Chapter Forty-One
Forty-One
ON THURSDAY MORNING, I pull into the parking lot and Peter is waiting like usual, leaning against his Jetta with a new book in his hands.
It was only yesterday we left our impromptu trauma slumber party in the city, but it feels like it’s been forever.
Long enough for me to slightly (fully) panic about the fact that I’ve told Peter, like …
everything. Now that he’s had time to let the fact that I’m an actual fucking basket case really settle in, he’ll probably do the only logical thing and make a fucking run for it.
“Oooooh,” Jules says. “Look at you just staring at Peter and gripping that steering wheel. You’ve so got that WAP!”
I release my chokehold on the wheel. “WAP?”
Jules’s eyes bulge. “Hello? Wet-Ass Pu—”
“Yo.” Noah’s face appears at Jules’s open window.
She turns to face him and leans her arms over the side of the truck. “Hi.”
“Sup?”
“Stuff.”
Just an absolute stellar conversation. I am riveted.
“You wanna roll?” Noah asks, leaning in toward Jules.
She nods and then turns back to me. “This conversation is not over, just so you know. I will be hearing about Peter’s peter.”
“It wasn’t like that. It was—”
“I have the receipts, honey,” she says, tapping on her phone before slipping out of the truck and under Noah’s anaconda arm. She shoots a glance across the lot at Elise to make sure she’s watching (she is). Jules smiles and winks at me before heading off with Noah.
I get out and make my way over to Peter.
I am suddenly very aware of my legs, like whether or not I am bending them normally as I walk through the parking lot.
And do I usually just let my arms hang there like a fucking monkey?
Peter rakes his fingers through his waves, concentrating hard on whatever he’s reading, his arm sort of flexing in the sun and …
Jesus Christ, I need to get a fucking grip.
“Hey.” He smiles, dog-earing his paperback and tucking it under his arm. The same arm that was holding me when I woke up yesterday.
I clear my throat. “Is that Ishmael?” I ask, studying the part of the cover that’s peeking out from under his arm.
Peter’s face lights up the way a normal boy’s does when you mention fantasy football stats. “I should’ve known you’d have read this one. It’s so up your alley.”
Ishmael is this weird thought-experiment book about a sad thirty-something white guy hero-wannabe and the talking ape that convinces him all his ideas about his place in the world have basically come from our own inescapable shitty culture.
The concept sounds kind of insane, but it’s got this very burn-it-all-down vibe that’s pretty punk.
“It was overly optimistic at the end, but I did like the parts where he talked about how the entire human race is full of self-important dumbasses.”
Peter laughs. “I thought that part was more about how humans just need a little help to find their place in the universe.”
“No, it was about them being dumbasses.”
The bell rings and I just stand there, realizing that it’s a new day and we never really talked about whether or not we were going to keep doing this Clocker shit in the city. And after our night in the hotel … things are different. Probably? I don’t know.
People start to file into the school and I continue standing there, not saying or doing shit. God, please put me out of this misery.
“So,” Peter says, finally, “I can’t skip with you today.”
Oh.
“That’s fine,” I say. It’s so incredibly fine. “It’s been, like, forever since I got to watch Noah attempt to make a stink bomb in chem so, I mean, I have a lot to catch up on.”
I do this very casual smile-shrug like I don’t have a care in the world.
And I mean, it’s not like I thought we could skip school forever.
Dad might not notice, but other people are going to start to.
Like, the government. How many days can you miss before you get a truancy letter?
Still. There’s this kind of empty free-falling feeling in my chest right now.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Peter says quickly. “I just have this thing. This morning. With my mom. So I can’t be out of town.”
“Sounds fake.”
“It’s just … family stuff.” His face looks sort of weird and pained, and I wonder if his parents are getting divorced or if my guesses about his mom’s alcohol consumption are legit. I’m about to ask him but then he says, “Anyway, sorry. Really.”
And that kind of feels like the end of the conversation so I just say, “No worries.” Even though I am having a moderate-to-significant amount of worries.
“But let’s meet up later? Okay?” Peter says.
“Sure.”
“Great.” He nods and I sort of nod back and then just turn around and walk toward the school’s big double doors.
This feels … like shit.