“I respect your feelings,” Maggie said as carefully as she could. “But I don’t think that I can just abandon her.”
Maggie eyed me up regretfully, and Matt could barely contain his emotions. His fists clenched tightly at his sides, and his eyes had this weird misty quality to them. I couldn’t stand it. In my mind, I started begging Maggie to just let it alone. Matt couldn’t take it anymore. Just please don’t see Mom anymore, please, please, please. I looked at Maggie directly, pleading with her with my eyes, and her expression changed. It went from being apologetically resolute to something sorta foggy. Her eyes had gone blank and her face went lacks.
“I think I’ll stop seeing your mom,” Maggie said softly, almost questioning. I let out a heavy sigh of relief, and she shook her head, clearing it of whatever she was thinking. Her change of heart had happened too quickly for Matt to let go of his anger, but Maggie gave him an easy smile. “Sorry about all that. I guess I should probably get supper started.” She gave me a slightly bewildered look and shook her head again. “The drive must’ve gotten to me.
Um, Wendy, I picked you up some of that sticky rice you love. I think I’ll make that.”
“Alright, that sounds good,” I nodded.
After she went into the kitchen to make supper, Matt excused himself to go downstairs, where he had his home gym set up. I heard Verdi Requiem blasting out through the floorboards a few minutes later, meaning he had a lot more steam to blow off. He’d probably stay down there working through it until supper was ready.
I picked up Roman Architecture off the table and felt the familiar twinge of guilt as I leafed through it. Matt would’ve loved to travel Europe and study, but that would’ve meant leaving me behind, so he never could. As it was, Matt’s high school and college grades had severely suffered because of his constant moving to follow me. Both he and Maggie thought it was in my best interest to go to the best schools, and while those were usually boarding schools, I had never lived in a dorm. They had always assumed that I would completely selfdestruct without their supervision. Matt could’ve lived on campus at other places, but he thought I would destruct without him in particular.
Matt never held a job, not a real one, because we moved so much. He has a degree and completed an internship, but then we had to move. And move again. Maggie used to be a child psychologist but she hasn’t worked since I was like eight or nine, when she finally gave up on the whole thing. I get kicked out of school, we transfer, and everyone starts over again. I have been completely ruining their lives, and I cannot wait until I’m eighteen and on my own and I can finally let them live their lives in peace.
3
Cafeteria food is a plague on mankind, I’m certain of it. I’ve been to some of the classiest schools in the country, and still found very little that I’d be willing to eat. Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t starve to death. All I can taste is salt and preservatives and vomit. I had gotten a tray because I was absolutely famished, but as soon as I started pushing it down the tray line, I felt that familiar wave of nausea as I was forced to smell everything.
“Generally, people, you know, get food here,” Patrick commented. He had grabbed a tray right behind me, and he was watching as I slid past all the offerings (macaroni and “cheese,” pizza, mashed potatoes, canned corn) without taking any.
“I find that hard to believe,” I scoffed. Patrick had loaded up on the macaroni and pizza, but turned down the corn. But he was over six foot and growing, so none of that would show on his waistline.
“You’re not one of those anorexic girls, are you?” Patrick asked, eyeing me up sincerely.
“No, I am definitely not one of those girls!” I shook my head. We had reached the end of the line where they had a few sorry looking lettuce leafs, a bowl of oranges, and red Jell-o cubes. Luckily, my love for Jell-o is Biblical and I loaded up my plate. “But if I was, I probably wouldn’t tell you.”
“Wait.” Patrick thought this over for a minute as I grabbed a bottled water. “Is that your way of telling me that you really are?”
“Nope. I’m not. I’m just saying that when you ask questions like that, you’re usually gonna get the same answer no matter what,” I said. I fumbled in my pocket for the money I owed the cashier, and Patrick narrowed his eyes at me. “When you ask someone if they’re a liar or if they stole that or if they cheated on you. Everybody is always gonna say no, whether they did it or not.
Asking the question doesn’t get you anywhere.”
