“Keag!” she laugh-screams.
I squeeze tighter. She squirms. I can feel her laughter in her throat, her chest. I kiss the space below her earlobe, rub the coarse stubble on my chin across the sensitive skin of her neck. She grabs my head and pushes it back so she can see my face. She’s no longer laughing. In fact, she has tears in her eyes. “Tell me you don’t hate me.”
I loosen my grip but don’t let go. “Five percent.”
“What?”
“I hate you five percent. But I love you ninety-five. Even if you want to wear a full-body gerbil costume during sex.”
She swallows hard. “Hamster.”
“Right, hamster.” I kiss her lips. “Promise you’ll love me even if I start hoarding mannequin heads?”
She narrows her eyes. “Just the heads?”
I kiss her throat. “Torsos, then.”
“Oh, okay. I mean, if it’s just torsos…”
“Seriously, though. I love you. Your whole gray-area, Dr. Okada–slash-d0l0s-slash–Narioka Diane package. But I don’t wanna be invisible. You don’t get to ignore me. Or make me smaller when we don’t agree.”
She folds her arms around my shoulders, shifts her hips in my lap, and, brow curved, attention focused, says, “Deal.”
I kiss her mouth again, longer, harder, and we stop talking for a while.
REESE
$0.00…$9,965.98…
Glaring at her phone, Nari paces the width of my room from the door to my bathroom past the end of my bed to my drafting table against the far wall and back.
“Trying to hit your step count?” I ask as she passes. My scalp, hair soaked with dye and wrapped in plastic overnight, itches. All over. If only because I can’t scratch it and the power of suggestion is an asshole. Violet, in case you’re wondering. The dye. Red may be the so-called color of victory, but been there done that, and I like purple better. Plus “Violet.” Get it? As in my lovely cohort’s recent pseudonym? Also, pride forever!
Nari looks up like she’s breaking the surface after being underwater. “What?”
I poke at my head through the plastic wrap and mush of my hair. It doesn’t help. “You’re pacing like my mom worried about meeting her daily step count.”
I could guess what she’s looking at on her phone, what’s making her so preoccupied. Not even guess, I know. The phone she’s obsessed with is her prepaid, after all. But it’s only Sunday morning. Not even forty hours since the deed was done. What is there to look at? Isn’t this supposed to take months? Also, I’m still basking in the ombré pastel palette, the billowing, post-adrenaline-rush calm of our success.
My skull itches. Not even my scalp. My skull, the bone part, which I know isn’t possible and is therefore not real, but whatever—I’ve waited long enough. “Okay. Can’t take it anymore. I’m washing it out.”
“Hooray!” Nari cheers. She locks her phone and leaves it on my drafting table. “Reveal time!”
And I let it go. Whatever she might’ve said, whatever else I could’ve asked, I let it go.
We walk into my bathroom, where I sit on the floor, unwrap the plastic from my hair, and lean my head back over the edge of the tub so my face doesn’t end up purple, too. Nari pulls down the detachable showerhead and turns the water on, warming it up a few degrees above frigid but keeping it cold so my color will last longer. “So, uh, how’s things?” I ask, looking up at her.
She moves the sprayer into my hair. The water filters through to my scalp for a long, quiet minute. “Things…” She uses her free hand to squeeze the water out of my hair, then starts rinsing again. “Um, my parents were grossly glowy after being Nari-free for five days. That’s a thing.”
“Sure, a deflection thing.”
She sprays my face.
I cough. “Hey!”
“Sorry,” she says, not sorry. “It slipped.”
“Funny.” I reach for a towel and blot my face. “Please, though, tell me more about your parents’ sex life, ’cause that’s totally what I meant.”
She shuts the faucet off, squeezes the water out of my hair a final time, and hands me the bottle of conditioner. Still resting my neck on the edge of the tub, I squeeze out a palmful and comb it through my wet hair with my fingers, then twist it into a loose bun on top of my head and sit up, blood rushing out of my head. I lean back against the tub beside Nari.
“Things are things,” she says. “Keag and I talked through a bunch of stuff yesterday.”
