Two
“Oh wow,” said Cella, rubbing my back from the passenger seat when I groaned a second time. “I’m sensing I miscalculated the cost-benefit analysis. Would this be, like, negative utils?”
She burst into giggles, just like she had earlier when our economics teacher had introduced utils as a unit for measuring consumer satisfaction—and every time he’d said it thereafter.
She’d spent half the class with her hand over her mouth.
I didn’t really get why she got such a kick out of it, but her laughing got me laughing.
I disguised it by letting out a third groan.
“That sounds bad,” she said. “Are you going to survive this?”
“No,” I said, really annunciating, shaping it out with my lips. “See how easy that is? That’s what you’re supposed to say when you’re the deciding vote on your best friend’s worst nightmare. Three weeks, Cella.”
“Worst nightmare? Come on.”
“I said that for rhetorical effect.”
“Why do you have such a problem with Mason? He seems sweet. Or at least, not bright enough to be a threat.”
“I’m not threatened by him. He’s just an asshole with an ego. Have you noticed he makes eye contact with every single person when he walks into a room? It’s like he gets off on attention.”
“I feel like I’ve met someone like that somewhere . . .”
“He probably pisses on the ground to mark his territory.”
“Do you know what he said when he saw this?” Cella held up the plushie Mew key chain on her backpack. “And I quote: ‘Oh, you one of those girls who’s super into rats? That’s dope, and I really mean that.’ How can you call that an asshole?”
“Seriously, Cella, I get a bad feeling around him. Like I’ve never felt before.”
Saying that out loud, it struck me that it wasn’t true. The feeling I got around Mason was . . . I wouldn’t say familiar but recognizable. I couldn’t figure out why, and trying to remember made me uneasy.
Cella smiled with her eyebrows raised. “Never?”
“In a past life, maybe.”
“That’s beautiful.”
I reached inside my console and threw the first thing I touched at her. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a pack of gum, and Cella tapped her feet happily.
“Like we were a lion and a hyena in another life, and he ate one of my cubs,” I clarified.
“Huh. And Mason’s . . . ?”
“The hyena! Why would you even ask me that?”
Her grin fell when she unwrapped a stick of gum to find it melted.
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting? You hate strangers all the time.”
“I don’t ‘hate’ anyone,” I said.
“Right. Because you don’t care enough.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I literally just agreed with you.”
“I’m picking up a tone from you right now—oh, nope.” I slid down in my seat. “Nope, no. He’s coming.”
Cella looked out her window toward the school, squinting.
“Jeez, how did you see that?”
“Didn’t have to. I can feel him.” Like a scratchy clothing tag or an overplayed song. Like sunburn.
“That’s beautiful.”
“I’m leaving.” I shifted into reverse.
“He’s probably just going to his car.”
Moments later, Mason’s face appeared in my peripheral vision as he knocked on Cella’s window. Maybe I had earned all this bad karma in that past life. Male lions kind of seemed like jerks.
“Kieran, did you seriously just turn your child lock on?”
Reluctantly, I turned it off, and Cella lowered the window. My skin tingled in the sudden light.
“Mar-cel-la,” Mason sang, low and smooth like he liked the feel of it in his mouth.
“We’re spot neighbors, can you believe it?
” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at a forest-green Jeep that looked like it had just about driven through an actual forest to get here, leaves piled around the wipers and dried mud lashed across the bumper.
“I’m glad I ran into you. Can I get your number? ”
Cella gave that raised-brow smile again, this time with her mouth hanging open.
“For the project.”
“Yeah! Yeah, ’course.”
Mason crossed his arms over the car door, practically sticking his head inside to hand her his phone.
“I’ll give you Kieran’s too.”
He had the nerve to frown over her shoulder like he was noticing me for the first time.
“Don’t touch my car,” I said. Mason straightened up with his palms raised.
“My fault. Almost smudged the, ah . . .” He looked my car up and down. “Batmobile.”
“The fuck did you just—?”
“Have you read Macbeth?” interjected Cella. “We did, sophomore year.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” I grumbled. Just because my car was black and sort of long-nosed and maybe a little low to the ground . . .
“Yeah, couple years ago in English,” said Mason. “Can’t promise I remember a whole lot.”
And this coming from a guy who looked like he had Batman undies stashed in his drawer, no less.
“You free to start working today?” asked Cella. “Get it over with?”
Mason agreed but added that we couldn’t work at his place. His family was still moving and it was a mess. Cella offered hers.
