The Girl Next Door Chapter 14

That week, the Penguins were on a three-game home stand, so Kate and Sidney got to hang out a lot. They had games on a Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, so on that Friday night, a bunch of the guys decided to go out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, since all of the guys loved the place. They brought their girlfriends and wives with too, so Sidney invited Kate to join them. They had won their first game the night before, 7-5 over Atlanta, so all of them were ready to have some fun. When they got there (Kate drove, Sidney was about to get his car), Kate sat in between Maxime and Sidney, and the plan was that if anyone asked who Kate was, they would just say that she was Maxime’s friend. All of them had a ton of fun; Kate was getting close to a lot of the guys, since she was dating Sidney. She had been hanging out with them at Mario’s house, and after the games. Her parents didn’t have a problem with it, since most of her friends were guys. Since she had been hanging out with Sidney a lot, and going to the games, she hadn’t been seeing many of her friends lately, and some of them started to notice that she wasn’t around a lot.
*****
“So, Kate,” Kate’s friend Maddie began, while they were at school that Monday, “where have you been the past few weeks? You haven’t been hanging out with us a lot.”
“Well,” Kate began, “I’ve been going to the Penguins games, and I’ve been busy with hockey starting, and our first game next week.”
“But you haven’t come to any parties with us!” Maddie said. “It was so much fun
on Friday night! Noah got smashed, it was so funny!”
“I’ve just been busy lately, that’s all,” she said.
“Have you just been at home all the time?” Maddie asked.
“I’ve been hanging out with some of the guys on my team that go to Quaker Valley,” she said, which was partially true.
“Well,” Maddie said, “haven’t you been hanging out with Sid too?”
“Ya,” she said. “We’ve been hanging out, just friends.”
“You should bring him to a party!” she said excitedly.
“Um,” Kate began, “it’s not quite his thing. He’s kinda shy, not a big fan of huge parties.”
That was true; Sidney was pretty shy around a ton of people. He doesn’t show it around the media, since he knew he had to deal with all of it, but out of the limelight, Kate had discovered that he was a shy person.
“No parties,” Maddie said. “You didn’t come to Homecoming, since it was the Pens home opener, you are disappearing!”
“I just don’t like doing the same old shit anymore,” Kate told her. “I was never a big party person, I don’t drink,” (Kate’s older cousin Hilary had died because of a drunk driver at age sixteen when Kate was twelve, and immediately decided she would not drink, because Hilary had been her favorite cousin), “I don’t like driving my drunk friends home, let’s just leave it at that, okay?”
“Fine,” Maddie said, sighing in exasperation. “Just hang out with us more, okay?”
“I’ll try,” Kate said. “But I’m sick of the same old shit, now you know.”