And those were the comments that weren’t riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, and I tried to ignore the ones with inventive swear words.

My stomach turned over, and I felt like I was going to vomit all over Shelby’s laptop. Having gone through a bad round of bullying when I was fourteen, I’d pretty much steered clear of all social media since then, and this was reminding me why.

This was proof I’d made the right call last night when I’d told him I only wanted to be friends. I already knew what it was like to have to endure this type of venom on a daily basis. No way did I want to sign up for that mess again.

Gossip really hit differently when it was about you.

Shelby realized too late what I was doing. “Don’t read the comments!” She shut her laptop screen and pulled it back. “It doesn’t matter what a bunch of tweens and frustrated housewives think. It only matters what he thinks.”

“To be fair, it doesn’t really matter what Noah thinks, either. I told him I only wanted to be friends.”

She stared at me, her mouth open. Then she reached for the most recent issue of American Weekly, rolled it up, and hit me on my arm with it like I was a bad dog.

“What? Why would you do that?” she demanded.

“Ow! Stop!” I grabbed the magazine from her and threw it onto the coffee table behind me. “I don’t like him that way.”

“You are my best friend and I love you, but that is quite possibly the stupidest thing you have ever said to me. You look at him like you’ve been starving for a month and he’s a man-size vat of ice cream.”

“Whatever” was my masterful reply. My phone buzzed, and I reached for my clutch. I had thrown it onto the counter last night when I got home. I emptied out the contents and noted that my phone was about to die. My heart had a moment of hope that maybe it was Noah. But . . . what if he’d seen the picture? That could be a bad thing.

It wasn’t him. It was a text message from . . . my bank. Thrilling. I wondered what credit card I was currently eligible for or what their current low, low rate would be for refinancing my mortgage. The fact that I didn’t have a mortgage never seemed to bother them.

“An uneaten Snickers bar?” Shelby asked. “Isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse?”