Chapter 27
June
Oli didn’t talk much as we walked to his room. He was upset with me. Obviously, he was getting tired of my antics, and I couldn’t blame him. I was a lot to deal with. Even my own family thought so, so why would he be any different?
But when we entered his room, my mind switched from him to his roommate, who was sitting in his desk chair, turned sideways, staring at his own bed with a blank expression on his face. Jonah’s hands rested on his thighs, his feet planted evenly beneath his knees. He just gazed into the nothingness as if he’d had his brain wiped.
“Jonah?” Oli asked. I could feel his protector mode kick in. His concern was tangible.
Jonah twitched like he hadn’t noticed us opening the door and was only just now registering our arrival. He stared at Oli, then me, then Oli, his eyes wide and brows caving solemnly. “I fought with Kai,” he whispered.
Oli’s shoulders lowered with a sigh. Apparently, Jonah arguing with Kai wasn’t enough cause for concern in Oli’s book, either because it happened often or because it meant nothing. I wondered which one.
It was unclear if Jonah still had a brain underneath all his messy hair. He hardly moved, looking around himself slowly, slumping more and more as our presence pulled him back to consciousness.
“What did you do?” Oli asked quietly, sitting on Jonah’s bed just in front of him. I did not fail to notice where the blame was placed by default. Dropping my bag on the floor, I took a seat next to Oli, my feet dangling. I hoped Jonah wouldn’t mind that I was sitting on his bed. Perhaps I should’ve asked first.
“She dared me to ask someone out,” Jonah said, staring straight at me. “She said it’ll be harder to meet people when I leave school, and she dared me to ask someone out before I left. She said she’d dye her hair blue if I did, as if it were some sort of joke. Can you believe that?” His eyes widened as he glanced between us, searching for our agreement.
Oli’s face fell to his hands, his thick fingers rubbing vigorously at the skin of his forehead.
“It sounds like it was a joke,” I said. Both boys snapped their eyes to me. Eek. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, but I was trying to calm him down. Maybe she didn’t mean it seriously at all, and that would be better, right? “I just mean…” I looked at Jonah, quickly trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t piss him off. “She would never dye her hair blue, would she?”
Jonah’s jaw tightened, the lack of thickness beneath his flesh making his cheeks ripple. Twice in one afternoon now had I tried to make someone feel better and somehow made it worse. Seriously. Someone needed to fucking lock me up.
“She pierced her nipple because she thought it was funny, only to take it out a week later,” Jonah said.
“Jesus.” Oli groaned, gripping his head in his hands as if that were the worst piece of information he’d ever heard.
“June, she would get married just to wear footie pajamas to the wedding,” Jonah continued. “She would shave her head just to pin her ponytail to my ass. Dyeing her hair blue would be a pleasure to her, especially if it meant causing me turmoil. Of all the stupid things she does, making me squirm seems to be her favorite.”
I shrugged. “Or maybe she just doesn’t want you to be alone.”
Jonah glared at me. “Don’t be stupid, June.”
“Hey,” Oli snapped, pinning him with a look.
Jonah crossed his arms, glancing at Oli before looking back at me. “I like you. So don’t start being stupid now.”
I leaned forward to flick his shoulder. I liked him too.
Oli stared at his friend, though he spoke to me as he said, “Jonah is not upset with you, nor does he really think Kai wants to torture him. He knows Kai wants what’s best for him, and what’s best for him is to put himself out there. He’s upset that she doesn’t care if he does so.”
Jonah immediately shot out of his seat and pushed Oli’s shoulders, wrestling him down to the bed. I leaned to my right, away from the boys, as they tussled. Jonah tossed himself over Oli’s body and lifted his knee, attempting to kneel into him. Oli got his arm around Jonah’s neck, locking his head tightly. It was the headlock that eventually did Jonah in, his limbs falling limp as he began to weep. Jonah clutched Oli’s forearm with thin fingers, his face twisting. Oli loosened his hold and let Jonah turn into his chest. The short wrestling match was officially over.
“I was so mean to her,” Jonah cried into Oli’s T-shirt. “I just snapped, and now she won’t reply to my messages.”
Oli leaned up and placed Jonah back on the floor, catching my eye and nudging his head, silently telling me to get off the bed just as he did the same. He then maneuvered his roommate onto the newly emptied sheets.
