Chapter Twenty
Twenty
I JOLT AWAKE, my heart going a million miles a minute and my eyes darting back and forth. The train is still rolling, graffitied buildings and browning trees scraping by the window faster, faster, faster.
“Sydney.” Peter puts his hand on my arm. “Are you okay? I think you fell asleep and were having some sort of nightmare.”
Oh shit.
I jerk my arm back. “I just … had one of those things where you think you’re falling. I’m fine.”
I’m fine? What a fucking joke.
“Are you sure? You—”
“I said I’m fine,” I hiss.
“Okay,” Peter says. “My bad.”
He turns his eyes back to his book, and I pull out my phone and pretend to scroll Insta, but none of the images quite make it into my brain. My thumb keeps moving up, up, up, until the pictures blur into an overexposed mess of other people’s teeth and limbs.
What gives Peter the right to jump in like that? He thinks he can just go around talking to people? Handing them hot dogs? Helping them do shit before they die? Giving them fucking hugs like he’s the guest star on a feelings episode of Sesame Street?
That’s not how this works. How this works is that you leave well enough alone and let death do whatever it’s going to do.
You stay away from hospitals and nursing homes and you keep your eyes on your own fucking paper.
And if you do see a clock, you try not to think about it.
You put them in your notebook, and you turn the page and never look at them or think about them again.
And you hope that you get a few months before you have to reopen the book and etch another name in your red college-ruled cemetery.
Except now I have two more to add. Just from today. Because of Peter.
Because he dragged me out there, into that snarled-up tangle of city lives, and city deaths.
The train gasps to a stop, and we awkwardly get off, bumping into each other and mumbling apologies.
On the drive back to school, I don’t play any music, and we don’t talk.
I’ve officially decided everything bad that happened today is his fault.
Maybe everything bad in the entire world.
Sure, it wouldn’t have been fun to sit through everyone moaning about Ms. Jegstrup, but leaving and going into the city was clearly a mistake.
A mistake I should’ve known better than to make.
We pull into the school parking lot about five minutes after the bell and I wordlessly unbuckle my seatbelt and get out.
Peter grabs his bag from my back seat and shuts the door behind him, gently, like he’s afraid to slam it. Like he’s afraid to touch anything too hard, afraid to disturb the balance of the universe.
I don’t look back at him. I keep my eyes locked straight ahead at our classmates pouring out of the building and splintering off into their own little sub-societies based on social hierarchy and who’s blowing who this week.
It feels so weird to be back, surrounded by all of them.
We’ve only been gone a few hours, but it feels like a lifetime.
Like I’m one of those soldiers who return from war and suddenly can’t go grocery shopping without having a nervous breakdown in the imported fruits aisle.
Except I didn’t go to war. I just sat on a stoop and watched a middle-aged man fumble with his briefcase.
“Sydney,” Peter says, stepping into my line of vision, a brown wave dangling over his furrowed eyebrows. “I’m sorry if I crossed a line today.”
“It’s whatever.” I refuse to make eye contact, pretending to look really hard for Jules.
Peter shifts on his feet for a second but then just nods and heads in the direction of his black Jetta.
And as I watch him leave out of the corner of my eye, steady and tall, his hand reflexively shooting to the back of his bare neck, rubbing it with his long fingers, I start to feel like a colossal bitch.
I think about calling out his name, or even running after him, lightly touching his arm, looking up at him with an apology in my eyes.
But instead I just grip my old-school car keys in my hand, the metal teeth digging into my palm.
My thumb brushes the red PANIC button, and for a second I consider pushing it just to see what everyone would do. Probably nothing.
I finally spot Jules across the lot, leaning on Jake Martin’s orange Camaro, holding court with half the junior class and a handful of seniors.
She’s not exactly scouring the rows of cars, panicking about her ride home.
In fact, she seems wholly unconcerned about where I might be.
But I can’t exactly leave. Suddenly I’m absolutely desperate for Peter to see Jules get in my car.
As if us actually driving home together is going to make me seem like less of a psychotic bitch.
Pretending not to watch Peter turn his car on, I send Jules a text. I could just walk over to her and tell her I want to go home, and I’m sure she’d abandon her admirers and leave with me, but then I’d have to pierce through the little circle around her, and I’d rather set myself on fire.
ME: Hey. Can we go?
Jules pauses her conversation and swipes up on her phone. She reads the message and looks around, finally finding me and waving.
JULES:I thought u ditched???? (bad ass btw ) but i already told noah he could drive me home
Peter’s Jetta inches past me and out of the lot, his hands at nine and three and his eyes straight ahead. A little shard of guilt sticks me in the stomach. Fuck, maybe I broke the golden boy.
Jules glances up from her phone and looks me over from her perch on the Camaro. She frowns and types something else.
JULES:I can just go home with you though nbd. I heard about jegstrup. You prob feel like shit rn. I know you had a soft spot for her. I’ll go home with you and we can talk about it
JULES:Emma is organizing a wake and bake for jegstrup tonight at noah’s. I know it’s not really your scene but it might be good for you to go. We’re gonna tell stories about her and stuff
A wake and bake. Christ, I’d rather jam a sharpened Starbucks straw in my eye.
ME:No it’s all good. seriously dw. I’ll see you at home later. have fun
Peter’s already gone, so I guess I can stop pretending like Jules’s method of transportation is critical to me.
I claw a smile onto my face, wave to Jules across the parking lot, and slide back into my truck, turning on the low wail of “Save It for a Rainy Day” by the Jayhawks.
Mom loved this one. Jules always complained it was too sad, but Mom used to pull down her oversized sunglasses, look at us in the rearview mirror and say, “Yeah, but there’s a sweetness in the sadness, don’t you think?
” To which Jules would usually respond, “Can we get a Happy Meal?”
I turn the music up, letting it fill all the empty space in the car.
All the empty space in my chest. It’s better this way.
Now that I’m alone. No Peter obsessively watching my face, trying not-so-subtly to read my emotions.
No Jules trying to convince me to borrow one of her secondhand too-short black Selkie dresses and come out with her tonight.
I can just go home. And sit at my desk and draw my little fucked-up Doom Doodles in my notebook.
The baguette woman will be easy, simple. A long, crusty bread and a retro phone. Dark circles under her eyes, the name “Ger”—whoever that is—written in cramped letters inside her lifeless pupils.
But Gordon …
My hands grip the steering wheel, squeezing the tight leather in my fists.
There are too many possibilities for his page.
Images of different gray sketches tumble through my mind faster than I can really register them.
A cruise ship. A glacier. The outline of Antarctica, half erased, forgotten.
A diamond wedding ring strangling a pair of blackened lungs.
I could draw a New York stoop. Messy hair.
Sloping glasses. One hand clutching a shaky drawing of a catdog.
The other holding a hot dog. Because of Peter.
A charcoal outline of Peter’s face pushes its way into my head.
His eyes morphing from curious to hurt to—
Someone raps their knuckles hard on my truck window, and I nearly shit my pants.
Fuck, it’s the principal.
I roll down the window, my heart still pounding. “Hello?”
“Hello, Ms. Hoffman.” Ms. Shywill blinks, her mascara clumping like fat spider legs around her red-rimmed eyes.
Shit, I’m about to get in trouble. Like, actual trouble.
I’ve literally never been in trouble at school.
What do they do to someone when they get caught ditching?
ISS? Full suspension? I strain to remember what they did to Ethan when they found him vaping on the twenty-yard line on the football field.
Ms. Shywill is staring at me. Waiting for me to respond.
“Um, hi,” I say again.
The principal purses her lips, her splotchy eggplant lipstick setting into a tight line. “Come with me, please.”