“It is, or I wouldn’t be interrupting.”
Once Rachel saw I wasn’t going to back down, she peeled herself off Quentin and walked away, trailing her finger across his jaw all the way up to his earlobe as she left. He gazed at her wistfully before turning to me.
“What is it?” he asked, as if nothing different had happened.
“It’s Friday. We were going to try high-altitude training this weekend.” My voice came out like a text-to-speech simulator, devoid of human emotion and jaunty in all the wrong places. “You know, to see if that would unlock more of my powers. You never picked a mountaintop. You said the feng shui had to be just right.”
“Oh. Yeah. Whatever’s fine.” He glanced around, as if searching for more interesting people to sidle up to at a party.
“All right then, I’ll pick a spot,” I said. Focusing on logistics, appointment-keeping, the squeezing of blood through my veins would keep my roiling guts on the inside. Or so I hoped. “When I text you, you’ll be ready to go?”
“Sure.”
“Is there something you want to talk about?” I asked, on the odd chance that he wanted to explain his behavior. But he was already shoving past me, done with this conversation.
“I’ll text you,” he said, waving me off with the back of his hand.
I nearly put my fist through a locker.
Quentin didn’t make good on his promise to text me. Instead, he found me in the cafeteria at lunch.
His personality had changed from spacey to grumpy. He must have been suffering withdrawal symptoms from Rachel’s saliva.
“I forgot that the lunar cycle’s not right,” he groused. “Mountaintop meditation’s not going to be the best for this weekend. We have to shift our whole calendar around.”
“So now you want to make a plan? I thought we were winging it.”
Quentin tilted his head. “You . . . don’t want to make a plan? That’s weird. I’ve seen you write to-do lists with only one item on them. You even put a number one on them with nothing underneath.”
“Well, maybe it’s time to loosen up,” I said. “Act differently for a change. Improvise.”
Quentin reached over and put his hand on my forehead to check my temperature.
I smacked his arm away only to see Rachel watching us and laughing. She obviously wasn’t threatened by her new boyfriend flirting with someone else. She knew there was no comparison.
Quentin returned a fake smile and a wave to her. “I don’t know how I feel about that girl,” he said. “We’ve only been spending time together because I’m bored. But I think she’s imagining something that doesn’t exist.”
Okay, so that irked me to the core. Rachel was annoying, but she was genuinely into Quentin. He could at least have the decency not to use her as a stress reliever.
“Congrats on completing your assimilation into modern life,” I said. “You’ve become something that’s unique to this era.”
“What’s that?”
“A douchebag.” I got up with my tray. “When you figure out how to stop being one, you can come and talk to me. Otherwise don’t bother.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Yunie said once she found me in the library at my usual spot. “I’m going to rip his balls off and shove them in his eye sockets.”
Gossip about Quentin and Rachel’s hookup had gotten sufficiently around. Anatomical impossibilities aside, Yunie’s first words to me since the concert fiasco were bittersweet.
On one hand, we were speaking again. That was a victory I’d crawl through salt and broken glass for. On the other hand, I could see the narrative playing out in her head, and it hurt my soul.
I’d done the crazy threatening friend routine on one of Yunie’s terrible exes in the past, and the reason she could have been itching so badly to return the favor was because it was a perfect way to erase the cloud between us. There was more hopefulness than violence in her anger toward Quentin—hope that with this show of force, I might forgive her for whatever part she played in our rift.
My friend thought she needed to earn her way back into my good graces, which utterly destroyed me. This was our version of fighting. We were incapable of getting truly angry with each other, so instead we tore our hearts out and handed them over on silver platters.
I swallowed all the things I desperately needed to tell her and responded the way I knew she wanted. Like nothing had ever happened.
“For the last time, Quentin and I are not together,” I said. Each word was leaden in my mouth, for multiple reasons. “He can do what he feels like.”
The flash of relief in Yunie’s shoulders was palpable. Once it finished circulating through her veins, it was back to business for her. Getting to cut someone for me, purely for the fun of it now.
“Of course he can,” she said airily, the last couple of weeks gone with the wind. “He just needs to accept the consequences. Which in this case is having to see through his own testicles.”
Normally I would have moved on right alongside her. Cracked a few jokes about nuts. Pushed and pulled in our familiar pattern. But this time, the burning lump of coal remained stuck in my throat. It didn’t go away.
Quentin entered the library to return a stack of books. Yunie locked on to him like a planet-destroying laser.
“The bastard didn’t even take off your earrings,” she hissed. “That’s the last straw. I’m going to get them back.”
“They don’t open. We tried once but they’re stuck.”
She grinned at me.
“Yunie, wait!”
My best friend, drunk on righteous anger, marched across the library. In her head Quentin wasn’t only a two-timer; he was also responsible for making me miss her concert. She went up and gave him a ringing slap across the face that could have knocked Baigujing’s teeth loose.
“Pbthbdth! What the hell!?” Quentin shouted.
“You creep!” Yunie roared. “Take them off or I’m going to rip them off!”
She lunged at his face and he caught her by the wrists. It gave me enough time to wrap my arms around her waist and lift her away. The good cop/bad cop routine worked better when bad cop wasn’t smaller than most freshmen.
Of course the room had to be packed today. Everyone was laughing at us. Even without the boost from our half-assed making up, this was the kind of drama that could power Yunie for weeks. She’d be queen of the school by the end of it.
I, on the other hand, needed to shut this down. I put down my friend, grabbed my whatever-Quentin-was, and hauled ass out the door.
“What the hell was that?” Quentin asked once we were safe from prying eyes. “Did you tell her to do that?”
“No,” I said. “She’s upset about you and Rachel.”
Quentin furrowed his brow. “Why would she be upset about that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. The benefit of time had given me the ability to speak to Quentin in monotone, rather than whatever bird language I was yelping this morning. “I’m certainly fine with it. All I ask is that you not carry on with her right in front of me.”
He frowned again. “Everywhere is right in front of you, you know that?”