Jonah curled up, wailing desperately, almost the same way I did when I heard the news about Alana and the same way I did every time I thought about her from then on. Perhaps I was an idiot to compare our sadness, but his sobs sounded just as heavy, despite the dissimilarity in the cause, and that made me feel less alone. Why he was so hysterically upset, I honestly had no idea, but at least we shared the sentiment.
“Jonah, she’ll text you soon,” Oli said.
Jonah hid his face in the corner of his blanket. “I don’t know. I told her I would do no such thing. That I liked being alone and that I didn’t need her asinine suggestions nor her pity. Then I told her she’d look ugly with blue hair.” He cried harder at that, his whines increasing to such a volume that he had to shove his face deep into his pillow. “She would look so pretty with blue hair!”
I glanced at Oli, who was standing with his hands on his hips, staring at the floor and biting back a smile. He thought this was funny. Honestly…it kind of was. I mean, it wasn’t. Definitely very serious. But the blue hair comment was pretty fucking hilarious given its delivery.
Without a word, Oli reached under Jonah’s pillow and pulled out his phone, easily bypassing the lock code and opening up Jonah’s messages. I kept my gaze away from the screen, though I watched Oli’s reaction. His thumb slid down the glass as he read, his head shaking. When he finished, he sighed and tossed the phone back on the mattress.
Jonah sniffled, turning himself over and reaching toward his desk drawer. His hand dangled off the edge of his bed as he fumbled around inside the compartment, pulling out a hairbrush.
“Jonah, no.” Oli ripped the brush from Jonah’s fingers, and Jonah curled back into himself.
“I need to do something that feels good,” he said with a squeaky whimper.
“You need to get a grip, Jonah.”
“Oliver!” I took a step forward to catch his eye and shook my head in disapproval. How dare he say that to someone so clearly unwell? I turned to Jonah. “What do you need, Jonah? What would feel good right now?”
“I can’t reach,” he cried, flopping his hand over his shoulder.
Before I could understand what that meant, Oli placed his forearm in front of me, parting me calmly from his friend. He then sat down on the edge of the bed and lifted Jonah’s sweatshirt up. The oxygen evaporated from my lungs as I took in Jonah’s body, the room utterly silent apart from his soft sobs. There on his back were patches of dried skin, red spots like a rash, and scratch marks worn raw likely from his hairbrush.
Oli reached into Jonah’s desk drawer, pulling out a tube of hydrocortisone and squirting the greasy ointment into his hands. “Are you ready?” he asked Jonah quietly.
Jonah only hugged the blankets beneath himself tighter, lying face down.
Oli rubbed the medicine over Jonah’s back, leaving a shiny film on his skin. With the new glaze, the light bounced more noticeably off the knobs of his spine and the hollowed spaces between his ribs.
“Time keeps moving, and it’s leaving me behind,” Jonah said, sucking down a thick sniffle. “Everyone is moving forward, and I can’t. I just want to go back. I need her to come home. Oli, what if she stays there forever? What if we lose her? What would I do?”
Oli shook his head. “I’m not even gonna go there tonight, Jonah. You’re spiraling, and you need to stop.” My eyebrows flew to my hairline. That was potentially the meanest thing I’d ever heard Oli say, considering Jonah was hardly human at the moment. Jonah just nodded into his pillow.
Oli stood from the bed tiredly, rubbing his oily hands together and dismissing himself to the bathroom to wash them. I sat down on Oli’s bed as Jonah lifted himself and adjusted his clothing, his back against the wall and his knees in his chest, facing me. He covered both of his hands with his long sleeves and dragged them over his cheeks, taking a deep breath.
“Sorry you had to see that,” he said as he uncovered his red eyes and looked at me.
I simply shook my head.
“He just cares a lot,” Jonah added.
I nodded. “As he should.” Jonah reached behind his neck to tug on a piece of hair nervously, though his eyes didn’t leave mine. “Do you want to talk about it? You don’t have to, but…you can.”
“Uhm…” He rolled his shoulders into his sweatshirt. “Kai doesn’t like me back,” he said plainly, “and I don’t expect her to. I obviously have a lot going on, and I can appreciate the fact that she’s living her life. That’s not what it’s about. It’s… It’s that she doesn’t like me back, and I know exactly why. Because if I saw myself, I wouldn’t like me back either. I really don’t blame her. She’s going through a part of her life that’s very different from mine, and I don’t love the phase we’re in. I’m very eager to be anywhere but here and now.”