I drape one of my rainbow hair-dyeing towels around my neck. “Which was…?” I use a corner of the towel to dry my face again. “Really making me work for it today, Narioka Diane.”
“It was good. Made me think.” She looks at her hands, at the dye on her fingers, and grabs another towel to try to scrub it off. “Do you think it was right? What we did?”
I want to say, Duh, of course! But she’s serious. So I say, seriously, “I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ ”
“Yeah.”
“But,” I say, “I’d rather do the wrong thing for the right reasons than the other way around.”
“There needs to be a middle word. For the gray area in between,” she says.
“Like midigood.”
“Betwixtibad.”
“Grawful. The mutant offspring of great and awful.”
“Illeg-altruism.” Nari tosses her towel into my laundry basket by the vanity, accepting her temporarily purple hands. “Except I’m not selfless. Keagan was right about that. Among other things.”
“Well, you’re not selfish. Or self-righteous or whatever he said.”
She arches an eyebrow at me.
“Well,” I say, “Keagan’s…” I don’t know how to finish that. Keagan had apologized for the Wednesday freak-out, and I would’ve forgiven him anyway. I, for one, am a fan of the occasional freak-out. Little freak-outs prevent mega freak-outs. A hypothesis Keagan proved by balling all his little ones into one over-compressed freak-out bomb.
“It’s okay,” Nari says. “And it’s okay that Keag’s right. I mean, not okay. But we’re good. The way he said it last week was super shitty. But that—” She shrugs. “It’s one moment in the middle of all the rest.”
I frown and open my mouth to, I don’t know, argue? Blame Keag? Though for what, I don’t really know. Being an ass that one time? Like I’ve never been an ass? For hurting Nari? Sure. But they both hurt each other, and it wasn’t exactly my business anyway. In any case, Nari reaches back to turn the faucet on again. “Let’s rinse that goop out of your hair. I’m getting impatient.”
Nari hangs out awhile longer. She watches me touch up the design I’ve shaved into the cropped side of my hair. Which comes out perfectly, by the way. Deep purple, near-black at my roots. She talks about summer and Berkeley and how she and Keag discussed her staying in the dorms and him finding an apartment with some roommates or something, then asks about my ever-upgrading itinerary for the fall—I’ve added Prague and Zagreb and Innsbruck—and how things are selling and so on and normal so forth, punctuated by a few gaping stretches of negative space. Ones we might’ve filled with blood packets and bank accounts and Bitcoins.
Except we don’t. Then she leaves and I do some work; text Maddie, who spent spring break in Vancouver; waste time online; eat dinner with my dad; then go to bed, where I think about all the things neither Nari nor I wanted to say.
I wake up in the morning to my phone screaming from the floor, where I plugged it in last night. Literally screaming. My mom’s ringtone is a sample of some actress’s horror movie shriek. Subtle, I know.
I don’t answer. A week ago, that would’ve been obvious. Now, I hesitate. Hesitate to answer. To stop myself from answering? Both of those sound weird, but whatever. I count the screams. Three, seven, ten, then wait through the beep telling me she left a voicemail
. In the quiet that follows, I pull my duvet up to my chin and stare at my ceiling. Two heavy cerise minutes later, my alarm goes off.
I wait to listen to the voicemail until I park my dad’s car at school, half out of spite and half confusion. My epiphany about her hasn’t worn off. But understanding and forgiveness aren’t the same things. The morning fog hasn’t lifted yet. People filter through the parking lot toward the building. “Reese,” my mom’s voice says. “It’s Mom.” Brilliance upon brilliance. Thanks, Mom, for reminding me that I’m me and you’re you. I roll my eyes. “Your dad says you got back from your camping trip early Saturday. Hope you guys had fun. I don’t like how we left things last week. I”—she pauses to heave a sigh—“I don’t like how we’ve left anything lately. I know you think everything’s my fault, and I guess, for now, that’s okay. But, if you’d consider forgiving me? Someday? Maybe before I’m old and frail and start losing my mind?” Another sigh. “I’m not perfect, Reese. I’ve never claimed to be. But your dad’s not perfect either. Which isn’t— Never mind. This isn’t about that, it’s about you and me.
