Chapter 31
“Uh, sorry. Ignore literally everything on the floor,” he says when he opens the door for me. I side-eye the crumb-covered passenger seat and the fast-food wrappers, receipts, and other detritus on the floor. He looks embarrassed.
“I should’ve cleaned it out. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine, I am just wondering how Katy let you get away with this.” I gingerly get in the car. “She strikes me as an exacting mistress.”
“You have no idea.” He leans over and starts wadding up the trash.
“How’s she feel about all of this, anyway?” I ask.
“All what?”
“Our road trip. You helping me,” I say. “She’s not exactly my biggest fan already.”
“Well, that’s no lie.” He goes quiet while I brush crumbs off the passenger-side seat and buckle in. It’s not until we’re turning out onto the highway that he speaks again.
“Actually, Katy and I broke up.”
I do a double take, cranking my head around to the left. “What? When?”
He frowns. “Uh, it was … yeah I guess it was right after homecoming?”
“Oh, wow.” I watch his profile, but his expression doesn’t betray much of anything. Well, that’s always the case with Max. “Wait, was it because of me?”
He bounces his head back and forth. A little bit yes, a little bit no. “You were what finally made her mad enough to pull the trigger, I guess.”
“Does she think we’re hooking up or something?” I ask.
“She’s always kind of thought that,” he says. “Now she’s also mad I’m not buying into the whole ‘you’re a murderer’ thing. She thinks I’m defending you because I’m in love with you.”
The way he says it is matter-of-fact, but it still makes my cheeks go warm. “I’m really sorry, Max. I never meant make her think…”
“Nah, you didn’t. She’s jealous. And intense. And let’s say ‘tightly wound,’” he says.
I bite my lip. “I’ll be honest. I, uh, never quite got you two.
” When he doesn’t answer right away, I go on.
“I mean, she’s cute and all, but she’s always kind of been that way.
Do you remember the read-a-thon in middle school?
She was so mad that I beat her she had a tantrum in front of everyone at the awards assembly.
It was wild. I think she broke one of the microphone stands. ”
“Yeah, I remember,” he says. “She does too. She still talks about it.”
“Really?” I ask. “If I made a fool of myself like that I wouldn’t ever bring it up again.”
“Oh, it plays a little different in her retelling,” he says with a smirk. “According to her, you’re an airhead who obviously cheated just to show her up.”
“What?” I start to laugh. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know, but she has a lot of stories like that. About you, about Hayden and Sophie, about some of the other popular girls at school. She remembers everything anyone has ever done to wrong her. Plus a few made-up ones.”
I whistle. “That’s intense. And now you’re on her list too.”
“Yeah. God, I hope she gets into Stanford so we can get some geography between us.” He picks up the aux cord and hands it across the console to me. “Here, get something on the stereo so I don’t fall asleep. This is maybe the most boring drive in Texas.”
“You know that’s not true,” I say. There’s a lot of Texas to measure against. “Hmm, let’s see. What’s your favorite Taylor Swift album?”
He doesn’t even blink. “Oh, definitely The Unspeakable Horrors of the Eldritch Void. Taylor’s Version.”
I laugh and scroll through my phone until I find FKA Twigs, who I hope will be weird enough for him. And then we are off, putting Varda in the rearview, the autumn sun sharp in the sky.
It’s not the most boring drive in Texas, but it’s not particularly scenic either.
We shoot past exurbs and quarries, farms and undeveloped lots.
It’s all flat and scrappy looking. I find myself thinking about Max and Katy.
They were always a strange couple—her humorless and prissy, him dryly funny but not very demonstrative.
He never even seemed to like her much. But then, he didn’t date around a lot, and maybe it was comfortable for him to stay with the partner he knew, rather than to take a risk.
I’d known Max long enough to see that his deadpan cynicism was a protective measure as much as anything. Underneath it, I think he was lonely.
Well, aren’t we all.
“So,” I say after we pass through yet another bland little housing development. “Do we have any kind of plan here?”
He tilts his head back and forth for a few seconds, like he’s measuring his options. It’s a tic I remember from when we were kids.
“Well, I guess I just want to get eyes on him, to start with,” he says. “I’m really curious about this guy.”
“Me too.” I have spent the entire weekend going through my old chat logs with Jonah, trying to find some sense of why. There’s got to be a red flag somewhere, right? But then, that was what I’d thought after Rocky died. So maybe I just didn’t know a red flag when I saw one.
“You’ve known him for what, three years?”
“I mean, three years at camp. So two weeks a year. Which honestly adds up to something more like a few hours. But we didn’t start to text each other until this year.” I rest my head against the seat. “He always seemed nice.”
“Yeah, well, it’s easy to seem nice, if you’re trying to get something out of someone.” He makes a strange face, like he’s tasted something sour.
“I just don’t know what he was trying to get. He didn’t ask for nudes or money or anything, he just wanted to talk.” I look out the window and see a half dozen brindle steers grazing.
I feel a sudden pressure on my hand, and I turn to look at Max. His eyes are still on the road, but his hand has closed gently around my fingers. The contact steadies me.
“Do you remember back in middle school when I was a total pariah?” he says.
“Sort of.” But of course I do.
He gives me a half-amused sidelong glance, like he knows there’s no forgetting it.
“It was actually Carter and Rocky that started it. We were in math together, and Carter snatched my notebook to copy my answers. So there he is, leafing through all the problem sets I’ve done, when he comes to a page or two in the back that had some … uh … private fan art I’d done.”
When he sees my blank expression he shakes his head and sighs. “I drew a bunch of porny pictures of female video game characters.”
“Ohhhhh.” A memory suddenly floats back my way. “Oh my God, that’s why they called you…”
“Zelda-Fucker. Yeah. They weren’t very creative,” he says. “Anyway, they told everyone in school. It was pretty miserable. I had panic attacks every night thinking about having to go to school the next day. Mom and Dad didn’t know what to do with me.”
“That’s really awful,” I say.
He shrugs. “It was dumb kid stuff. It was a bad year. But you and … and Lynette were the only ones that didn’t treat me like some weird pervert.”
The sound of her name catches me by surprise. I feel it like a punch to the gut.
“That was honestly all her.” My voice is low and even, but there’s a knot in my throat at the thought. “I mean, I wouldn’t have excluded you. But she was the one who dragged me over to your table at lunch and made a big show of sitting across from you.”
“Well, you both came.” He lets go of my hand and puts it back on the wheel. “I never forgot that.”
It’d been such a strange lunch group. I didn’t go out of my way to torment Max—but I also wouldn’t have had the guts to be seen with him if not for Lynette.
Lynette’s social standing was fragile even then …
but maybe that was why she’d been willing to take the risk.
She knew something about reputation. She knew Max needed our protection—and she knew we could afford to give it.
The thought comes with a sharp pang of grief.
I’ve lost Lynette so many times now. It feels like another loss, remembering her bright, daring face in middle school, remembering the way her chin would jut forward when she was determined.
Remembering that she wouldn’t let the rest of the kids treat Max like he didn’t exist, back when he needed it the most. And I think about how I let her down.
I’m sorry, Lynette, I think.
And now … I understand.