Again, I nodded. I didn’t expect so many words to come out of him, but I chose to believe this meant he was comfortable with me. I hoped I might be giving him a little space to release and breathe, as Mr. Hatzakis had done for me that one day, as Oli didn’t do for him just now.
“I’m not, like, crazy, you know?” he continued. “Everyone thinks I am.” Relatable. “I’m my own person, and I do like a lot of parts of me, but I really hate a lot of parts of me too. Living is not exactly one of my talents. I feel I have to force it, and I don’t know why. It’s very frustrating. She just makes it all a little easier. She’s…” He shook his head and smiled to himself. “I think I could fail miserably and she’d still love me, in some capacity. I know I have to figure these things out on my own. I just wish she could be closer, and I wish our tiffs weren’t heightened by the distance. Every disagreement feels like the end of the world. I’ve never felt further away from her than I have while here at college.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of waiting for her?”
He paused, catching my gaze. He looked like he’d never been asked that before. “By the day’s end, yes.” A faint curve grew on his lips, informing me that his true answer was no and that this was his version of sarcasm. “The only issue is that every morning, I fall in love with her all over again, and the whole thing resets.”
As sad as that was, it was probably the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. I wondered if someone could ever love me enough to give me a clean slate every morning, to love me in some capacity even if I failed miserably. It probably would’ve done me some good all these years.
“She’s not as oblivious as everyone thinks she is,” he said. “She suffers, as do I, and she makes mistakes, as do I.”
“Do you get to talk to Oli about this stuff, or does he go all daddy issues on you?”
Jonah snorted at that, and a glimmer of pride sprouted in my chest at having provoked a little laugh from such a dark, shadowy man.
“I do. He’s very kind, June. He just worries, and sometimes he gets overwhelmed. He carries all our weight on his shoulders and, despite my small frame, I’ll be the first to admit I’m quite heavy.”
I was about to tell him he wasn’t a burden because he seemed to believe he was but, just then, the door glided open and Oli stepped in, pressing a flat-lipped look my way. He turned to his closet and rummaged around in the back before pulling out a few plastic cups and a bottle of whiskey. He lined the three cups up on his desk, filled them each with a shot, and then silently handed one to Jonah and one to me. We all swallowed at the same time without a word. Then, Oli lined up the cups again, poured one, swallowed it, then poured all three, and passed them around once again.
In all honesty, Oli deserved a bit of slack. The poor thing had a father who shamed him, a mother who stood by, one best friend who was unwell, another who lived on a different continent, and me, the fucked up bitch from history class who refused to give him a break. He was not a big, strong asshole who was strict or bitter. He was a defeated soul, collapsing under the weight of life. Such a noble man with so many crumpled spirits around him.
I suppose I hadn’t truly thought about how much it must’ve been weighing on him. Not once since we started working together had I ever shown up to the library and asked how he was. I never thought about whether he was having a good day or not. And that was on me. I was selfish, Oli wasn’t.
I suddenly felt bad about it. I’d spent so much time thinking about how embarrassing my existence was that I hadn’t even stopped to consider how he felt about his. Maybe I was being hard on him all this time. Or maybe he was too caught up in his own shit, as I was mine, to even notice how disastrous I was. I hoped that was the truth. Perhaps we could simply be disastrous together.
“We’re going to the hub,” Oli finally said, ending the general silence between us three. I could only imagine what this mysterious hub was. I guess I just had to trust Oli on it. He looked at Jonah. “Do you want to come?”
“I want to want to come,” Jonah said lazily, leaving his cup on the desk next to his bed and shoving himself back under his sheets. “I’m tired anyway.”
“Jonah, it’s 4:13.”
“What difference does it make?”
Oli stared at the floor, momentarily lost in thought, before turning to me and asking, “Do you have boots?”
I nodded.
He walked toward the door, motioning at me to follow. “Let’s go get your boots.”
◆◆◆
Oli
Technically, we could’ve left an hour or two later to get to where I was taking June, but she insisted on leaving early. After tugging on her combat boots, she pulled out her phone and called a car. I wasn’t exactly in a talking mood, so I just let her do her thing.
