Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
THE EARLY-MORNING SUN is excessively bright and piercing compared to the dull yellow of the school’s fluorescents, and I have to shield my eyes with my hand just to see in front of me.
Peter runs his hands through his hair. “Well, that was—”
“Fucked?”
“Yeah,” Peter says. “That was fucked.”
“It always is.”
He sits down on the curb and rubs his hands over his knees. “How do you do this all the time?”
“I don’t. A teacher dying isn’t an everyday occurrence.”
“You know what I mean.”
I do. He means how can I possibly live with the constant threat of death literally hanging over people’s heads?
“How does anyone live with anything? There are people way worse off than me. People living in war zones. People who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. People who—”
“I’m not talking about people,” Peter says, cutting me off. “I’m talking about you, Syd.” He looks up at me from the curb, the sun illuminating the top of his head. It makes him look intensely angelic. It’s a little excessive, honestly. “How do you deal?”
I shrug.
He looks like he wants to press the issue but doesn’t.
Instead, he just exhales a little breath and looks back out at the parking lot.
He’s trying to act like he’s cool, but his pinkie is trembling a little.
I guess it’s one thing to hear that a teacher you barely knew died, it’s a whole other to live through a premonition fulfilled.
“Have you ever …” He pauses and glances back at the school, like he’s deciding if he should say his thought out loud or not. He probably shouldn’t. “Have you ever told a person—a clock person—that their time is up? Sorry, is it bad to say it like that?”
My body tenses, like a thousand tiny knives are stabbing me. “I don’t get involved.”
“I don’t mean trying to alter their destiny or whatever. I just mean—”
“I said I don’t get involved.” I cross my arms, my fingers squeezing until I feel my nails pushing into my skin.
I stare at Peter, waiting for his face to change.
Waiting for judgment to cloud over his eyes.
Waiting for him to say something like Really?
Not even one time? or But what if you did!
He looks like he doesn’t quite believe me.
And why should he? I’m full of shit. But at least he’s smart enough to let it go.
Sort of, anyway. Because he gives it about two seconds before he asks me another question.
“Does anyone else know what you can … do?” As if it’s an enviable skill.
“No.”
“Not even your sister? Or your dad?”
“No.” A car squeals out of the junior parking lot, flying over the speed bumps and blasting an Olivia Rodrigo track as the passengers laugh hysterically.
“I told my parents once,” I say. “But I was so young. It was like saying I saw dragons or elves in the pantry. It never really became a thing. And then my mom died pretty soon after, anyway.”
“That must’ve been—”
“It’s whatever. I didn’t even connect the clocks with dying until I was older. And by that time it was just easier to keep it to myself.”
“Easier for who?” His eyes flick to my fingers, which are still digging into my arm.
“Jesus, Peter, should I be lying down on a couch and paying you a hundred dollars an hour for this?”
“Sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I just wanted to—”
“Make me feel all better?”
“Yeah.” He looks embarrassed, and now I feel kind of bad, even though attempting talk therapy in the senior parking lot was seriously misguided.
“You know what?” he says, his voice suddenly all amped up. “Let’s go somewhere.”
Ah, Avoidance, I know her well.
“It’s seven forty-five in the morning. I don’t think anything’s open besides fast food and I am not a McDonald’s person. Have you seen the pink slime videos? I’d rather starve.”
“They actually discontinued the use of pink slime in 2011.”
“Who knows something like that?”
He shrugs. “Me. But that’s not what I mean, anyway. I mean really go somewhere.” Peter looks out at the parking lot as if it’s some vast ocean he wants to cross. “Let’s go into the city.”
What is he even smoking right now? “I’m not going into the city.”
“Is it because of the rats? Because they’re actually doing things to reduce the—”
“It’s not because of the rats.” Obviously, the idea of sidestepping a salmonella-infected rodent the size of a hellhound makes my skin crawl.
But really it’s the sheer amount of people in the city, sweating and pushing each other, walking in front of taxi cabs, running red lights.
Helmetless cyclists playing both vehicle and pedestrian when it suits them, eerily still homeless people curled up over sewer grates …
I can never really explain it to anyone because—
He already knows.
The thought catches me totally off guard. It’s been so long since someone knew. And that went pretty fucking poorly. But … maybe this won’t. Maybe this one time I actually can explain it. Peter isn’t Charles, I remind myself.
Fuck it.
“There are too many dying people out there.”
Peter nods. “Fair. But also”—he turns back to the school—“there are too many mourning people in there.”
