When In Rome...Find Yourself: A Sweet New Adult Romance by Lena Mae Hill Page B

her. Jack had certainly never bothered to text Rory after they broke up.
    Ned and Nick seemed to hit it off, swapping pizza slices and talking about beer. Rather, Ned was explaining the different kinds of beer to Nick, who apparently didn’t drink. Rory tried to imagine a guy who didn’t drink beer, but the only thing who came to mind was some cartoonish stereotype of a gay guy. Real gay guys probably drank beer as much as anyone else, not that Rory knew any. Her circle of friends was narrow and homogenous.
    They definitely would have made fun of her for being shallow and superficial if they knew that she was about to spend some of her time in Rome shopping. Which, it seemed they were going to do. She’d zoned out for a few minutes, too obsessed with eating quietly to pay attention to the conversation around her. But now everyone was paying their bills, talking about what shops they were going to, and Ned seemed to think he was now part of the group.
    It was strange how things in Rome were exactly the same and yet so completely different. Most people only knew a couple people in the study abroad class, so they all formed new friend groups and cliques. Cynthia and Nick had joined with Maggie and Kristina, though Rory knew that at home, they weren’t in the same social circle. At college, the groups weren’t as stratified as they had been in high school, of course, and there was more fluidity. Someone could hang out with a few different groups. But most people still made their core social group by the end of freshman year. Even Rory had made friends, though she didn’t live on campus.
    Despite all that, she didn’t think she could just join in this group that had already formed. It was too late. Alliances had been chosen on the first day, some even before that, on the plane. Those who had flown together had fallen together naturally. And though she’d flown with this group, she hadn’t gone out with them on Friday. If only she had said yes, maybe she would be one of them. Now that it was over, she could see how truly important that invitation had been.
    When they left the café, she and Ned left Jelly and instead took the tram with the others to an area with posh, designer stores. While the girls tried on outfits in the Prada store, asking each other for judgment when they really wanted only approval, Rory crept through the store, afraid to touch anything. They didn’t have racks of clothes to dig through like the thrift stores she and her friend Patty frequented.
    Patty was the reason she had made friends outside of Quinn, the reason she’d gotten a job at Claire’s in the mall, the reason she’d met Jack. She’d met Patty freshman year, when they’d had a mind-numbingly boring American history class together. After the first week, Patty had sat down next to her in the lecture hall, her voluminous body, draped entirely in black, barely fitting into the auditorium seat, and asked if she wanted to strike a deal. They would each attend every other week and then exchange notes. Rory had nodded mutely, too startled to think of an objection, and Patty had taken Rory’s hand and scrawled her phone number up the back of Rory’s arm before saying, “Tag, you’re it,” and marching out of the auditorium without a glance at the pimply grad student teaching the class. It was the first time anyone had ever given Rory her phone number.
    “Would you like to try it on, mademoiselle?” asked a tall, thin man wearing impeccably ironed grey slacks and a peach colored shirt. Rory had been gazing at a mannequin wearing a trim black pencil skirt and a creamy blouse that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe combined, thinking how different it was from the displays at the mall where she worked, the Forever 21 and Wet Seal stores stuffed to bursting with the hottest fads, a new color each season, the mannequins striped with frayed denim shorts and fringed tiny tops, bare black midriffs separating the pieces.
    “Oh—no,”