“Didn’t you say your ‘sister’s polycule is imploding’ and your ‘house is a nuclear zone right now’?”
Cella’s older sister, Diane, had graduated from college and moved back home in May, and had brought a new crisis to the Gibson household every month since. That week, she was mid-breakup with three people at once and making it everyone else’s problem.
“You remembered that?”
Mason smiled. “Duh. What about Mr. Sunshine’s place?”
“I don’t want you in my house,” I said.
“What he means is he has a really big family. It can be hard to concentrate. I’ll text you my address.”
Mason leaned onto the door again, and my hand clenched around the gearshift.
“Later, Cells,” he said, slick like oil. His eyes flickered past her for a fraction of a second, gloating. I eased off the brakes, sliding backward a few inches, forcing him to get off my car.
As I pulled out of my spot, I said, “I’m going to knock off his side-view.”
“Your dad will kill you. You’ll be double dead, Your Majesty.”
***
A new bout of shouting started up in Cella’s house, this time from below.
Diane had taken her rampage to the kitchen it seemed, and all the banging—slamming cabinet doors and Diane’s fist pummeling dough (according to Cella, she made biangbiang noodles from scratch whenever she was stressed)—had pushed Mrs. Liu-Gibson over the edge.
Their screams floated up the stairs like music from a smashed piano.
It always shocked me that Mrs. Liu-Gibson—a miniscule woman with a soft voice and a sweet, melodic way of speaking around her Shanghai accent—could scream like that.
Half an hour earlier, it had been Diane’s voice alone, surging and fading in volume as she paced the upstairs hallway in a heated phone call with one-third of her breakup. I had learned enough about the situation from eavesdropping to be firmly on her side.
The fight between Diane and her mom was harder to listen to. Partially because it was all the way downstairs, but mostly because of the fight taking place right here on Cella’s bedroom floor.
“What do you mean, they’re the same thing?” I said in sincere disbelief. “They’re two very different words—they’re not even synonyms.”
“Yeah, but one leads to the other,” Mason argued. “Macbeth wanted power, so he let his ambition overcome him.”
“You might be onto something,” I said.
Mason threw his hands up. “Thank you.”
“Or you would be, if we were looking for two themes. In case you forgot, we need to figure out a central theme. As in one. Would it help if I counted on my hands? Ambition corrupts.” And I raised my middle finger. “What kind of theme is ‘power,’ anyway? Power is an objective or a consequence.”
Mason’s fingers flexed before balling into fists. “You think you’re so smart.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Big words. Power is a goal or a result.”
“Nice one,” Mason sneered, a deep scrunch to his nose.
“Children!” Cella shouted, loud enough that even the argument downstairs paused for a beat before picking back up.
Judging by the harsh set of her mouth, she’d been trying to get our attention for some time.
She dialed it back at Mason’s wide, surprised stare, smoothing her face and switching to a lighter tone.
“I know tensions have been high since the who-died incident, but this is solving nothing.”
“Stop naming arguments we had twenty minutes ago,” I said.
There had been some confusion about which character was killed by Macbeth.
I’d claimed it was King Duncan, but Mason had insisted he remembered it being Banquo and also that my head was so far up my ass I could snack on that afternoon’s lunch in my stomach.
Cella, when she could get a word in, had clarified that it was Duncan (but also, technically, both of them).
“What did we learn from the Battle of the Macs?” she said now. Ten minutes ago, Mason and I had debated who killed Macbeth. I said Malcolm. Mason said Macduff.
“That Callisto doesn’t know what he’s talking about?” said Mason.
“That the names in this play are way too similar.”
“That these issues can be resolved by a simple online search,” Cella corrected us. “Or by listening to your third groupmate, who knows the play better than both of you.”
She stood, abandoning her notebook to grab her beat-up tablet from her desk. She folded its peeling case to prop it upright on her bed.
“Since we can’t go five minutes without arguing over basic details,” she said, “We’re going to watch Macbeth. Come onto the bed, children.”
Mason sprang up. Cella’s Good Impressions were showing cracks, so I knew I’d really pissed her off.
I pointedly avoided Mason’s eye as I climbed onto her lilac comforter.
I wedged myself into the corner between the wall and Cella’s pillows, which were permanently stained from her blue-hair phase in freshman year.
Her mom had tried to throw the pillowcases out, but Cella had insisted they were “sick” and “countercultural,” which she regretted now.
She was too proud to admit that part to Mrs. Liu-Gibson.