Chapter Ten
Ten
On Friday night, Amber and I huddle in front of a crackling orangish bonfire by the lake, its warmth swallowing most of the October chill.
An electric buzz is in the air as our senior class gathers under the stars.
More of us are slightly farther down the beach, kids playing volleyball and Frisbee, and a few people have even ventured into the inky black water.
There’s music playing on someone’s portable speakers and a cooler full of beer that is bound to taste like soap.
Amber jiggles her keys, uncharacteristically impatient as we people-watch while we wait for Mo. “Have you noticed she is never on time these days?”
“She eats and sleeps Zebra,” I say, feeling the need to defend Mo.
“It just feels kind of rude,” Amber insists. “Like, I have things I’m excited about too.”
“Like?” I prod.
Amber grins. “Well, for starters, I’m pretty sure I’m in love.” And here it is, I think, heart sinking. The soulmates confession Mo warned me about. “With Pablo Navarro.”
“The exchange student?”
“What? No, the poet! I’m reading his book.”
I giggle. “Do you mean Pablo Neruda?” You don’t ace Mr. Tan’s English class without knowing a bunch of famous dead poets.
“Yes, him! My bad. Either way, Pablo fully gets love,” Ambs gushes, like they’re on a first-name basis. She tells me about the way he writes about passion, like it’s a visceral thing. A living, breathing thing. “And that’s how it should feel.”
Right then, Talon, who has been playing Frisbee, looks over and waves. Amber and I wave back.
“Are you sure you’ve felt it?” I ask, but Ambs never gets the chance to answer because Mo suddenly appears.
The first words out of Monique’s mouth are “I hope you’re not drinking, Zadie.
Not with…all the headaches you’ve been getting.
” She’s panting slightly, like maybe she just jogged the whole way here.
“Wow, hello to you too,” I say, positively bewildered.
I notice then that she’s wearing a visitor sticker on her hoodie, the kind they give me at Sterlingwood General every time I visit Jay. Mo yanks it off and crumples it in her hand.
“Why were you at the hospital? Is everything okay?” I ask.
Mo flops down on my left side and gives a dismissive wave. “My sister did…something to her ankle. She’s fine. Anyway, I’m sorry I’m late. Also, I would have texted you, but my phone died.”
“It’s okay, Doctor Doolittle. I already decided I’m going to be DD tonight,” I say, but I don’t think I’m imagining that there’s a weird tension between the three of us.
Amber is being unusually quiet. When she finally speaks, it’s to say, “You know, Zadie is actually capable of making her own decisions.”
A beat of silence. “Yeah,” Mo says, “and I’m reminding her to make a good one.”
“It’s f—” I start to say, but Amber speaks over me. “Where do you get off telling people what decisions are good and bad for them?”
She is not wrong—Mo is being just the tiniest bit self-righteous and overprotective—but the bitterness in Amber’s voice catches me off guard. She rolls out an imaginary banner with her hands. “Breaking news: Mo is the only one with a brain around here. The rest of us are just idiots. Right, Mo?”
“Um, is that what I said?”
“It sounded a lot like what you said to me. I’m Monique, the absolute authority on everything.”
“Wait. Are you serious right now?” Mo gasps, and suddenly they’re yelling at each other. I feel like I’ve missed something.
“Guys! Guys!” I grab both their arms. “Holy shit. What’s happening?”
Amber blows out her bangs. “She’s so condescending.”
“Very useful information. Mo?” I turn to her.
Mo glares at Amber and makes like she’s going to speak but ultimately shuts her mouth.
“So no one is going to tell me what this is about?”
There is a very long pause, and just when I think they won’t answer, Amber blurts out, “She doesn’t like Talon.”
“Talon?” I’m completely confused. “This is about Talon?”
“Well, it has to be, since she keeps dropping hints about me making bad decisions.”
Oh, Mo. I shoot her a look, because we were doing so well trying not to be judgmental.
But Mo won’t look at me. “I said nothing about Talon.”
“You didn’t have to say anything. The way you treat him speaks volumes,” Amber says. “You know, you’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
“Oh, honey, I was going to say the same about you,” Mo says. And they’re back at it, every jab from each of them escalating the situation.
It’s like the worst game of tennis, listening to their back and forth. “You guys are giving me a headache. Did you forget we don’t fight?” I ask, unable to hide my sadness. “We’re Teflon.”
Neither of them moves for a second, and then Amber loses her fighting posture. “Fine. I’m sorry,” she says.
There is a very long pause, in which I am terrified that Mo is not going to back down.
“I am…” Mo looks like she’s gritting her teeth, fighting to speak. “Sorry. Also.”
“Progress!” I say, raising my arms in celebration. “You know what? I can be DD and bartender. I’ll get your drinks.” I snatch Amber’s keys from her lap and walk off before another fight erupts.
I’m digging around in the cooler when I hear a voice behind me. “Zadie Cartwright. Vesuvius or Fuji?”
I twist around to see a grinning Marcus, then turn back to face the cooler. “What am I supposed to be choosing between?”
“Your favorite volcano, of course,” Marcus says, like this is completely normal discussion material.
I sigh. “When are you going to let this go? We’re not playing a game.”
“We could be,” he says, raising his eyebrows playfully.
When I don’t respond, he says, “I have something to ask you.”
I put my hands on my hips. “What now?”
“Hold on,” he says. He takes several steps closer until he’s looking right down at me, his chin millimeters away from my forehead.
“What are you…”
When he leans forward, his woodsy scent wafts over to me, even under the smell of the bonfire. The closer he gets, the more lightheaded I feel. A hand touches my cheek. His hand.
