Snake shot me a glance, gesturing to his camera. It was like he had forgotten I was there until that very moment. “Reggie, you mind? Keep the camera rolling just in case.”
I took the heavy camera from him, impressed that Snake could hold something that weighty so easily on his shoulder. I watched through the viewfinder as Snake walked to Carla and offered a hand. She pressed it to her left side so his fingers rumpled her silky pink dress.
He grimaced. “Ew. Why is it sticking out like that?”
“Don’t say ew,” Carla protested. “It’s the way he’s sitting.”
“It feels like a Gungan. Like you got a little Jar Jar Binks in there.”
“Who’s Jar Jar Binks? And don’t call your kid a racial slur.”
“Gungan isn’t a racial slur. It’s from Star Wars.”
“God, I might as well have had this baby with a Gungan.”
Snake peeked up at me, his hair hanging like a sheepdog’s over his eyebrows. His mouth struggled as if it wanted to smile, but there wasn’t enough energy stored in his face to make the muscles move. “Reggie, you got to feel this.”
“Your alien fetus holds no interest for me.”
“Aw, come on,” Carla begged, reaching pinnacle Nagging Carla. She peered at me with expert-level doe eyes, her bottom lip poking out. “He’s just a wittle baby.”
“Which precisely explains why I don’t care.”
Snake grinned and turned his attention to Carla. “Well, I think it’s pretty awesome.”
Her whole face lit up in reaction.
They stood there locking eyes for a few good seconds like a page ripped from a cheesy teenage romance. It may have just been in my head, but it felt like I was third-wheeling it hard. Like, as hard as a girl on New Year’s Eve who watches her friends make out as she drinks tequila and plots what size apartment to rent to fit all twelve of her cats. If this was how they were planning to be at prom on Friday, I was growing increasingly worried that Snake wasn’t joking about them rekindling whatever it was they’d had over the past few months. Which I had originally thought was just an obligatory relationship between two idiots too stupid to use a condom, but wasn’t so sure about anymore.
Whatever. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to prom. I wouldn’t have to be subject to precious (see: disgusting) moments like this one. Assholes. Screw him. Screw both of them, actually.
Snake removed his hand from Carla’s belly and walked back to where I stood. I unloaded the camera from my shoulder, ignoring him as he pinched my waist and tried to rattle me up in one of our back-and-forths. He gave it another go, but I shook out of his grip.
“One last shot?” he asked quietly and exclusively to me. “Please?”
Not one fraction of my being had any desire to be there anymore. I hadn’t wanted to help him in the first place, and especially didn’t want to after watching his sickeningly sweet family video. As if having Snake’s reality shoved in my face made it any more concrete than it already was. I would always be watching his life from the outside, close enough to delude myself into believing I was a part of it, but still far enough away to know the truth.
Besides, I had my own reality. One Snake wasn’t present for, one Carla only vaguely knew about, one my mom never cared to unearth. But at least in my reality, I didn’t give anyone a reason to think that they could get closer than arm’s length. I never tried to convince anyone that they were more special to me than they really were, or that I had any plans for a future together when I could barely see the present.
I stood next to Carla, a strong wind whipping through the trees across the lot. My black hair and her red locks glowed in the screen.
“Make this quick,” Carla pleaded. “My dad’s going to be here in a few minutes.”
Snake grabbed a Twizzler from his jeans and chewed it. “Final question,” he said, biting down harder. The blinking light sped up. “Why does all of this matter?”
Carla’s face milled through expressions, settling on a frown. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Snake continued, swallowing the last bite of Twizzler, “this. You, me, Reggie, Little Man, our lives. Why does all of this matter in the greater scope of the universe?”
Carla was stumped, her eyebrows dipping in concentration. I stared at Snake’s one blue eye above the lens, at the reflection of Carla’s swollen cheeks and belly, at my own dark circles and soon-to-be-sunburned skin. At the trees and the narrow road and the houses across from us. At the wooden sign that read HAWKESBURY HIGH: FOUNDED IN 1973. There was only one conclusion to reach, one answer to a question so incomprehensible that it made my blood go warm in anger. Because I wished to God that it wasn’t as incredibly real as it had to be.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” I replied, shrugging at my own mirror image. “Maybe nothing we do matters at all.”
On Friday night, I sat in my room and stared at my phone, waiting for a text from Snake like one of those desperate, pathetic girls who had nothing better to do on a Friday night than obsess over some jerk-face guy. And like those pathetic girls, I received no reward. No text. No call. Nothing.
It was seven o’clock. Prom was starting. He’d probably picked her up at her house. They probably took pictures, and he drove her in his girly, soccer-mom Prius. He was probably calling her babe, and she was telling him to shut up. They were probably experiencing one of those possible great things (see: romance) Carla had talked about in Snake’s film. He probably wasn’t thinking about me at all.
“Reggie.” Karen was in the doorway, folding a shirt from the laundry basket. “If you’re not doing anything, you should work on your final paper.”
“It’s prom night,” I muttered. “No one types papers on prom night.”
“Well, you decided not to go to prom.”
Like she would have let me go even if I’d wanted to. Karen hated proms. She called them the devil’s playground and said they tempted teens into committing sexual immorality. Because we nutty teens aren’t aware that there are another 364 days in a year in which our no-no parts fit together just fine. Clearly, we can only have sex if we dance to shitty pop music first.
“If you’re in for the night, you should get it typed.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“You can’t keep putting everything off.”
“I can if I want to.”
She sighed as she pulled the door cracked. “At least write something,” she called from the hallway. “If you don’t want to do schoolwork, then it’s a perfect time to use that journal.”
Man, she was annoying. And kind of right, unfortunately. Did I have anything better to do? Snake wasn’t going to call me. He was probably asking Carla to dance the very moment I heard the pitter of the washing machine blade grinding against the metal. She was warming up to the idea of him again. He was praising her beauty; she was eating it up. They were falling into the stupid and nonexistent ideal of love to the rhythm of a John Legend song.
I grabbed my black notebook and pen and wrote down words without even thinking. I had done enough of it.