“Anyway. Your room here’s all set up. Please let me know if you plan to use it.”
And that’s it. Click. The end.
I put my phone in my lap and stare out the windshield at the grille of the truck parked opposite my dad’s car. Thing was, I hadn’t even come home early that day. It was, like, five-thirty. FIVE-THIRTY. I’d even been kind of late getting home, having gone over to Nari’s after school for whatever reason.
Basically, my mom wanted to get caught. By me? Doubt it. But she might as well have had the guy over for dinner.
Go big or go home, I guess. Or that morbid saying about cutting your nose off to spite your face. Except that this time, it was more like my mom didn’t like the carpet so she set the house on fire.
Or.
Or she’d let herself get so bottled up, boxed in, corked, that the pressure built and, well.
Again, a week ago I would’ve said something snotty about her getting what she deserved. Shitty divorcee apartment, resentful kid, ruined reputation, etc. But now I think, maybe she is? Getting what she deserves. What she wants, at least. Not the pea-green muck of it, the hurt and loss and complexity.
But out. It’s gotta be one of the most brutal ways to do it. I mean, when I came out to them at fifteen, I was like “Hey, I’m asexual and aromantic, any questions?” Get it? “Out”?
Anyway. My mom. She’s…I don’t want to say “free,” but I will. She’s free. She gets to decide who she is and what she wants without my dad’s walls or my cork or bottle or combination of whatever. She gets to start over. Well, mostly over. And yeah, it’s selfish. And yeah, the better time to have been selfish was twenty-odd years ago, though totally not wishing away my existence here, but.
Everyone deserves to make their own choices, to have their own life.
So that’s why I text her: Okay.
The convo bubble with the three grayscale dots comes up immediately.
Okay?
Okay, I’ll use the room.
I leave my phone in the car because I’d rather bask in that moment of closure than stumble through a dozen texts about logistics, and walk inside feeling lighter. More mature? Something corny and trite like that.
First period is AP English, then chem, then study hall, then lunch, which I’ll skip to since who really wants a recap of the rest of it? After study hall I meet up with Bells and Nari in the hall outside their AP Physics class and we head toward the cafeteria. Almost there, I see Barret walking toward me with two of his interchangeable lackeys.
Five feet off, and he’s laughing.
Three feet, and he meets my eye.
Two, and he winks.
One, and he’s tripping.
Zero, and that piece of shit catches himself from falling by grabbing my chest.
“What the hell?” Nari yells.
I take an exaggerated step to the side. Barret rights himself, grinning. “Yeah, Barret,” I say, frigid. “What the hell?”
He shrugs. “What? I tripped.”
“That’s sexual assault,” Bellamy says loudly. Bellamy. Loudly. Last week really did something there.
“Aw, come on,” Barret says. “Don’t be a bitch about it. It’s not like there’s much to grab anyway.”
And you know what? Fuck him. Fuck this. Fuck almost four full years of this asshat wasting my— Right. No more.
I wind up and kick him in the balls.
Hard.
Like, literally as hard as I can. Which is pretty hard, gauging from the way his face goes pale and he crumples to the floor.
His friends shout. Nari laughs. Bellamy smiles. An assortment of gasps, laughs, and groans comes from everyone else watching in the hall.
I lean down to where he has his face sort of mashed into the floor, hands gripping his groin, and say, “Don’t touch me. Ever. I don’t owe you anything. My time. My energy. My anger. And certainly not my body.”
And I walk away with Nari and Bellamy trailing behind me. We might as well be in slo-mo with a muted explosion erupting at our backs, it’s that awesome. Freaking Technicolor.
SANTIAGO
$19,937.15…$28,012.51…$37,890.65…$68,527.77…$249,654.09…
The ground is damp, the grass wet enough to soak through the old blanket we brought, but I don’t care. Lying on my back, I close my eyes. A wave of sunlight pours over Bells and me as the clouds part, warming my face and arms, brightening the color of my eyelids to a vivid orange. Turned toward me, her body flush along the length of mine, Bells presses her cheek into my shoulder and squeezes my hand. I could stay like this forever, paused in this moment, folded inside the ease of our silence and the quiet warmth of the April sun.
