“Are you fucking kidding me?” she yelled, then started banging on the windshield.
Max and Kendall broke apart, startled. Their oh-my-God expressions identical.
“Get out of the van!” shouted Eliza.
Max shook his head. And who could blame him, really?
“Goddammit,” said Eliza, and threw herself at the driver’s side door, flinging it open.
Kendall scrambled out the other side of the car. I scrambled to meet her.
“Kendall,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her hand still gripping the car door. “I was here and Max showed up and we started talking, and I started crying, and then . . .”
But Eliza was walking toward us now. I turned and tried to stand as strong as I could next to my friend.
Quickly, so quickly nobody really had any time to react or guess what was about to happen, Eliza stepped up close to Kendall. Her arm went out and for a flicker of a moment, I thought she was going to slap Kendall. Or worse.
Her hand reached for the collar of Kendall’s X-Men T-shirt. And she pulled. Hard. Harder than I thought someone as small as Eliza could.
The collar started to rip before Kendall smacked Eliza’s hand away. It made a loud thwack, comics-style, as their skin made contact.
“Stop!” yelled Max, crawling out of the van now.
“You,” said Eliza, holding out one finger and jabbing the air with it. “You do not get to do this. Not to me. Not with my boyfriend.”
Kendall whimpered, clutching the collar of her shirt. Eliza put her hands on her hips in a gesture of victory.
Because girls like Eliza always won. They always owned and they always received. They never expected anything less.
A second later, I was shoving Eliza up against the side of the van.
“You do not get to treat people like that!” I yelled. “You can’t bark orders and try to control everything!”
Eliza’s face. Not angry, but shocked. Her eyes and mouth all perfect O’s.
“Ari!” someone shouted from somewhere, but I didn’t turn to look.
My hands gripped her shoulders and held her there, and I was surprised how easy it was. She wasn’t even fighting back.
“Ari, stop!” someone shouted again.
“You also do not get to steal things from people and expect them to let you!” I hissed. “You do not get to take advantage of people who thought you were their friend!”
I let Eliza go for a fraction of an instant, then pushed her again. The tinny noise of her body against the metal of the car. It was suddenly the best noise ever. Who was doing this? Ari wouldn’t do this. Satina? Maybe.
Or maybe Ari was always doing this, somewhere deep down. Not to Eliza, but to everyone and everything I wanted to push back against.
I wasn’t thinking about that. I was only thinking about the satisfying sensation of Eliza’s body on the other side of my hands. How the way she was looking at me made me feel so present.
Then, tears pooled in her eyes and she started to sob.
Arms wrapped around me, pulling me back. Max grabbed Eliza and walked her down the aisle of cars until they were a good distance away from us.
I turned to see that it was Camden who’d yanked me away. He kept his arms tight around me and I could feel his breath panting against my ear. I realized I was panting, too.
Kendall opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The three of us stood in suspended animation.
“Hey,” said James, ambling across the parking lot toward the van. I could tell he hadn’t seen or heard a thing. “Is it time to go?”
Stating the obvious: the drive home sucked.
Eliza sat up front with James, while Kendall and I were in the middle. Camden sat with Max in the way back.
I would never have believed that six people could be that silent for that long.
To pass the time and to avoid looking at Camden behind me, I read my new Silver Arrow book. When I felt carsick and could read no longer, I spread my hands in front of me, examining my palms whenever something outside would flicker light into the interior of the van. I moved my fingers, twirled my wrists. Were these really my hands that had pushed and held Eliza against the side of a car? And my brain had told them to do that?
It didn’t make sense. One of the things I knew for sure about myself was this: when I got angry, it stayed indoors. I never let it out to roam and roar and scratch. It hid in a corner or burrowed inside a couch, easy to ignore. A thousand silent times, I’d raged against my mother or Dani or the thought of my father. But it had screeched out now, and who knew what the consequences would be.
Somehow the hour passed and we were back in town.