She’d made me so fucking upset earlier in the library. She damn near broke my heart. And the worst part? It was hardly her fault. So she didn’t trust me enough. So she only wanted to hold my hand because it was a niceday, not because she wanted to. So staring into each other’s souls during sex and crying on each other’s shoulders wasn’t enough for her to let me in. No big deal. She was just reacting honestly.
But, god, my heart had the right to shatter, didn’t it? The last hour of my life beat me down deeper than I’d felt in a long time. I had no control over anything—not June, not Jonah, not myself—and I was simply flailing as I fell into the spiraled abyss.
I thought that after last night and this morning, maybe June would want to…date. I was clinging to that hope, admittedly. But nothing was ever going to change the way she saw me, because it wasn’t about me at all.
Whatever. Maybe tonight would make her feel better. Maybe she’d want to date me tomorrow. Maybe I’d wake up and Kai would be home and Jonah would be cured and I’d be holding a diploma in front of my smiling father.
Before I knew it, we were in a car. We’d spent so long in her dorm as she decided what to wear that the sun was already down. I leaned into the window with my arms crossed, my forehead tilted toward the glass as I stared at the dark blue world. I could feel June thinking of ways to fill the silence with small talk. The silence which, in my opinion, didn’t need to be filled. If she wanted to do something useful, she could’ve magically fallen in love with me and accepted me forever. I crossed my arms tighter and sank further into my seat.
“What does Kai like?”
I swallowed the sigh that so desperately wanted to escape my nose. So small talk it was. I shrugged. “A lot of things.”
“Can you tell me a few?”
I turned to face her. She sat with her legs side by side, her hands in her lap, and her eyes wide and fixed on me. Perhaps she was actually interested. Maybe she wanted to learn more about my friends. Because she…liked me? I gave her a real answer if only to understand what she was up to with these questions. “She likes to dance. She loves food. Mostly french fries and just about anything sweet. Her friends are very important to her...”
“And objects? Does she like any objects?”
What?I just stared at her like an asshole. I had no idea what she was getting at, admittedly, nor did I have the energy to think too hard about it.
“Alana liked to collect Pez dispensers,” she said quickly, clarifying her question.
Ah. “Teddy bears. Kai is very attached to her teddy bears.”
June smiled at me triumphantly, blowing a happy little puff of air out her nose as she sat back into her seat and faced the front of the car. I couldn’t for the life of me decipher what was going on in that head of hers. I never could.
Or, I usually thought I could. I felt like I could read Juni well but, whenever I was sure we were on the same page, she turned right around and dove head-first into a plot twist. Her actions seemed to work against her feelings a lot of the time, but I wouldn’t have known. I only got an outside view of her, much to my chagrin. I would’ve gladly crawled into her ear for a closer look but, sadly, I was just a bit too large.
The car brought us to the mall, and my confusion only deepened. She dragged me out of the vehicle quickly, speed walking through the building’s entrance with my elbow in her hand. We plowed through the foot traffic until finally turning off into one of those makeup stores with lights brighter than a football stadium. June didn’t stop moving until we were in front of a wall of perfumes.
“Do you know which one Kai wears?” she asked.
Call me a jerk, but I had absolutely no interest in fucking someone who smelled like the girl I considered my sister. Still, I pointed to it. If she wanted Kai’s perfume, Kai’s perfume she would have.
She plucked it from its spot and grasped it in her hands. “It’s for Jonah,” she mumbled as she inspected it.
I remained silent. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her that Jonah preferred to smell like the underside of his own mattress, not perfume.
She looked up at me, the brightness of the store making those sparkly eyes glow. “Alana liked to collect Pez dispensers, so I have a few of them saved in a wooden box, like I told you. The inside of the box is lined with red velvet…”
Oh…my…fuck.
“Red velvet,” I whispered. Memories of the Nature Club rushed into my brain on a wave of guilt. She was so upset when I made jokes about red velvet. I’d been poking and prying like a total dick, and she was simply trying to tell me about her friend. Fuck. I wanted to curl up in a ball and die just now.
“Yes. I spray the lining with this body mist she used to always use. It smells like vanilla in there. It smells like her. I know it’s kind of stupid…” She looked down at her feet. “When you miss someone, smell can be really evocative. I’m going to get a teddy bear for him and spray it. It’ll help him relax a little.”