But a shadow blocks the light, and I open my eyes. “I knew it!” Reese says. She beams, her sharp features bright with discovery, with being the first to know.
We sit up, Bellamy dropping my hand to remove her glasses and rub her eyes. She fixes her ponytail as Reese plops down across from us and dumps the contents of her bag out on the blanket. She smooths her deep purple hair over one shoulder.
“It isn’t a secret. Just—” Bellamy shrugs.
“Hey.” Reese sorts through her pile of art supplies. “I get it. Nari’ll flip. In a good way, but still. I get it.”
I pull my legs up and rest my forearms on my knees. My shirt clings to my back. “Well, Nari seems a little preoccupied lately.”
Reese snorts. She pulls a black high heel and a gold Sharpie from her pile and gets to work. Bellamy and I share a look.
I’d expected it to be omnipresent, heavy and lurking, a rumbling shadow that dimmed every moment, but the truth was that I’d barely thought about Foster Innovations at all. All week, we’d gone to class, eaten lunch, worked, done homework, and hung out almost like normal.
Almost. Almost like normal because doing that changed each of us. It made Keagan sturdier, more assertive, from finally talking things through with Nari to declaring his love of diet soda one day at lunch. “I know it’s disgusting!” he’d announced. “And probably rots your guts!” We’d all watched him proclaiming, emphatic, with our eyebrows raised. “But I love its numb aftertaste!”
“ ‘Numb’ isn’t a flavor, Keag,” Reese had said.
“Nonsense!” he’d cheered back, and chugged a third of his Diet Pepsi to prove a point no one cared he was making.
When he’d set the bottle back down, Bellamy had clapped a bit, murmuring, “Yaaaay.” We’d all laughed.
Succeeding at her part had changed Reese, too, inspiring her to both quit putting up with Barret’s bullshit and reach some sort of cease-fire with her mom. For Bellamy and me, it’d made us, well, an us. And for me? The feeling of invincibility had worn off, but my believing in myself had not.
Walking d
own the sidewalk back to Keag’s car last Friday, I’d felt that wall of doubt in my head crumble. The plaster had cracked, the layers upon layers of paint had chipped away in flakes and sheets. I knew I could do anything. I felt as though, if I’d wanted it enough, I could’ve taken a running jump and leapt over a building. I clung to that, not the delusion but my optimistic determination. My parents’ worries and doubts didn’t have to be my worries and doubts, and if what they needed was proof and guarantees, then I was eager to give them both in the shape of my success. When I told them as much, for the first time both my mom and dad only listened and neither said no. It wasn’t over, I knew that. I’d be pushing against their uncertainty as long as there was something to be uncertain about, as long as I was deviating from their prescribed plan, from their tradition and authority. But I knew their worry came from a place of love. And if I could respect their views despite that difference, I could also ask them to respect mine.
“So, it’s not a secret,” Reese says, concentrating on the creature she’s drawing on the toe of the high heel. “But is it Breaking News?”
I smile like I always smile when I think about what Bells and I are now, like I can’t help it, like what I’m feeling simply has to make itself known outside my head and heart, out on my skin. Bellamy and I share a glance, and I shrug. “We’re seeing where it goes.”
Reese nods without looking up. “Rad.” And that’s it. Bellamy looks at me again with eyes wide and an off-kilter grin, a look that I return because, that’s it? But Reese is Reese, and her interest in concerning herself with other people’s business extends only as far as knowing that the people she cares about are happy with that business.
I’m watching her add a detailed menagerie of insect-like creatures to the strap and heel of the shoe when Keagan joins us. He walks over from the parking lot, passing among the other people out enjoying the nice day. When he reaches us, he moves some of Reese’s stuff—pens, the matching shoe, a notebook—and sits between her and Bellamy on the blanket.
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