Not If You Break Up with Me First - Hardcover

Miller, G.F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1665950013 ISBN 13: 9781665950015

Publisher: Aladdin, 2024

Synopsis

Two friends who have unhappily found themselves accidentally dating try to drive the other one to call things off in this witty and heartfelt middle school romance.

Childhood friends Eve and Andrew are destined to be together—everyone says so, especially their friends and classmates who are all suddenly crush-obsessed. So when Eve and Andrew’s first eighth grade school dance rolls around and Eve, feeling the pressure, awkwardly asks Andrew to go with her, everyone assumes they are Officially Dating and Practically in Love. Overwhelmed, Eve and Andrew just…go with it.

And it’s weird. Neither of them wants this dating thing to mess up their friendship, and they don’t really see each other that way. But they also don’t want to be the one to call things off, the one to make things super awkward. So they both—separately—pledge to be the worst boyfriend or girlfriend ever, leaving it to the other person to break up with them. It would be genius…if the other person weren’t doing the exact same thing.

About this title

About the Author

G. F. Miller absolutely insists on a happy ending. Everything else is negotiable. She is living her Happily Ever After with the love of her life, three kids, two puppies, and some chickens. She cries at random times. She makes faces at herself in the mirror. She believes in the Oxford comma. And she’s always here for a dance party.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: It’s Only Weird If You Make It Weird

Chapter 1 It’s Only Weird If You Make It Weird
Eve was convinced that the clock in the airport terminal was set to Mercury time. Every minute took approximately fifty-eight times longer than a regular Earth minute.

“Didn’t their plane land, like, an hour ago?” she demanded when she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Fifteen minutes,” her mom said, not looking up from her sudoku. “And I have no control over airline efficiency.”

“Sorry,” Eve muttered, dropping into a runner’s lunge right there in front of the TSA and everybody. Running and prepping to run were Eve’s go-to fixes for practically every problem—boredom, nervousness, awkward silences, cramps, loneliness, parents having their twentieth fight of the week.…

She glanced around the O’Hare International Airport waiting area, considering doing a couple of laps between the “Nuts on Clark” popcorn stand and the PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT sign.

That would be weird, right? She should probably stick to stretching.

If people knew what she was going through, though, they wouldn’t judge. Her best friend in the world had been gone for two whole months. (Because two-month family trips are a thing you can do when your dad’s a teacher and your mom’s job is virtual.) Two months was cruel. It was inhumane.

Eve had been forced to hang out with the other Cross Country girls all summer, which wasn’t really a bad thing. They were pretty cool, and they were her teammates. But it meant she had a whole new friend group that Andrew wasn’t part of. Plus they watched makeup tutorials and talked about which boys they liked. She wasn’t being fake with them when she went along with it, but she wasn’t totally being herself, either. With Andrew, she didn’t have to pretend at all. She really missed that.

But now she was just a few Mercury minutes from seeing Andrew again.

It’s bananas how much stuff can happen to a person in two months. Andrew turned fourteen and Eve wasn’t there to smash cake in his face. Cross Country got a new coach. The Gonzaleses moved away. Her friend Reese kissed someone on the actual lips. School started, and Andrew missed the whole first week of eighth grade. Eve’s parents were acting horrible to each other, and she couldn’t talk to her best friend about it.

And yeah, they’d been texting, kind of. But some things just aren’t textable. Plus their mothers had colluded, as always, and put a million ridiculous restrictions on both of their phones. No phones at the dinner table. No phones in the car. No phones during “mandatory family time.” Sometimes she’d wait hours for a text back, and finally get a Sorry MFT . Worst of all, the things literally shut down at eight p.m. With Andrew on Florida time, all communication with her best friend was cut off before toddlers go to bed.

Thinking about everything she had suffered made Eve groan out loud. The lady in the TSA uniform standing guard under the PASSENGERS ONLY sign gave her a pointed look.

Eve switched legs, wailing, “I’m dying!”

“Of impatience?” Mom teased.

“Of old age!”

That got a ha from Mom.

Eve said, “Seriously, how long has it been?”

“Since your birth? Thirteen years and seven months. Since they landed?” Mom glanced at her watch. “Eighteen minutes.”

How had only three minutes passed since the last time check? See, thought Eve, Mercury time.

Mom uncrossed her legs and recrossed them, opposite leg on top. Her sneaker-clad foot bounced, as she penciled a “5” into one of the boxes of her puzzle. The permanent crease between her eyebrows was deeper than usual. For all her calm façade, Eve could tell she was anxious too. Turned out even adults with unfettered phone access missed their besties. Eve put her forehead on her knee and focused on the sensations of stretching. The tightness of her calf and heel. The tension in her thigh.

“There they are!” Mom exclaimed, standing. “Is that Andrew?!”

Eve popped out of her lunge and scanned the crowd. Andrew was emerging from the security corridor. He was wearing running pants and a Miami Heat basketball jersey. He had a backpack slung on his shoulder, a rolling bag dragging behind him, and a shopping bag in the other hand. His mom, dad, and sixteen-year-old brother flanked him. Eve didn’t take time to notice anything else. She took off running like she’d heard the starting gun at a Cross Country meet.