“I sorta feel like I should make you eat a Big Mac now to prove me wrong.” Patrick took his turn paying the cashier, and I waited for him.
We had been sitting together during lunch the last week or so at school, and that still felt odd to me. I had eaten lunch by myself almost my entire school career. Normally, we sat at a little round table in the corner of the room, underneath a banner for the football team. We were all team spirit.
“Hey, Wendy, wait,” Patrick stopped me when I started heading over to our table. “Let’s sit somewhere else.” Our table was empty, and there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it, so I didn’t understand the sudden decision to move tables.
“Okay. Where?” I shrugged.
“How about… over there.” Patrick nodded to the opposite side of the room, but there weren’t any tables open. I scanned the crowd, trying to figure out who he’d want to be sitting with… but then I figured it out. Finn had glanced up at me.
“Seriously?” I scoffed. “You wanna sit with him?”
“Come on, Wen.” Patrick looked at me imploringly, and then looked over at where Finn was sitting by himself, opening his bottle of water. “He’s all alone, and he looks so forlorn.”
“No, he doesn’t. He looks thirsty,” I watched Finn take a long drink of water.
“You know how much it sucks being the new kid,” Patrick insisted.
“Are you like the welcome wagon or something?” I scowled at him. By the expression he was giving me, I knew I’d have little choice in the matter if I wanted to continue a friendship with him. And for some stupid reason, I really did. I exhaled loudly, my sign of defeat, and Patrick grinned broadly. “He’s so creepy, though.”
“He is not.” Patrick had started walking over to the table, so I followed reluctantly after him. “And you know what? I think thou dost protest too much.”
“I know that’s Shakespeare, but I can’t tell how that applies here,” I grumbled.
“You know exactly how that applies here,” Patrick flashed me a knowing look, and I felt my cheeks flush for a second. Maybe I liked Finn more than I was willing to let on, and I definitely didn’t appreciate Patrick catching onto that.
When we got to the table, Finn pretended not to even notice us, making me want to kick him in the shins. I knew that he always noticed me. He had chosen mac and cheese and an orange for lunch, but he seemed to be pushing around the macaroni more than eating it.
“Hey, do you mind if we sit with you?” Patrick asked politely, but before Finn could even answer, I pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I set my tray down with a bit of an excess clatter, making Patrick jump a little, but Finn didn’t move a muscle.
“Sure,” Finn gestured to the empty chair next to him and finally turned his attention to me. His dark eyes were rather mesmerizing, which is why I always failed at our staring contests. I didn’t trust anything that hypnotic, so I looked down at my Jell-o cubes and tossed one in my mouth.
“So how do you like school so far?” Patrick asked when he sat down.
“I don’t know,” Finn admitted, looking down at his tray. Patrick had already started scarfing down in his food, making me simultaneously nauseous and jealous. The food was disgusting, but I was starving and wished I had something that I could wolf down.
“You know, Wendy hasn’t been here very long either,” Patrick gave a little nod at me, and I narrowed my eyes at him. What was this he was doing?
Was he trying to set us up?
“I had
heard that, yes.” Finn stabbed a noodle and stared at it for a moment, then just set it down on his plate and leaned back. “This is the worst food in the world.”
“Wendy hates the food here too,” Patrick interjected, and this time I kicked him under the table. “Ow! What was that for?”
“Stop,” I whispered, which was silly since Finn was right there, looking at me. “I know what you’re trying to do. And stop.”
“Alright. I will stop making conversation, since it displeases you so,” Patrick raised an eyebrow and went back to eating. “If you want to not eat and not talk, then… well. You win. I guess.”
“I’m eating,” I pouted and ate another Jell-o cube. “They do have bad food here though.”
“Yet everyone seems to be eating it,” Finn scanned the rest of the cafeteria, sounding mildly surprised.
“So, are you from a private school too?” Patrick looked up at Finn. I had just been coming to the same conclusion myself. He was well-dressed, wellmannered, and he had a slight air of distaste about him.
