“You?”
“Yeah. We’ve known each other since we were five, and this is the first time we’ve ever hung out. I mean, besides work and school.”
“That’s because I’ve never liked you.”
She smiled the way Snake did when I insulted him. “I guess I’ve never liked you much either.”
Her father’s BMW pulled up to the walkway. She looked at me in a Carla way that wasn’t like all of the other Carlas. Her eyes were uncharacteristically sincere. Like Snake, it was her best look. “Thanks for coming with me today. You’re the last person in the entire world I would have wanted to spend a Friday night with, but it actually wasn’t too bad.”
“The disgust is mutual.”
She grabbed her duffel bag and tossed it over her shoulder. As she walked toward her dad’s car, she paused turning back to look at me. “By the way,” she called, “the answer is no. I wouldn’t want my date to be Snake.”
Thirty minutes later, I ended up on Snake’s front porch, ringing his doorbell a thousand times until someone had enough nerve to answer. When the door swung open, it was Jeanine, flour spattered across her floral apron.
“Reggie,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Where’s Snake?”
Her smile faded the moment I mentioned him. I waited for the next words out of her mouth to be he was sick, dying, or dead, because that is all that would have justified ignoring Carla and making me her go-to by default.
“He’s having a rough day.”
“I bet.”
“There was an issue last night.”
I knew she was talking about Carla dumping his sorry ass.
“Is he in his room?”
She nodded. I scooted past her without asking, because I was quite honestly all cared out. When I made it to his door, I could see that the lights were off. There was no shine beneath the crack. I pushed the door back.
Darkness. Computer screen shut down. Blinds closed. TV off. A hump of covers. I recognized the scene as if it were my own. Classic Stage 3. Snake was in Disconnect.
I found him exactly where I expected, lying in his bed with the blanket pulled to his nose. His phone was on the nightstand. Untouched. He had a set of earbuds in his ears, a reverberating noise leaking into the quiet. Drums. Screamo. The Renegade Dystopia.
He didn’t see me, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Disconnect made you as good as dead, which was why I decided not to do what I wanted to do. Yell. Scream. Put up a fight. Tell him off the way he secretly wanted me to.
His only cop-outs were sickness, dying, and death.
Disconnect was all three.
I wasn’t sure if it was Carla he was mourning or the consequences of yet another mistake. That mistake being me, of course. He probably regretted me, but he probably still wanted me because he knew he shouldn’t. And it hurt him and it made no sense and it was useless, and he needed it. He needed to need because it made him feel. Unfortunately, feeling wasn’t always such a good thing.
As I peeled the covers back, he glanced up at me with glassy, distant eyes. Disconnect eyes. I lay down on his bed, twisting on my side to face him. He was looking straight at me. But he wasn’t looking at me so much as through me.
I pulled the covers to my neck and reached my hand to his earbuds. I took one out and put it in my own ear. He didn’t move.
“You’re a day early,” I whispered. “Wallowing in self-hatred is supposed to happen on Saturday.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t acknowledge me at all. We lay together for an hour as the Renegade Dystopia screamed into our ears. It really was a crappy band.
Chapter Eleven
I SPENT MY ENTIRE SATURDAY MORNING shopping for baby clothes (see: corporal punishment) with Carla Banks. Apparently, my stand-in-dad stint at birthing class gave her the wrong impression. I got the call after I left Snake’s the night before. A chatty little voicemail that said: Reggie? Snake texted me your number. Hope you don’t mind. I was wondering if you’d go baby clothes shopping with me tomorrow? I know that’s kind of awkward, but I don’t have anyone else to go with. Call me back!
Like birthing class, I would have rather been punched in the face. But the list of reasons I was indebted to Carla was endless and unrelenting.
I might have sort of kind of had a thing for her ex-boyfriend/baby daddy.
She didn’t try to catfight me in the school parking lot during our confrontation about reason 1.
Her dad was my boss.
It was bad karma to shun a pregnant girl whose aunt had just kicked the bucket.
So there I found myself, moving from rack to rack, hordes of giraffes and butterflies bombarding me at every turn. Flashburn didn’t even have a real mall. It was only a few outdated stores shoved inside a building the size of a warehouse. I only went to the mall for one reason and that was when I was craving a soft pretzel. Or when Karen was forcing me to help her pick out bath towels (see: capital punishment).
“This is so cute!” Carla exclaimed, lifting a sweater vest with a matching bow tie. It was yellow and argyle and so ugly I could have barfed on it. “What do you think?”
“You don’t want to know what I think.”
She hung her head and hooked it back on the hanger.
“What about this?” I asked, waving a mini white T-shirt bearing the phrase WORLD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR.
She laughed in disgust. “Ugh, Snake would love that.”
“If it were a few sizes bigger, he’d wear it.”
“Ohmigod,” she said, sifting through the animal-themed section. “Right after I told my dad I was pregnant, Snake showed up to my house in a Darth Vader shirt that said WHO’S YOUR DADDY?”
I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from bursting. “He. Did. Not.”
“I swear to God. My dad almost drop-kicked him right there in my living room.”
I rounded the corner and snorted into my hand, the weirdest, most uncomfortable sensation I’d felt in weeks. Lately, laughing felt a lot like opening my mouth to speak and hearing my words flow out in a foreign language. Carla, of all people, was laughing alongside me, talking back. It was like we both understood but didn’t know when we’d learned to.
“Olivia hates him,” she said over her shoulder. “I mean, she thinks he’s hot. Obviously. But she also thinks he’s a prick.”
“That’s because he is a prick.”
“Yeah . . .” She dragged it out like she wasn’t sure. Like she was agreeing just for the sake of agreeing. “He wasn’t always like that, though. You know?”
I wanted to have enough knowledge of Snake to agree. To have the memories Carla had, to be able to say, “Remember that one time he did that awesome thing?” But I didn’t know him before, I barely knew him now, and it was pointless to pretend it would have mattered either way.
“Tell me,” I said.
She glanced at me and scrunched her forehead. “Tell you what?”