Also fair.
He pulls out his phone and types in a couple things. “If we take the train, it’s only about forty-five minutes to Grand Central. And it’s only a ten-minute drive to the train station.”
“I don’t know … .”
“We could be eating at a hot-dog stand within an hour. If we leave now.”
“My sister was pretty adamant about me avoiding street dogs.”
Peter laughs. “Okay, we’ll stick to pizza.”
“It’s pizza day in the cafeteria.”
Peter raises his eyebrows. It’s a weak-ass argument and he knows it. Cafeteria pizza tastes like cold garbage, and the lunch ladies insist on cutting it into rectangles, which is an unholy sin.
“We can keep it low-key. Maybe go to the park. See a museum or something. Just … be.”
There is literally nothing “low-key” about the city. And all the bad things about it are just as true now as they were five seconds ago. I really have no desire to see how many people are unknowingly headed to death’s door when they think they’re headed to Bergdorf’s.
But.
But the thought of sitting through six more classes of people crying and talking about Ms. Jegstrup as if they really gave a shit about her makes my palms sweat.
And, honestly, the idea of just “being” with Peter has this weird, twisted appeal.
Still … There’s always the secret third option, which is I leave Peter in the parking lot, go home, crawl under the covers, and sleep until tomorrow.
“If things get weird, we can just come back. We don’t even have to get off the train if you’re not feeling it.
” Peter looks at me with those big eyes—and he’s so hopeful and earnest and …
there’s something else in there. Like, maybe he needs this too?
And some deep-down part of me wants to just give it to him. God, I wish he was ugly.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but “Fine. Whatever.”
“Awesome!” Peter’s shoulders relax. I didn’t realize how tense he was. Like he was holding his breath, waiting for my answer.
“I’ll drive,” I say, heading toward my black truck.
“Shotgun!”
“There’s literally no one else here.”
Peter jogs backward toward the truck, smiling. “Still. It feels good to win something sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“WOW. DOES THIS THING HAVE an actual CD player?” Peter leans toward the dash.
Before I can stop him, he’s pressing the eject button and examining the CD like it’s an ancient artifact. “Chumbawamba?”
“It’s Chumba-whum-buh. Not Chumba-wham-buh. And ‘Tubthumping’ is a classic.”
“Right. Of course. My mistake. I bet Chumba-whum-buh is right up there with Chopin.” Peter slides the CD back into the player. The tinny British voice comes out of the old speakers, filling the truck with the same notes I’ve heard a thousand times.
“Well, this is very …”
“Fantastic?” I say.
“Upbeat,” he finishes. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a nineties pop girl. You seem more Billie Eilish than … whatever this is.”
“Just because I know when people are going to die, I have to sit around listening to dark, angsty music?”
Peter tenses. “No, I didn’t mean …”
“Oh my god, loosen up,” I say. “I actually do like Billie Eilish. But in here it’s all nineties all the time.”
I nod to the CD case next to his feet. He pulls it up and flips through the pages of plastic inserts. “R.E.M., Britney Spears, 98 Degrees. This thing is like a time capsule.”
“They were my mom’s CDs. This was her truck. My dad kept it in storage and gave it to me when I turned sixteen.” I don’t mention that it was mostly so he could stop driving me around himself.
Peter flips past the Jayhawks and Jimmy Eat World. “Korn? This looks intense.”
I laugh. “Yeah, well, even she had a dark side.”
“She sounds cool,” Peter says.
“She was.” I turn my eyes back to the road.
“Even though she was a mom, she still dressed cool, you know? Nothing embarrassing or anything like that, but she’d wear this leather jacket when it was cold and she still wore jeans, even when the other moms were in sweats.
And she hated vanilla ice cream. Isn’t that a weird thing to hate?
But it’s kind of punk, right? To hate vanilla ice cream?
And she used to play ‘Summer Girls’ by LFO for Jules and me when she’d pick us up on the last day of school.
Every single year. The lyrics are ridiculous but every time I hear it I still get this giddy feeling like …
” I stop talking. I don’t know why I’m telling him this.
Mom is not a thing I talk about. Never with Dad and hardly ever with Jules.
But it feels good to say the word again. Mom.
“Can I ask you what happened to her?”
The three bloodred scratches across my mother’s sunken, dead face flash before my eyes and I get the urge to jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic. I keep my hands gripped at nine and three, my eyes locked on the yellow dashes on the road. “Breast cancer.”