Chapter 1

Paige was a fuckboy magnet. And it wasn’t like she ever tried to look for them in the first place. Like new zits before Winter Formal, they came around just when she thought she didn’t have to deal with them anymore. It didn’t help that fuckboys could be just as hard to get rid of, too.

Who even invented the word that was so on point it brought her to tears? While Paige made a forgettable note to herself about looking it up, she did know why “fuck” and “boy” were together: the fuckboy was a boy with no motive other than to ****.

“Sasha was a total bitch,” Andrew complained as he parked the latest Audi luxury sedan in a tiny parking lot. “All she did was talk shit on everyone, and she always hung out with James and Gary. She didn’t even send me nudes!”

Paige wanted to do anything other than listen to this hypocrite. And she hoped to God he wasn’t going to send her nudes. Sure, while he was kind of hot, she had to wonder, as with every fuckboy she’d dated, if her level of hotness was only what mattered to him. Besides, even before he pulled up in her driveway with a car too shiny to be his first, she knew in the very back of her head that Andrew Chen was still a fuckboy, especially sophomore year when he dated every girl she knew, and not to forget his fashion inspiration being Kanye West. Once a fuckboy, always a fuckboy.

Paige stepped out of the car. “Yeah, I heard she was a bitch to you.” Probably because he’d do things like talk shit about his exes on first dates.

He slammed his door and fixed his hair using the car window as a mirror. “I can’t put up with crazy sluts anymore.”

They headed to the entrance of Cucina Mia, a low-key Italian restaurant on Main Street. With red striped awnings above the windows, it was a cute and modest place, and probably too tiny to fit the customers waiting outside. People probably heard about the zillion and one flavors on the new gelato menu.

Paige suppressed a sigh. Waiting for a table meant more forced conversations with Andrew. And though he’d been the one to ask her out, she blamed this Saturday night on herself, as well as many other past dates that started out this way. After all, this thing called “dating” was an endless cycle of pretending that romance was real and justifying it with lust, only to break it off and claim to be friends when really they were semi-friends or future rebounds. Of course she, as well as her exes, never expected anything from their relationships, and neither did the whole school.

She wondered if Andrew wanted this date because he wanted to ****, or worse, hit the gossip headlines the very next school day? Or, in the time they waited for their table, he just wanted to rant about his mom yelling at him for always coming home late? And that he couldn’t wait to go to college to be away from them? He should’ve felt lucky the worst thing his parents did to him was giving lectures.

At least the rant made the time pass faster, because the next thing she knew, they were sitting at a table near the center of the restaurant, with a waiter handing them worn-out menus. He looked to be about Paige’s age, but she was sure she’d never seen him around school.

“Hey guys, I’m Mark,” he said as his brown eyes glanced at her and Andrew. “And if you ever forget my name, remember the waiter that made his mark.”

Paige snorted. “Which was making a pun with his name?”

Mark turned to her and grinned. “Good, you’ll remember my name now.”

She grinned back, resting her chin on her fist. “Is this how you greet people? You must be that boring.”

He made a show of pointing his finger at her. “You’ll remember my name, even after you leave this place. Mark my words.”

“I’ve marked your words, Matthew.”

As he slowly turned to walk away with a crooked smile, she stared at his short dark brown curls. She laughed softly and faced forward in her seat, her eyes barely reading the words on the menu.

“Do you know him?” Andrew asked.

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