“Oh? I find out that you’re dating Carla Banks—?I’m sorry, no. Scratch that. Procreating with Carla Banks, after you relentlessly tried to impress me for God knows what reason, and all you say is ‘Oh’?”
“What am I supposed to say?” He tossed both of his hands up in surrender. “Yeah, I’m dating Carla. Yeah, I got her pregnant. Yeah, that makes me incredibly dumb and careless. And yeah, I really, really, really wanted to impress you. I still do.”
“You’re doing a bang-up job.” I pushed my sweaty hair back. “Why do you want to impress me, anyway? If you’re having a ginger squash with Carla, you shouldn’t even care what I think.”
“I do care, Reggie,” he said. I could feel him staring at me. “I don’t know why. When I met you, something just . . . I don’t know. It sounds ridiculous now.”
“Yeah, it does. When did you and Carla start dating?”
“About seven months ago.”
“She’s seven months pregnant.”
“Exactly.” His hands shook slightly in his lap, presumably from his Twizzlers withdrawal. I could have used one right about then.
“Well, aren’t you a Flashburn gentleman?”
“It’s not like I was planning on sleeping with her. We met at some highbrow party for spoiled rich kids, because when your family has money and your therapist says you need to ‘be around other kids your age’ and ‘learn to appreciate the perks of living,’ lying in bed and floundering in self-hatred while you listen to a sucky band like the Renegade Dystopia isn’t seen as a healthy alternative.” He clasped both hands behind his head. “Carla started flirting with me. And at the risk of sounding pathetic, having a girl like Carla notice me wasn’t something I was used to. So, yeah. I flirted back. I drank a little bit. She drank some to balance it out. We were upstairs alone. And, well, she was wearing this really short dress—”
“Oh my God, spare me the nitty-gritty.”
He closed his eyes to refocus. “Point is, it wasn’t supposed to amount to anything.”
“Except that it did. And you have to grow some balls and own up to that.”
“I’m trying!” he shouted. I hadn’t heard him shout before. It was the most impressive thing I’d seen him do, because it was real. He was being sincere for once. “I promised Carla that I’d be there for her, even though her dad hates me and won’t let me go to any of her appointments. I took the job he offered me so I can help her when the baby gets here. I’ve done everything I know to do, but then you come along and ruin everything.”
“Me?” I somehow ended up on my feet with a face hotter than Hades in the summer. “I didn’t know you’d impregnated the Kate Middleton of Flashburn when you came on to me. How did I ruin everything?”
“You made me want to be hated,” he sighed. We stood facing each other. Nothing separated us but a block of sunlight. “Carla is not my type. I’m sorry. I know I should say she is, but she isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I care about her. I kind of have to after what we did. But she . . . she . . .” He raked his fingers through his hair. “She is conceited and shallow and bossy and has the worst taste in music I have ever heard.”
I could practically hear her screeching to Taylor Swift. “Worse than the Renegade Dystopia?”
“Worse than the Renegade Dystopia during a Prozac seizure.” He made an ugh noise into his hands. “She drives me insane. And then I meet you, and you drive me possibly even more insane. But it’s the kind of insane that makes the Renegade Dystopia during a Prozac seizure seem like one of those perks of living. I want to be around you so I can hate things the way you hate them and endure constant putdowns and near assaults and kiss you on anti-dates.” He looked out the window at a young couple fishing by the pond. “But how do you dump a girl who is pregnant with your ginger squash, right?”
Reflections from the window sparkled in his eyes and for a fleeting moment made the gray-blue of them something worth appreciating.
“You should leave me alone,” I said.
He stepped closer to me, and the reflections left. His eyes were uninteresting again. “That’s Saturday, remember?”
“What?”
“The Guide to Successful Depressive Behavior. Being left alone is supposed to happen on Saturday.”
“I don’t care what this fictitious manual to barely existing says to do. I’m crazy enough as it is. I don’t need you coming around and trying to impress me with anti-dates and inspirational speeches about woodland creatures. You’re too presumptuous.”
“I’m presumptuous?”
“Yes. And I don’t need you. I don’t need your cold pizza. I don’t need to be a front-row observer of the disaster that is your Twizzlers addiction. I don’t need your pregnant girlfriend rubbing her sonogram in my face. And I don’t need to hate you, because I think you’re doing a pretty good job of it without me.”
He smirked, that jackass. He enjoyed being told off. He was so hopelessly presumptuous that he invited rejection at the expense of his own ego. Which was so downright presumptuous that it was really kind of self-deprecating. That’s what he was. A self-deprecating egomaniac.
“Easy there,” he warned. “Don’t want to waste the epic ‘I hate you’ too soon. It’s only been one date, after all.”
I knocked his shoulder as I stomped past him. He caught up and tried to hold the door open as if he could still convince me that he was some kind of gentleman. I grabbed it first, purposely jabbing him with my elbow as I stormed out of the house.
As I hopped off the two-step porch, I spun around to feed him one final piece of my mind. But he leaned in the doorway, arms over his chest, hair in his eyes, cool as a lying, cheating cucumber. He was calculating my moves, amused by my anger. Oh, did I have some choice words for him. But I would have to save them for the day I dished out the epic “I hate you,” as he said. What a day that would be.
I dug my keys out of my pocket and headed toward the minivan parked at the end of the driveway next to the mailbox. I made a note to knock it over on my way out. I turned around one last time and said, “Next time you decide to stop acting like a pansy and come to work, don’t bother talking to me.”
I left without hitting the mailbox. Snake was still grinning in the doorway as I floored the gas, speeding away from the rich kid pond.