“Ash,” he whispers, gently flicking something off my face with his thumb before he steps back.
My heart is a thunderstorm in my chest, even as I regain the feeling in my legs. “Oh,” I say. I am warm all over. Embarrassed at my overreaction. It’s just Marcus Riddick, for God’s sake.
“Thanks,” I mumble.
Marcus starts talking again, but I can’t hear any distinct words. I’m still feeling dizzy from being that close.
“Because if I did somehow hurt your feelings…”
A second later, I hear what he’s saying. He’s actually acknowledging that we hate each other, that he upset me.
“You didn’t,” I blurt out before he can finish his sentence.
He wants me to admit that he hurt me so he can, what, laugh in my face?
Feel vindicated by my confirmation than I’ve been stewing for a solid year over a few comments he made?
There’s no way I am going to give even the appearance of caring about anything Marcus Riddick has to say.
“Some people just don’t jibe, and that’s what it is. ”
“Some people just don’t jibe,” Marcus repeats quietly, like he’s running the thought through his mind for inconsistencies. “Okay.”
I’m annoyed by his audacity to look both confused and hurt. He was the one who literally announced to everyone that he didn’t see what Jason could see in me.
Asshole.
“I have another question,” he says, but before I can react, a pixie-like brunette girl rushes Marcus, throwing her arms around him from behind.
“Marcus!” she says.
“Kari!” he says, sounding friendly, if not quite pleased to have her plaster her front to his back. But she doesn’t seem to notice.
“Shhh. I’m not supposed to be here,” she says, using Marcus as a human wall and periodically peering around him to see what’s happening on the other side. She waves at me, then ducks behind him again. I think the joke is that she’s a junior at a seniors-only event.
“My question,” Marcus says, ignoring her shenanigans, “is whether you would tell someone you know if you had a really weird dream about them.”
My brain spins at his question. He’s not saying…He can’t be suggesting what I think he’s suggesting.
I look closely at him, trying to grasp the meaning of his words, but his eyes are unreadable.
“Like a sex dream?” Kari, who is clearly very drunk, sticks her head out to join our conversation.
Marcus kind of jumps at her voice, like he’d forgotten she was there. It’s a performance, the way he immediately plasters on one of his cheeky grins. “I mean, there’s always the potential.”
Um, so not the same dream then. “I wouldn’t tell them anything. In fact, the only person I would tell about the weird things that go on in your mind is your therapist.”
Marcus laughs, but there’s something odd about it.
I collect two cans and start to leave but Marcus stops me again. “So you don’t think joint dreams are a thing?”
“Joint dreams?” I echo.
He looks at me like he’s genuinely asking. “When two people have the same dream or are in the same dream. Together.”
I almost drop the beers in my hand.
“N-n-nope,” I say. “Co-dreaming? Doesn’t sound like a thing.”
I don’t know why I say it exactly. Maybe because it doesn’t sound like it should be a thing. Maybe because Kari is with us and there are a million people around, and it sounds really freaking weird that Marcus and I would have the same dream.
I want to end this discussion, but Marcus won’t let it go.
“You don’t think sometimes there’s, like, something that happens between two people? Like thinking the same thought? Mind overlapping?” The crazy thing is, he sounds completely earnest.
“What if we don’t just have to be stuck in our own minds all the time,” he’s saying, spiraling, “but we can like hop between…I don’t fucking know, Cartwright. I just…”
“Marcus, you silly goose,” Kari says, whispering like she’s telling a secret. “We’re all alone in the universe.”
I point at her. “Yep. What Kari said. We’re all alone in the universe,” I say, and then I turn and practically sprint back to my friends.
Naturally, they are talking about—what else?—Marcus.
“What I heard is that Coach Kyle wants him to play Jason’s position,” Amber whispers to me, Mo, and Talon, who has since joined our group.
“But Marcus is being, like, the biggest slacker. Turning up late to practices or not showing up at all. Playing like crap. It’s like he wants to stay on the bench. ”
“Big surprise there,” I mutter to myself, looking over my shoulder to find him still laughing with Kari.
When he glances up, our eyes clash and I quickly swivel back to my friends.
From then on, I feel Marcus’s gaze on and off, and it’s stressing me out.
I don’t know what the hell the conversation we had was about.
Was Marcus really hinting at having had the same dream I did?
That’s impossible. Sure, something bizarre happened in between the lunch at Jason’s house and me waking up in my bed hours later, but it’s because I have a head injury. That’s why my memory is fuzzy.
* * *
Hours later, when I’m lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, my head calls my bluff.
Before I know it, I’m heaving over a bucket, throwing up everything I’ve eaten today.
I’d think it was a hangover if I had even a lick to drink, but I listened to Mo.
Every sound is grating to me just like it was when I went to Nurse Diamond last week at school.
The buzz of electricity humming through the walls, my clock ticktocking, all of it makes my brain feel like it’s under siege, being scaled by very loud, very bright enemy forces.
Between bouts of nausea, I groan and cover my eyes with my pillow, wanting only peace and relief. I call for Mom, but she must be fast asleep or not home yet, dealing with some overnight crisis, because she doesn’t respond.
I can’t even cry about this everything-everywhere pain because the crying itself would make things worse. Even the skin over my eyes hurts.
But in a split second, the blackness behind my lids disappears, and the kind of light I’ve been hiding from all night shines into my room. I pry my eyes apart just in time to see my side table crumble, my door dissolve, my walls vanish.
And then everything begins again.