Andrew broke into a huge smile. He opened his arms and yelled, “McNugget!”

She fully left her feet when she crashed into him. He let his bags fall as he caught her. Eve squealed, “I’m going to hug you so hard, you pass out!”

“I’m gonna crack your ribs,” Andrew laughed back, his voice deeper than she remembered. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was squeezing her so tight. And man, he must have gotten stronger. It really was hard to breathe.

“I’m going to break your spine,” Eve wheezed, grabbing her own wrists and using the leverage to tighten her arms like a nutcracker. Her effort was rewarded with an oof from Andrew. She laughed victoriously with the little air she had left in her lungs.

Best. Hug. Ever.

Exceptz Andrew was different. At least two whole inches taller than when she’d hugged him goodbye. Taller and stronger and deeper-talking. It was disorienting.

So much can happen in two months.

“Whenever you guys are done making out, we can go,” Andrew’s brother, Tom, huffed, hefting his backpack.

What?! Eve pushed away from Andrew almost as hard as she’d tackled him a minute ago. Andrew averted his eyes, his cheeks going red, and scratched his head like he always did when he was uncomfortable.

“Hey!” Mrs. Ozdemir cuffed Tom on the arm.

“Just kidding, jeez,” Tom said.

It’s just Tom being Tom, Eve told herself. But kidding or not, Tom’s comment hung between them, making everything weird.

The moms turned back to their own reunion—jabbering and hugging like nothing had changed between them. Because nothing had.

Andrew cleared his throat and put on a forced-looking smile, seemingly determined to shake off whatever that was. He said, “Hey, I got you something!”

He retrieved the shopping bag he’d dropped and shoved it into Eve’s hands. She reached in and unfurled a beach towel. It was a map of Florida—obnoxiously fluorescent green and blue, and peppered with cartoonish icons of mouse ears, palm trees, alligators, and creepy smiling oranges.

“It’s so ugly!” Eve exclaimed, realizing that Andrew hadn’t changed so much after all. He was still her goofy best friend. She smiled hugely. “My eyes are bleeding!”

Andrew grinned back, for real this time. “I figure this could help you suck less at geography.”

“But if I was good at geography on top of everything else,” Eve said, “that wouldn’t really be fair to the other kids.”

Andrew snort-laughed.

“Okay, guys, let’s keep moving,” Mr. Ozdemir prodded tiredly. The group started to move forward, quickly falling into their natural pattern—Mr. Ozdemir and Tom in the lead, the moms right behind, chattering and barely watching where they were going, and Eve and Andrew at the back of the line.

Eve held the beach towel on display behind her like winning runners do with flags at the Olympics, while Andrew told her about Florida. He talked about the Keys, the beach, a sailboat ride, petting alligators, and visiting a town hilariously named Sopchoppy.

“Your haircut looks kinda sopchoppy, no offense,” Eve said.

“Did you sopchoppy your pants up on purpose?” Andrew countered.

They were both laughing as they dodged and weaved through baggage claim, keeping their moms in sight. But as they arrived at Carousel 4, where a crowd was already gathered to watch luggage trickle onto a conveyor belt, Andrew said, “How come your dad didn’t come?”

Eve bit her lip. She wanted to tell Andrew everything that was going on, but she didn’t know how to start, and this definitely didn’t seem like the right time and place, with her mom right there and everything. Besides, Eve didn’t know why her parents had started fighting—just that they were fighting. A lot. About everything. So she said, “It’s complicated.”

Andrew turned to look at her and leaned closer, his eyebrows pinched together. “Is it that bad?” he asked.

Before Eve could come up with an answer, she heard her mother say, “Look at them. They’re so sweet together.”

And Andrew’s mom went, “Aaaaaaw.”

What the actual heck?

Andrew must have heard it too, because they both stepped back at the same time, looking anywhere but at each other. Why did it have to be weird again?

Thankfully, the awkward moment was cut short by Mr. Ozdemir calling, “Andrew, red bag! Grab that one!”

Andrew reached for it. And that’s when Eve realized that even more things had changed when she wasn’t looking. Andrew kind of had muscles. Not like NBA muscles. But his arms were not the same skin-and-bones-with-pointy-elbows appendages he’d been jabbing her in the ribs with since kindergarten.

And, also, armpit hair.

From this moment on, Eve thought, time will be measured before and after armpit hair.

Before armpit hair, they were just kids. And even though there had been a razor in her shower for months, Eve had still thought of her and Andrew as kids. But now—hauling a red suitcase off a conveyor belt with his boy muscles and his hairy armpits—Andrew obviously wasn’t a kid anymore. He was a boy. Like he always was, but now it mattered.

Not to Eve. It didn’t matter at all to Eve, no matter what awkward comments his brother and their moms made. She’d been best friends with Andrew forever. They’d seen each other through growth spurts, family drama, and broken bones. Their moms were practically conjoined. Their families did holidays together. Just because Andrew happened to be a boy—a tall, hairy boy—didn’t mean anything had to change between them.

Eve clutched her new Florida beach towel. A cartoon alligator grinned up at her, and she whispered to it, “Don’t worry, Alli G. Absolutely nothing is going to change.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Aladdin
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1665950013
• ISBN 13: 9781665950015
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288