by Amie Gibbons
I blinked and I was back to seeing this giant room and the walls like we were actually in here.
“Whoa,” Mama said, shaking her head. “This is goin’ in my next book.”
AB and Carvi sat on the bed and I smiled at her.
Her eyes were glued to the clown, still running circles.
Except now, the clown was running circles around the bed and laughing between its sobs and cries of pain.
“Nobody say anything,” AB whispered. “I can’t… I can’t leave. She won’t let me.”
I glared at the clown as she rode by.
And pushed her off her stupid bike.
Her and AB yelped as one as she hit the floor, and I grabbed the bike, walking to the bed.
“You… I can’t believe you just did that,” AB said.
“I don’t know what I’m doin’,” I said, “but hey, figured it couldn’t hurt. Besides, she was smirking at me.”
I climbed onto the bed, putting the bike on the side next to me and furthest from the clown.
The clown crossed her arms and stared at me.
I stuck my tongue out at her.
“Bite me,” the clown said in a little girl voice.
“Wow,” Carvi said.
He pulled AB tight against his side and she sniffed, leaning into him.
Her face was drawn tight and she was curled up in a fetal position, holding a blanket around her so tight I wondered if she had powers in here making it cling to her like that.
“AB, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Tell me what needs to be done and I’ll do it.”
She sobbed and let go of the blanket with one hand to slam it over her mouth.
“What?” I asked.
The air in front of us shimmered, like a giant screen turning on.
“I think this will be good,” Carvi said. “Going back and seeing what happened.”
AB sniffed.
The room shifted, and we were sitting in a living room.
Wait, I knew this place.
There was a cheap, crappy couch with folding chairs around it and a giant American flag over it, with maps covering the other wall, a piano, and a giant TV.
We’d been here last week, investigating a supposed suicide that wasn’t.
It was Thomas’s apartment.
Thomas appeared, sitting on the couch, sprawled out and smirking. AB was on the floor, legs stretched out in front of her, leaning against the wall next to the piano.
The door closed, and I looked at it.
“We’d gotten into it that night,” the real AB said. “That was my friends leaving when I asked them to. They weren’t going to. They argued with me, said I should leave too because they didn’t think it was good for us to get into it, but I wasn’t okay to drive yet. That’s why we were hanging out at Thomas’s. I’d had too much to drink and couldn’t drive home yet.”
We were still on the bed, with Mama and Quil standing next to it, but we watched the room like we were sitting outside, with the wall next to the front door knocked out so we could see into the set.
“You want to get into this now?” the past AB said, voice rough and slightly slurred. “Really?”
“I don’t want to get into anything!” Thomas said, throwing his hands up dramatically. “You’re the one who’s been-”
“What?” she cut him off. “What have I been doing?”
“You had to bring up the Boards? Why are you trying to humiliate me?”
“I didn’t know saying that was! What is your problem?”
They stared each other down.
“I didn’t know it then,” the real AB said, “but he’d just slept with the nurse two days before this. The guys were saying he probably felt on edge because of that. We’d gone out to trivia and everything felt so strained that night. I figured it was me or something, but I figured later it was coming from him and I picked up on it, because I didn’t know he’d slept with her yet. I think here, he thought I knew and that I was picking a fight because of it.”
The past AB finally looked away and our AB flinched.
“You were trying to humiliate me,” Thomas said. “Let’s just tackle the elephant in the room. You have feelings for me, and you have a problem with me because of it.”
Past AB looked down, curling her knees to her chest.
Luckily her red dress went past her knees, because it bunched up and kept her from flashing the room with the motion.
She didn’t even seem to notice as she hugged her knees.
Making herself as small as possible.
God, she looked like a scared child.
I wanted to jump onto the scene and pull her into a hug.
Protect her.
“I…” she shook her head.
Thomas sat up straight, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward.
“You have a problem whenever I’m getting along with other women. You stomped away when I was flirting with Clarisa. You weren’t okay when Paul said he had a friend from out of town he wanted me to meet.”
She stared at her knees.
I could almost feel her head swimming.
Her friends had been right. She was in no state to have this talk.
“This is all fuzzy,” the real AB whispered. “I only remember flashes of this conversation.”
Thomas stared down at AB, something flashing in his eyes.
Guilt?
She looked so small curled up there.
She looked scared.
“AB, I normally don’t say this to people, but you are the one person I want to take me off that fucking pedestal. Please. I’m not the guy for you. We wouldn’t be good together. Please, stop acting like this.”
“Why?” AB said in a flat tone, looking up at him. “What am I doing? I’m not… I can’t… I don’t know what to do with you. Thomas, I don’t know what I’m feeling and I don’t know what I’m doing. You’re the therapist. Tell me. I don’t get it. I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know what to do with you. Help me know what to do. Because tonight… it was so weird and awkward. That’s why I drank so much, because I… couldn’t! What’s wrong with me? You’re the therapist. Tell me?”