My brain short-circuited. Maybe she really did care about my friends. Maybe she cared about me. “June…that’s incredibly sweet, and I am in awe of you right now.” I took a step toward her, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. She stared up at me hopefully, an upward curve dancing on her lips. She wasn’t receding, wasn’t rejecting me. For now. “I just think feeding into his delusions is counterproductive.”
She snorted at that. The girl actually snorted. “It’s not feeding into his delusions, Oli. It’s sitting with him until he’s ready to get up. I had to do it alone. Jonah doesn’t.”
“He’s unwell.”
“Obviously. And for that reason, he doesn’t need a reality check, he needs comfort. Urgently. You can’t give driving lessons during a car crash. You can’t tell him to get a grip in the pit of his depression. He has nothing to hold on to. His pain won’t get any smaller right now, Oli, but you can help make the good a little bigger in the meantime.”
My eyebrows shot to my forehead. She was…correct.
Just like that, in no more than a few sentences, June had suddenly made me overtly aware of a concept I could never grasp. The little bit of slack I never gave my friends, the slack my father never gave me. I’d never heard her say something so emotionally sound. I’d been under the impression she ran from her feelings, but that…that… I think it was exactly what I needed to hear.
I took her head in my hands and looked her in the eye. “You’re right. I’m sorry, June.”
“Wrong person, but I’m glad you’re catching on.”
My chest glowed so brightly with feelings for this woman that I was sure I was giving the makeup store’s lights a run for their money. She was astounding. I probably should’ve been producing more words, but I simply couldn’t. I lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around my waist, hugging me around my neck. She grabbed my hair with her free hand, the box still dangling from the other as we fell into a kiss. I ran my palms along her back, under her thighs. June was everything I needed and so much more.
“Sometimes I’m just plain mean,” she said, pulling away a bit. “That’s what you wanted to tell me in the library, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, Ju—”
“No! Stop apologizing. I was. I am. I don’t know why I’m so mean to you.”
My face melted into the faintest of smiles. Was this what I’d been waiting all this time for? Was she finally coming around? I mustered up my typical smugness to answer. “It’s a defense mechanism, clearly, because you like me so much.”
Her face creased at that, her eyebrows sinking so low in the middle they blended in with the bridge of her perfect nose. “Like you?!” She pushed at my chest, though she was locked into my arms, so it was useless.
That was all the answer I needed. I was officially puffed up. “Or, maybe, you’re comfortable with me, so your difficult feelings are resurfacing because they’ve found a place where they can heal.” I was being serious, but also a little condescending in hopes of pissing her off while I was at it.
“What are you, a fucking therapist or something?” She sat back in my hold and crossed her forearms over her chest.
“What was that?” I kept one arm under her ass and lifted the other, cupping my hand to my ear and leaning toward her as if I didn’t hear. “Did you say you like me and are super comfortable around me?”
“Oliver!” She began scrambling, trying to get down from me, hot and flustered with embarrassment.
I held her tight, pulling her back into position with a full, joyful laugh. “You’re just a big ol’ meanie, aren’t you?”
She stopped wrestling with me and caught my eye. “Yet you keep coming back.”
My smile slowly faded. Had she completely lost it? Obviously, I kept coming back. I’d made it abundantly clear that the woman could quite literally throw me off a building and I’d keep taking the elevator right back to the top, looping into eternity in hopes she’d one day let me stand up there next to her. Was she an asshole? Yes. Was I? Also yes. But we called each other out, we made each other better. That was invaluable to me. It was fun to me. In June, I found joy in growing and changing, in embracing the fact that my old life was over.
“Of course, I come back. I will always come back.”
The look of sheer agony that washed over her was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I was positive that whatever she was feeling was something very new and very scary.
Good. Because that’s exactly how I felt.
She grabbed my face with both hands and pried my lips open with hers, the box of perfume still caught between her thumb and pointer. It poked into the side of my head, but I didn’t care. All I could feel was the way she ground her hips into me, the sound of her little whimpers against my tongue, and the very real energy that seemed to flow out of her body, through her mouth, and straight into mine.
I finally understood why this store had these stupid fucking lights. I was standing in heaven.