The sudden change in topic, from Tiffani’s controlling nature to the start of the summer, takes me by surprise. “Yeah. Dad was annoying and the barbecue sucked and you rudely stormed into it.”
“Yeah, that.” I’m waiting for him to laugh. He doesn’t. In fact, he just looks even more uncomfortable than he already was. “I was super pissed off.”
“Why?” I remember eavesdropping on his argument with Ella that night, but I don’t remember them discussing why he was mad in the first place. He looked furious when he pulled up outside the house.
There’s another silent pause. “I was mad at Tiffani,” he finally admits. By now he’s not even looking at me. He’s just staring at the tiled flooring. “I’ve been thinking about getting involved in something for a while, and she found out that night,” he explains, but his voice is quiet and a little raspy, and I realize he’s not going to tell me what it is he’s thinking about getting involved in. I can tell it isn’t something he can be proud of. “She said she won’t tell anyone as long as I stay with her until graduation. That’s why I was sucking up to her for a while at the start of the summer. You know, in American Apparel and stuff…” His cheeks flush with color in sheer embarrassment of having to talk about it, but I don’t mind. I’m just glad he’s being honest with me. “As long as she’s happy and I don’t break up with her, she won’t tell, because that’s what she does, Eden. She likes to blackmail people into doing what she wants, so that she can look cool and stay on top of the rest of us.” He exhales and shakes his head. “She told me she used to get bullied when she was younger, so I guess when she started at our school, after she moved here with her mom after the divorce, she wanted to make sure no one stepped over her. She wants to be better than everyone, cooler than them all. Having me by her side helps boost her ego. That’s why I’m stuck in this mess.” When he stops talking, he groans. “I hate this.”
“Wow,” I say. It’s all I can muster up right now. Tyler’s been right all along. He really doesn’t want to be with her, and he’s not just saying that to make me feel better. He is genuinely stuck in a complicated situation, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve made it worse for him. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m not breaking up with her,” he says gently, finally glancing back up to look at me. He looks sad. It makes me feel sorry for him, because I honestly don’t know what advice to give him. “Not yet, at least. I can’t risk it right now.”
“Then what are we going to do?” The floor is cold against my skin, but I try to ignore it, focusing my attention on the person across from me as I try my hardest to understand him.
Tyler fixes me with a stern stare. “I just don’t want to make anyone suspicious,” he tells me.
“Suspicious about what?”
“Us,” he says firmly. With another sigh, he unfolds his arms and runs a hand back through his hair, tugging on the ends, and I notice the familiarity of the action. It’s something he does unconsciously, a sign of his anger or distress, something that offers him some comfort for a split second. “We need to just act normal for now until we figure this out. That’s another reason I can’t break up with her. People would wonder why. So for now, she has to stay in the picture, because Tiffani is my normality.”
“But it’s wrong to do this to her,” I say quietly. I envision her tear-streaked face again this morning as she sobbed uncontrollably against her comforter, releasing the brunt of the hurt she felt. We inflicted that upon her, and although it feels so long ago, it’s only been a matter of hours. Maybe she’s still distraught, and right now Tyler and I are hovering on the edge of a dangerous line that should not be crossed. Tyler might be in a relationship with Tiffani that he can’t get out of and she might have forced him into that, but it doesn’t give us the right to cheat.
“Eden,” Tyler says. When I meet his eyes, his head is cocked and he’s studying me. “Talk about something else. Talk about Portland.”
My eyebrows furrow as I cross my legs, placing my interlocked hands onto my lap. “You want me to talk about Portland?”
“I want you to talk about yourself,” he says. His eyes are smoldering now, bright and vibrant, locked with mine and unwilling to break our shared gaze. “Tell me something that no one else knows.”