She shook her head, staring at her knees again.
“I can’t do this,” she said, letting her knees go, but grabbing the stuffed dog off the piano bench next to her and hugging it tight to her chest like a little kid.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said, eyes searching the ground.
I focused in on her breathing. It was fast and erratic, like she was having an asthma attack.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she repeated. “I couldn’t even deal with you tonight. I got drunk for the first time in like three years because I couldn’t deal with you.”
She laughed, high and crazy. “I can’t deal with you. We’ve been friends for months. Why can’t I deal with you now? I know it’s around that time of year when all this happened. Is that it? Is it because the anniversary just passed? What’s wrong with me, Thomas?”
She looked up at him.
Eyes begging for help.
This time he looked away.
I couldn’t read anything off him like I could her, probably because we were in her head and not his, but he looked like he wasn’t dealing with this well either.
“I don’t know,” Thomas finally said, shaking his head, eyes hard and voice holding that sharp tone he seemed to reserve for her. “I never had a girl go crazy on me before you. I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but you need professional help.”
She flinched and so did the AB next to me.
Whoa.
This was where he’d called her crazy.
“I never had anyone react like that,” he said when she didn’t answer.
I snorted. “Did he ever traumatize a girl during sex before? Because that probably had a lot to do with it.”
“I didn’t go crazy,” the AB on the floor said, shaking her head, forehead wrinkled up and making her
face a mask of confusion. “I didn’t… I didn’t do anything to you.”
“You told people!” he snapped. “You told people your version of what happened. You have any idea how bad you made me look?”
“I was trying to deal with this. I had people telling me all these things, and I didn’t know. How could I? But you knew. I mean, I told you.”
“I didn’t know I was so incoherent,” real AB said, watching the scene with a twisted, pained expression on her face.
The scene jumped so AB was on the couch with Thomas, each on opposite sides. She was still clutching the stuffed dog under one arm and had a glass of water.
I looked over at real AB.
She shrugged. “I think that might be where my memory fuzzed out.”
“Or it wasn’t a relevant part,” Carvi said.
“What do you feel for me?” past AB asked Thomas, taking a drink and licking her lips.
Eyes fixed on his.
Honestly, she had a little crazy eyes going on here.
“What do you want from me?” she asked. “Do you have any feelings for me? Do you want me for anything?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, grinning wide and nervous as she licked her lips again. “Do you mean as a friend, for sex, as a girlfriend? Because they’re all different.”
She tossed up her free hand, apparently coherent enough by this point to at least not throw her hand holding the water.
“You keep saying that!” she burst, voice high and half panicked. “You… no! You think it’s okay to sleep around. You say you’ve slept with all these girls like that’s nothing. You…”
“Oh my god.” He threw his hands up, shooting to his feet. “You keep going back to that. It was casual. You need to get over this morality thing.”
“But… I…” It was like she couldn’t process that. “We slept together. I lost it to you. And you act like it’s nothing.”
I watched his face.
The smile stayed fixed in place, but his eyes said he wanted to run.
“Why are we able to see all this?” I asked. “AB wasn’t looking at him most of the time, so are these really the faces he was making? If they are, how are we seeing it?”
Carvi shot me a look over AB’s head.
“You,” he said. “You’re psychic, remember? We’re watching a vision of yours off of AB, to see what happened.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then why was there a jump?”
“Like I said, probably not relevant.”
I focused on the scene again.
Apparently it’d paused for us because Thomas stayed still, his face frozen in that smiling, scared look.
He moved, opening his mouth, but didn’t say anything.
He was trying not to say it didn’t mean anything.
Because that would hurt her feelings? Or because it would make him sound like an asshole and set her off again?
Wait, was I getting stuff off him now?
“I keep having people tell me this,” both ABs said in a small voice.
Our AB got up and crawled around Carvi to hop off the bed. She walked onto the scene and her double disappeared.
Thomas jerked, looking around.
I looked over and Carvi smirked.
“Carvi, what did you do?” I asked as the gangly man stumbled, catching himself on the side of the couch.
Carvi smirked.
“You have to let go of this morality thing,” Thomas said.
“But people keep telling me…” AB said.
“Yeah, screw them. Let go of the sexual morality, small town crap.”
“But people keep telling me. They keep saying.” AB’s eyes focused and she straightened. “No! That was me being incoherent. I wasn’t making a lot of sense that night because I was drunk. Thomas, sex means something. I don’t mean to others. I mean to me. I wasn’t saying people were giving me crap about me losing it in a casual way. I mean, I didn’t see it as casual. It was a huge deal to me!”
Her eyes searched his face and she licked her lips. “Thomas, do you care about that at all? Do I mean anything to you? Do you want me at all?”
He looked away.
“God, you can’t even answer one of those questions. How could you?” she whispered. “How could you sleep with me and not mean it? You knew I was a virgin. I’d never even made out with a guy. I told you. You knew how inexperienced I was. You knew I had no clue what I was doing or what I was getting into. How could you lie to me like that?”