“Something like that,” Finn answered vaguely and turned his attention back to me. “You went to a private school?”
“I’ve been to many private schools. So many, they stopped taking me,” I said with a hint of pride. Finn’s general stoic expression was broken with almost glaring disapproval, which made my stomach tighten.
“Why?” Finn asked directly.
“I have an anger management problem.” That’s the short answer, but he nodded like that made sense. His eyes never left mine, and this time I was determined not to look away. I decided that my best course of action was to throw him off his game somehow. “You have the darkest brown eyes I have ever seen.” As soon as it came out of my mouth, I wanted to take it back. It was vaguely swoony and not at all menacing, like it had somehow sounded in my head. Oh yeah, complimenting his eyes, that’s really gonna hurt his feelings.
“Your eyes are almost the same color,” Finn replied instantly, which rattled me, but I kept my eyes locked on his. I would win this. “Maybe a shade lighter.”
“They are not,” I retorted incredulously. My eyes were a fairly dark brown, but I couldn’t say for sure how dark they were compared to Finn’s.
Without a mirror handy, I didn’t know how he could say it with such certainty.
“No, they are,” Patrick agreed. I rolled my eyes at that, thus breaking my eye contact with Finn. I would’ve been disappointed if I hadn’t been so relieved. Looking at him like that was making my heart react stupidly, and I was eager to make it stop.
“Of course you side with him,” I grumbled and leaned back in my chair.
“To be fair, the truth sided with him,” Patrick said.
“You’re getting angry over your own eye color?” Finn asked, and if I didn’t know any better, I would think he sounded slightly bemused.
“No. I’m not getting angry over anything,” I lied and crossed my arms over my chest. I was getting angry but with myself for getting so flustered over everything Finn said and did.
“So, how come you moved here?” Patrick turned back to Finn, apparently tiring of my current attitude. Not that I blamed him. I was tired of my attitude.
“Work,” Finn replied. His goal seemed to be to reveal nothing about himself.
“Your parents?” Patrick asked.
“Family business,” Finn answered stiffly, then nodded to me. “What about you? Why here? Why this school?”
“I really don’t know,” I admitted. Maggie and Matt had explained their decision to me, but in the end, I didn’t really care why they picked here, so I had forgotten. “My brother thought it was a good school, I guess.”
“Your brother?” Finn raised an eyebrow, looking mildly confused.
“Yeah, I live with my older brother and my aunt,” I explained. “They’re my guardians.”
“Where are your parents?” Finn pried. It was beginning to feel more like an interrogation, and I bristled at it.
“I don’t really think that’s any of your business,” I said icily.
Finn’s confusion disappeared into a mask I couldn’t read. He just looked at me, the way he always did, and despite my anger, my stomach insisted doing that flipping thing. I wanted to look away from him, but it was like I couldn’t. It wasn’t just my normal urge to beat him at something. This was an actual compulsion that I had no control over.
“This pizza is really good, you guys,” Patrick tried to cut through the tension that had settled at the table. He broke whatever spell Finn had over me, and I lowered my eyes, staring at the Jell-o on my plate and trying to figure out what was going on.
“I do like curls,” Tegan was saying in a voice so loud it was obviously meant for me, “but I’m just so afraid that my hair would end up a Brillo pad like hers.” They were walking right behind me, and one of her minions cackled.
Touching my soft, messy curls, I turned to glare after her, but she didn’t even notice.
“I wanna kick her right in the labia,” I growled, still glaring at her departing figure.
“No, yeah, that seems like a perfectly reasonable reaction,” Finn said.
“She made a silly snide comment you know isn’t true, so you threaten physical harm. Perfect.” Patrick laughed at our exchange, although I didn’t find it amusing.
“I think I might hate you,” I lied, staring at Finn as harshly as I could.
Leaning forward on the table, Finn matched my gaze with a much softer one. “I don’t think you do.” With that, he stood up and started clearing his tray. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an exam to study for. I’ll see you in class.”
