of black Sharpie spelling the name Jonathan Slate on its side. I mean . . .Jonathan-freaking-Slate! And so, I’d keep holding it while the party around me kept going. I’d been there for a few hours already and had been on the cusp of making a round to see what was happening poolside. Instead, the cup and I stayed, standing against the ugly brocade wallpaper for—oh, twenty-one minutes. No worries. I could do this all day. I would stand here forever, if I was being honest. It was Jonathan-freaking-Slate.
Twenty-One Minutes Earlier I’d been taking a minute to enjoy the general debauchery around me—picture almost any show on a premium cable network and you’re halfway there already—when it happened. “Hey, Pie, hold this for a sec. Thanks, I owe you.” His words were slurred and rushed, so it took me a second to parse his meaning. But by then Jonathan Slate’s fingers had brushed mine as he handed the cup off to me. And obviously, we fell in love . . . or, I fell a little more deeply into my three-year crush on a white boy who sometimes said nice things to me but by all accounts might not even know my real name. Which is Payal. PIE-yuhl. Not Pie. (Footnote: My parents would never name me after a dessert pastry. Wait, no, one of my childhood nicknames was “Ladoo”—oh no. My whole life has been a lie.)
Jon didn’t wait for a response before he stumbled off, but that was okay. The world works differently when you’re a six-foot-tall Adonis in a button-down shirt and fitted jeans. You don’t generally have to conform to the same set of social rules as the rest of us mere mortals. Besides, maybe he did wait for a response and I was too busy trying not to drool to notice. (In case it wasn’t immediately clear, people considered me to be a very cool person.) Listen, Jon Slate was it. I’d had a crush on him since freshman year. He was in my very first high school class, and our Spanish teacher assigned us as partners on the very first day. I’d taken one look at his blue, blue eyes, sun-kissed cheeks, and surfer boy–blond hair and was gone. Then we didn’t speak again for six weeks, but he smiled at me every day . . . or at least smiled in my direction. And one time, he gave me his pencil. Not lent, gave. It was magical. I still had it. I loved him.
Back to Now I wasn’t entirely sure how I ended up at this party. It was the kind of thing my parents might actually kill me for attending. It had all the elements of a grounded-for-the-rest-of-my-natural-life-and-whatever-lives-came-after-that event. Alcohol? Besides the aforementioned vodka-and-red-juice drink, two kids I kind of recognized from school standing next to me were googling “How to shotgun a beer.” I leaned over to peek at the search results and shook my head. They’d probably get distracted by a full Wiki on the history of shotgunning beers if they didn’t move to YouTube. Drugs? Janet Kwon was about to take her turn with the joint going around a circle of people, but—oh, there it is. I winced. She dropped it in her beer. Yikes. Sex? . . . Probably? It hadn’t gotten to a point where people were actually doing it in the open, but I was pretty sure it was happening somewhere. The house was one of those gigantic McMansions with a million rooms that littered South Florida thanks to the super-duper rich who moved here to build big, ugly houses. Which leads us to . . . No chaperones. Rachel Finley’s parents weren’t even in town, and hadn’t been for a while, as far as I could see. They were on a yacht somewhere (or in Paris or Prague or who knows? . . . I don’t know how extremely wealthy people live). So here we were, in a giant house filled with teenagers making bad decisions. Seriously, I’d just seen the rest of the pot smokers herd into the kitchen to microwave the beer-soaked joint. Bad choices all around! (Not me, though. My decision to hold on to this cup was going to lead to something big. I knew it.) “Finn! Finn! Not here!”
Actually, you know what? I did know how I ended up here. The boy laughing and talking to Finn would be Neil Patel. Neil, who was currently trying to stop his boyfriend from taking his shirt off in a room full of people, had been my best friend for a million years. (Footnote: This tracks as factually correct because of that whole reincarnation thing.)
