I was only pretending. I recognized that he thought I would be, should be mad; it wasn’t hard to slip into a kind of mild outrage, to wear that attitude for a little while. It mattered to him, how I felt. He would stop giving me this small, pandering attention, so rare from him, from any boy, if I admitted I didn’t much care about his stupid deal. I’d lost the ability to judge choices, actions, on any kind of moral scale—if I could go as far as I’d already gone, breaking into the Hodsons’, skipping weeks upon weeks of school, nearly failing science, stealing and vandalizing and getting falling-down drunk—what made this any worse?
“I should have told you. You ever have that feeling like, you know you aren’t good, you’re not doing things right—like you can see yourself screwing up, kind of like watching it on a movie, but even though you feel it happening, there’s nothing you can do to stop it?”
“I know what you mean.”
“Sometimes I do stuff and while I’m doing it my head is screaming at me, Stop, don’t do that, stop, stop.”
“But you just do it anyway.”
“Yeah, mostly I do. What’s the point, you know?” The last question seemed tacked on, overly sarcastic, like he’d realized what he was saying and had to counter it with a joke, something that meant nothing. You don’t have to act like you don’t care, I wanted to tell him. Not with me.
“When will they be here?”
Ryder tapped his phone. “Soon, probably. They already left.” He raised his glass to me. There was less than an inch of vodka left. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” I said, and we clanged our glasses together, and drained them both.
*
Jimmy and Marlena and Greg and Tidbit were down at the beach when Ryder’s buyer showed up. I’d stayed with him in the house, claiming I wasn’t feeling well. Had Marlena noticed I’d been spending a lot of time with Ryder? Did she feel jealous? Let’s go down to the beach, she’d said. I love the beach at night. Her braid was loosening, her bangs messy and overgrown. Ryder didn’t feel like going—he looked at me when he said it, I don’t want to go, and that’s why I lied about not feeling well. Jimmy, who was supposed to be protective, didn’t care about leaving me behind, alone at the house with a boy I could tell he didn’t much like. Jimmy didn’t see me as a girl girl, just as I hadn’t really believed he was special enough to be with Marlena. But now the sparkling thing between the two of them was blinding. They took off for the beach, Marlena riding on my brother’s back, a bottle of champagne gripped in her free hand, Tidbit and Greg a few steps behind. Greg and Tidbit had disappeared into a bedroom shortly after we arrived; when they came out, fifteen minutes later, Greg seemed to have forgotten about his crush on me.
Ryder and I played a round of pool. I knocked four balls into the pockets, one after another, and he was so surprised he slammed his pool cue against a barstool. A soft crack, like paper tearing. He hoisted the cue into the air—it jointed just above the middle, held together by a strip of paint. Gravity slowly pulled the pieces apart until the top half bounced onto the carpet. The side that ended in a whiskery tuft of wood pointed at me. We’re in trouble, I thought, with a sick lurch. Ryder was still holding the other broken half when the doorbell rang.
“That would be Micah,” he said. “Does this make me look like a real drug dealer?” He jabbed the busted cue into the air a few times. There were so many cues—maybe, if we hid the broken one, the Hodsons wouldn’t notice. And also, was he flirting with me?
“Micah? Micah who?”
“I don’t know, Micah. Freckly like a ginger, rich kid, Marlena’s grade.”
“Are you serious?”
“What?”
“I hate him. If this takes longer than ten minutes I’m going to kill you.”
“I didn’t know you two have issues. I don’t keep up with all the KHS gossip.”
“He like, sexually harasses me.”
“It’s fun to hear you say the word sexually. Say it again.”
I shook my head at him, blushing despite myself, and left the house. I sat on one of the benches near the fire pit, pleasantly drunk, my stomach warm. Everyone in northern Michigan was connected; related, sleeping with each other, buying the same tomatoes at the same dingy grocery store. Plenty of Fish matched Bolt with my mom because they were both single adults of a certain age, living in the same fifteen-mile radius. Tidbit was Chelsea’s best friend’s cousin. Micah and Ryder and Greg played on the same T-ball team in second grade. I didn’t want Micah to see me. Being alone in that house with drunk Ryder would give credence to the rumor that I was a slut. Chelsea slid open the doors.
“Cat,” she said, exiting the house and sliding the doors shut behind her. She settled herself beside me on the bench. I wasn’t surprised. “So you are outside, avoiding us.”
“Yeah. Not a fan of your boyfriend. And yet, here you are.”
“I wanted to smoke. Sue me.”
“The yard is big.”
“No kidding. This place is nice. I guess this is your house? I know it’s not Ryder’s.”
“Now that we’ve sold the penthouse in Chicago we’re not summer people anymore. My father’s taking early retirement. He wants to spend more time with the family.” Shrieks of laughter echoed in the air, coming from down at the beach. She started it.
“You know what I don’t get?” She lit a Parliament, the longer kind, a one hundred, and blew the smoke out of her nose and mouth.
“What?”
“How do you even know these kids, anyway?”
“What do you mean?” I’d meant it to sound bitchy, but it came out like I was asking her because I wanted to know. I did want to know. The truth is, I couldn’t explain it. It made, objectively, when you looked at my life from a bird’s-eye view, almost no sense at all.
“They’re bad news,” Chelsea said. “Marlena is fucked up. She scares me. I’ve known her since we were five and she’s scared the shit out of me since then. She’s the kid who’s got cigarettes on the playground before anyone even knows what a cigarette is. You just don’t seem like you fit.”
Here was another person, telling me who they thought I was. If I didn’t fit with Marlena and Ryder and Greg, that meant I was supposed to fit with Chelsea and Micah and their group, with tanning beds and football games and rolling on E and how they were definitely going to share a big house together when they all went to Michigan State for four years before winding up exactly where they’d started, looking down on people like Marlena, on anyone different from them, forever and ever amen. If Chelsea had been my next-door neighbor, I’d maybe still be where I was now—only I’d have gotten there in Micah’s PT Cruiser. But her opinion would change the second she found out that this wasn’t my house, that she could hire my mom to clean her toilet for fifteen dollars an hour.
“Marlena’s my best friend,” I said. “Also that’s hypocritical. You’re smoking right now.”
“I’m just saying, Cat,” said Chelsea. “You’re really, like, normal. What do you even have in common with them? What do you even talk about?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She opened her mouth, emitting a big, perfect ring of smoke, and then sent a smaller ring floating through it. I was, grudgingly, impressed.
“Screw you,” I said. Some of this was up to me.
“I honestly thought Ryder would be dead by this point,” she said. “He’s like a fucking PSA.”