I watched him walk away, feeling my heart race with anger and something far more sinister. I couldn’t make sense of my mixed emotions about him. Most of the time, I really, really wanted to kick him in the shins. But other times, I felt perfectly content to just stare into his eyes, and I had never felt anything like that before. Nor had I ever wanted to. My life had been built around me being a self-contained island, and I had no intention of letting anyone else on it.
“So, he’s interesting,” Patrick allowed and took a drink of his milk.
“He is a creep!” I insisted.
Watching Patrick laugh with a big milk mustache, I realized that he’s exactly where I went wrong. I had let him onto my island, and he had stowed Finn along with him. It was all Matt’s fault for making me make friends, and then I realized that I already let Matt on my island. Apparently I wasn’t quite as self-contained as I thought I was.
“Let’s get out of here.” Patrick wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt and stood up. “I ate way too much.” His plate was completely empty and it had been overflowing when he sat down, so yeah, he had eaten a lot.
“Why did you want to sit with him?” I persisted, picking up my tray as I got up. “You know I don’t like him, right? You’re not secretly scheming anything?”
“I’m not much of a schemer,” Patrick admitted, and that seemed pretty honest. We walked over to the garbage cans to dump our trays, and he must’ve been able to tell that I wasn’t exactly satisfied with that answer because he continued. “I told you the truth before. He’s new and he seems alone a lot. And okay, yeah, I did think he might like you or something. So I thought it would be nice if you two could be friends. Or all of us could be friends, really. Just to be nice.”
“Just to be nice?” I eyed him up suspiciously.
“Yeah!” Patrick laughed. “Believe it or not, I am a nice guy. And sometimes, I do thinks just for the sake of being nice. Isn’t that weird?”
“Kinda,” I nodded.
We had left the lunchroom and were walking down the hall. Several other kids had left lunch a little bit earlier and were loitering around. Before lunch, I had dumped my bookbag in my locker, and I went to retrieve it. Patrick followed me. I struggled to open my locker com because locks of any kind were a sworn enemy of mine. I either twisted it around too much or not enough.
Pat
rick leaned on the locker next to mine to wait out the fight.
“Hey, you know what? We should go!” Patrick exclaimed suddenly.
“What? Where?” I still hadn’t gotten my locker to open, so I was only half paying attention to him. Patrick nodded at something across the hall, and I glanced back over my shoulder at a bright orange flyer hanging on the hall, proclaiming the fall semi-formal the event of the season. “The dance? You can’t be serious.”
“Why can’t I?” Patrick grinned. “It’d be fun. Have you ever even been to a dance?”
“That’s beside the point,” I shook my head and yanked on the lock, which stubbornly refused to budge.
“That’s exactly the point! You have to go to at least one dance in your high school career!” Patrick insisted and his excitement was building. He clearly thought this was the greatest idea he’d ever had. “Oh, come on, Wendy! It’ll be so much fun! I promise.”
“I doubt that,” I scowled. My lock finally gave way and opened, so I had a momentary lapse in judgment as elation spread over me. “When is it?”
“Friday. At seven.” Patrick had already won, and he knew it.
“In two days? Don’t I need to get a dress or something?” I opened my locker and started rummaging through it so I could switch out my books for class.
“I have the sinking suspicion that you already have something,” Patrick said. “So. I’ll pick you up on Friday at seven?”
“You know you will see me at some point over the next two days,” I pointed out, looking up at his goofy smile. “Okay, fine. Yes. Seven. Friday.”
“You won’t regret it!” Patrick promised and took a step back from my locker. “I gotta go get my stuff for class. But this is a good idea! You gotta live a little, Wen!”
“Yeah, I don’t know how that relates to a school dance!” I called after him, watching as he turned and jogged the rest of the way down the hall.
My experience with friends was admittedly limited, but I really didn’t understand what was happening here. Patrick seemed to be trying to set me up with Finn at lunch, but he had just asked me to the dance, and he was far happier about it than any guy should be. Finn was a total creep. He really was.
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