“Stop saying that,” he snapped, pointing at her. “I never lied to you.”
“You lied with everything you did! You lied. You said you liked me.”
“I did like you,” he said, grabbing his short hair and pulling. “Except when you were acting crazy. Like now.”
“As what! For what!”
“I can’t keep having this fight with you,” he said. “We have had this fight.”
“Yeah, the last time we hung out,” she said. “Before we fell apart. Before you decided, yet again, that you were just done with me. Until you wanted something, I mean.”
“Would you want to be friends with you right now?” he half yelled. “You… AB, we had a good thing going. We were hanging out and you had my back and it was great. Then this night happened, and you turned on me. You betrayed me.”
I jerked.
Why was he talking in past tense?
AB’s mouth dropped open and she stepped back.
“Carvi?” I asked.
Carvi nodded. “AB wants to deal with Thomas. She needs to deal with him as much as you need to deal with Grant. He’s in a dream, so he’ll probably be less cagey. She’s not drunk this time. And they can’t run from each other in here.”
AB’s mouth worked. “I didn’t betray you! You betrayed me! You left me! Again!”
“You were working on your issues with Paul. He said to give you your space to deal with this. And then, whenever we do talk, we end up getting into it. I feel like I’m being punished. Like I’ve been banned from the group because you can’t get over this crush you have! We’re not together. We don’t fit. Why is that so bad?”
“Because you broke me!” she yelled. “You used me! You lied to me.”
Why wasn’t she telling him he traumatized her?
That was the real issue.
Unless she couldn’t.
“Stop accusing me of things I didn’t do!” Thomas screamed at her. “I never lied to you.”
“So you weren’t planning on that being a one-time thing? So you didn’t act like you liked me to get me into bed? So you didn’t take my virginity when I was drunk and scared and not even sure you didn’t assault me?”
His jaw locked and he glared at her. “And there it is. There’s the accusation. There’s the fucking ace you have up your sleeve. If you can’t control me, if I don’t fall in line, you can always take your version of what happened and publish it for the world to see and ruin my reputation. Ruin my chances of citizenship. Right?
“You want to know why I left? Because you scare the shit out of me. Because I don’t know what you’re going to do. Because you’re my friend and we’re cool, and then suddenly we’re not, and you throw a fit when I want another girl. Because I don’t know when you’re going to snap and go crazy on me again. Because you can’t be trusted.”
She squeaked, covering her mouth.
He sucked in a sharp breath. “AB, you don’t act rational around me. You are trying to control me.”
Her hands flew as she screamed, “No, I’m not!”
He sat down at one of the folding chairs, a small folding table appearing in front of him.
“Yes, you are,” he said, stabbing the table with his pointer finger on each word. “You’re trying to control me.”
“What? What have I done? You still haven’t told me.”
“You scare me whenever you see me with another woman. You look at me like… like you’re heartbroken.”
“That’s not something I’ve done,”
she said, voice catching. “That’s something you feel. That’s different.”
“I see your face every time I’ve flirted with anyone. Everything you’re thinking is all over it. I have to watch that and know you could go behind my back and tell people whatever you want. I get you don’t remember the night we slept together. I know you were drunk. But I didn’t realize you were that drunk and I didn’t know it was going to hurt you. You said you just wanted to lose it. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
My mouth fell open.
Who would ever think taking someone’s virginity was doing them a favor?
“I told you it was hurting,” she said, voice weak. “Thomas, I told you it hurt me.”
“You didn’t tell me to stop! I’m not a fucking mind reader! You said that’s what you were there for. You said when I asked before I went in that you wanted to do this.”
“I didn’t know!” she screamed, grabbing the table and throwing it out of the way.
Thomas jumped to his feet and AB stomped up to him, pointing up at his face. “I didn’t know what sex was going to do to me emotionally. I didn’t know how much it was going to hurt. And I didn’t know you were planning on it being a one-time thing! I thought you liked me.”
“I did! I liked you, and sex went bad, so we were supposed to just be friends. And then you went crazy on me.”
“Stop saying that! I didn’t do anything to you!” She poked him in the chest. “I wanted to. But I didn’t.”
“You went crazy on me.”
“You keep saying that! But I didn’t do anything crazy.”
“You… you…” he sputtered. “AB, you weren’t you anymore. You acted… What’s that word you use?” He snapped his fingers.
“Spazzy,” she said. “I acted spazzy.”
“Yeah. You’d show up and you’d look at me like you were terrified of me. You’d run half the time you saw me. What was I supposed to do! You keep saying I left you. You left me! You abandoned me! You were supposed to be my friend and you left.”
He gestured like a mad man as he waved his arms, face hard and eyes blazing.
Oh crap. This wasn’t going to go well.
AB’s mouth worked.
“You never called,” Thomas continued. “You never checked in. Friends do that, you know?”