Several hours earlier, he’d done his dirty work. We’d been lying side by side on the grass in my backyard, trying to get some sun without Rajeshri Auntie noticing and immediately revealing her colonial roots by yelling at us for getting “too dark.” (Footnote: Colonialism, classism, and colorism persist in the twenty-first century; we do not love to see it.) It was early enough in the Florida afternoon that the humidity level was actually acceptable. Instead of sweat and stickiness, there was a comfortable warmth on my skin. “Neil, we are not going to Rachel’s spring break party. She is awful. Are you forgetting that she called you ‘Neila’ for the entirety of freshman year?” He turned to me, expression lazy and eyes half-lidded in the bright light of the sun. “Payal, you have to let things go. Rachel and I are certified besties now. The bullying is obviously over.” I gave him my best disbelieving side-eye. “Oh, are you? I take it she doesn’t know you’re the one who left her parents the anonymous tip about her I’m-grounded-but-I-need-to-go-to-Coachella crowdfund?” Neil sat up and looked completely aghast. “I was being a good friend. Who knows what goes on at those rowdy festivals? She could have gotten hurt.” “Oh, so it was in her best interest,” I said, playing along with Neil’s sarcastic response. I was honestly surprised the American Dream Queen’s parents stopped her from doing anything, because she did not act like someone who understood that her actions had consequences—but then I found out she was grounded because she’d wrecked her dad’s car, and her only punishment was that she couldn’t go to Coachella. Explanation finished, Neil lay back and threw an arm over his eyes. I propped up on my elbows so that I could look down my nose at him. “Besides,” Neil added, “I can’t help that now she thinks it’s cool to have a gay best friend. Why shouldn’t I take advantage?” I could see his lips quirk up. Typical. “Take advantage of what? The party is going to be terrible and loud and awkward,” I said. “No way. It’s going to be awesome. She has a pool and lots of expensive booze.” Okay, fair point from Neil. “Philip Kim won’t be there, right?” I forced myself to ask, frowning at the thought of my school nemesis. Neil shot me a dry look. “In what world does Philip Kim go to parties? He hates everyone except his nerdy holier-than-thou group of friends.” Whew. Good. Anyway, the less said about Philip, the better. “I’m just making sure!” I said, before pivoting back to what I knew to actually be true. “Whatever. You want to go because Finn is going.” I collapsed back onto the ground, ignoring the way the blades of grass pricked at my neck. “Lies!” He paused and then grinned. “I want to go because Finn is going and there is a pool, so Finn will be shirtless and that has serious potential.” What kind of friend would I be if I denied him that?
So here I was, standing against this ugly wallpaper, and there Neil was, enjoying the party he forced me to come to. “Heyyyyyy, Pa-pa-pa-piiiiilel. You have my drink!” Jon-freaking-Slate had had a few more, if that slur was any indication. I squinted, trying to remember that old proverb. Oh, right: Internet gods say, Four y’s on a hey and they are totally into you. That hey had at least five y’s. He was stumbling toward me, one hand outstretched and the other braced against the wall for support. His floppy, curly blond hair was floppier, and his shirt was torn at the collar. Maybe it was the drink, but maybe he’d opened his heart to the possibilities of a Bollywood dance number with his true love: me. Behind him, there was the blur of our fellow partygoers dancing and drinking, but none of it mattered. Just Jon stumbling toward me. I pushed away from the wall and held his drink out to him. Maybe our hands would touch again. “Uh, hey, yeah,” I said, unsure of how to continue before finally settling on “I didn’t drink it.” He smiled. Jon was smiling at me. His eyes were crinkling. Alert. Alert. My brain was no longer connected to my mouth. I opened and closed it a few times, literally floundering. (Even at my worst, I won’t miss an opportunity for a pun.)
He reached for the cup and took it from me, somehow managing to avoid touching my hand this time. I only had a split second to mourn the missed opportunity before he pulled away, slurring out a thanks before he turned to walk away. And then, again without my brain’s approval, my mouth opened. “Hey, Jon!” Oh no. What was I doing? What was I doing? Jon turned back to look at me, one eyebrow raised quizzically. I scrambled for something to say—anything. Why had I said his name? “We should . . . hang out,” I said falteringly. It took everything in me not to bite my own traitorous tongue. I resisted the urge to look around. It felt like time had stopped. Behind Jon, I was pretty sure a girl’s cup was halfway between the table and the floor and was hanging in the air mid-spill because time had literally stopped. Jon, for his part, was looking at me like he didn’t know who I was. Like I was a complete weirdo. A very short, stick-figured Indian girl with deliberately messy hair, too-dark eyeliner, and burgundy lipstick she’d stolen from her mother . . . weirdo. There was no way he knew about the lipstick thing. He still hadn’t said anything. It was too quiet. This was the longest moment in history. Did the music stop? It couldn’t have. Why did it feel like everyone was staring? Was someone filming? Someone was always filming. I needed to say something. Anything. But hadn’t I already said enough? I should backtrack. I took a halting step toward him. “I mean . . . since we both have Mr. Ansel’s mock AP History exam coming up. I mean, we should study. I heard you needed a study partner, right?” Good save, Payal. Killing it. Jon Slate narrowed his eyes, opened his mouth, and then—well, then, he threw up all over my Keds.
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