“I wouldn’t call it a choice.” He shut his camera down for good. I prayed the audio hadn’t been on for my humiliating oration. “And I don’t know. I wish I did. In some ways, I wish I had a Bree, or Alex from geometry, to make sense of it. Maybe it’s friendlessness or only-child syndrome or something. But I didn’t have a trigger. It was sort of a slow burn, I guess.”
“How did you know you were depressed?”
“How does anyone know they’re depressed? You feel equally alive and dead and have no idea how that’s even possible. And everything around you doesn’t seem so full anymore. And you can’t tell if the world is empty or you are. That’s how I knew. I realized it wasn’t the world that was empty.”
He forgot the part about the walls closing in and threatening to suffocate you when you’re already barely breathing, but it wasn’t my depression we were talking about. And he was right about the empty theory. Except he was wrong about one thing.
He wasn’t empty. Not to me, anyway.
“Look at us,” I said, motioning to the blanket damp from the evening dew, his three-piece suit, and my pajama pants. “We’re a wreck. No wonder people don’t want to hang out with us.”
“No one except Carla. She thinks you two are best friends.”
“What?”
“Yep. You’ve been propelled right into the friend zone.”
“I would like to remain in the silently-loathe-one-another-from-afar zone.”
“She isn’t that bad. I promise. A tad conceited, but not wholly insufferable.”
“So you’re telling me that prom wasn’t insufferable?”
“No, prom was hell. The DJ only played reggae, and the punch tasted like poisoned apple juice.”
“Now you know why I don’t go to Hawkesbury functions.”
He scrunched his face like he didn’t blame me. “Horrible party planning aside, Carla and I actually had a pretty good time. Granted, her friends weren’t hanging out with her, which I think had more to do with me than her, but still. We hung out. We mainly sat around and talked about you and baby stuff.”
“Me?”
“Your budding friendship. And you and me.”
“What about you and me?”
“She said that she didn’t totally hate you. And that she didn’t totally hate me. And if I liked you, I should go for it and stop wasting her time.” He shot me a playful look. “She put it differently, but I’m telling you the clean version.”
“You’ve never said you liked me to my face,” I pointed out. “You’re too much of a coward.”
“I said I hated you in the best way, which I thought was the same.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tell me you like me.” It shouldn’t have surprised him that I was demanding his affection so I could mock it. He knew too many layers.
“You’re going to call me a name and tell me to get over myself.”
“Probably. But if you’re going to continue your sad attempts at winning me over, at least man up and say what you want from me so I can properly reject it.”
“If that’s what you want.” He grinned with a dash of hopefulness as he leaned toward me and said, “Reggie, I really like you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Get over yourself, douchebag.”
He looked down and shook his head, the tips of his hair swishing against his bottom lashes. I watched him smile to himself, pleased with my dismissal of his affection. And for the first time, I understood why he liked being hated. It was so much easier to mock our feelings than indulge them.
“I should go home,” I said after he yawned. “If Karen’s still awake, she’s probably sent out a search team.”
He tied the camera around his back. “I’ll drive you.”
It took fifteen minutes to make it home when it should’ve only taken ten. Snake was driving twelve miles an hour under the speed limit, stopping extra long at every stop sign. He claimed that he needed to get the engine checked on the Prius before the baby arrived because it was a heaping pile of junk, and Carla wouldn’t want her kid cruising in a safety hazard on wheels. It would’ve been a great excuse if the check engine light had been on to back up his story. That idiot was driving Miss Daisy to buy himself time with me, time he was afraid he wouldn’t get back. I would’ve called him out on it at the very first stop sign if I hadn’t been willing to pay it in full.
When we reached my house, it was lit on both levels. I was a dead girl walking.
“I think you’re screwed,” Snake whispered, shutting the headlights off.
“Sentence predictions?”
“A month. Solitary.”
“Generous. I’m going to take your month and up you another. Also, possible execution.”
“I would bet you on it, but it feels wrong to gamble with a dead person.”
“I appreciate that considerate decision.”
The light in my bedroom disappeared just as the hallway light made its debut in the Signals of Reggie’s Imminent Death show.
“I’m going to go before the whole house turns yellow,” I whispered, turning to Snake.
The porch light flashed on, and I knew I had to act fast. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him close, kissing his cheek lightly. His skin was smoother than most boys’, and it smelled of a cologne that reminded me of those cheap samples that come in magazines. He was too cool for magazine cologne.
When I backed away, he was staring at me with a keen smirk, like he was winning a game I hadn’t known we were playing. In a squeaky voice that was supposed to be a mimic of mine, he whispered, “Snake, I really like you too.” Then he smiled and said, “It isn’t that hard.”
I opened the door and slammed it shut, the window shivering in the socket. The entire house was shining, my window still swung open from my dive to the pavement. He held his smirk as he sped down the street, nearly flattening my neighbor’s trash can with his reckless driving. Skid marks dotted the asphalt like footprints to the pond.
I watched him leave and felt that familiar deep-seated fire, a sensation with which I was well acquainted. The emotion to end all emotions.
Hate.
Apparently, it was my predominant behavior. I was hating again. But, for once, I wasn’t hating him. I was hating the absence of him.
I smirked back as he vanished.
Chapter Seventeen
“REGINA LORRAINE MASON,” KAREN HISSED THE second my boots touched the carpet. She was clad in her pink floor-length night robe with her whale-spout hair cocked messily to the side of her head, her glasses balancing crookedly on her nose. She pointed to the love seat across the room. “Sit down. Now.”
As I made my trek to the couch, I noticed my dad reclining in his La-Z-Boy, struggling to keep his sagging lids peeled. He wore pinstriped silk pajamas and tiredly watched me with a sad sort of irritation. The creases that cornered his eyes said more about my presumed rebellion than any sinner’s prayer my mother was preparing to make me recite.
She stood beside the couch, staring at me with quarter-size crazy eyes (see: slasher-movie status). “You have ten seconds to explain where you’ve been. Go.”
“That’s not enough time to come up with a good cover story. Come back in five minutes, it’ll have machine guns and everything.”
“Don’t start that tonight, Regina,” she snapped. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Saving a cat from a burning tree?”