Chapter Forty-Six #2
“Oh, she was,” Juliette agreed. “The worst part was, I couldn’t even fault her for doing it.
I would have done the exact same thing if I’d had ammunition like that.
I could have sunk her whole high school career.
But instead, she torpedoed mine. Also, it probably didn’t help that I gave a very impassioned speech during my first meeting as Honor Society president basically dishing all the dirt I had on everyone else on the council in retaliation for everyone knowing my secrets.
It was pretty brutal—three girls and two guys actually cried.
I’m also pretty sure that speech was the genesis for at least two divorces and one paternity test. Plus, I heard later that one girl lost her inheritance after I revealed her addiction to whippits.
At the time it felt like I was covering my own ass, trying to point out that everyone had drama.
But instead of endearing them to my plight, it turned the entire grade against me.
After that, they were only too happy to make a landing strip to watch me crash and burn. ”
“What happened?” Veeta asked.
“It was terrible. Boys would ask me out to see if I really was into the ‘freaky stuff’ my parents wrote about in the book, girls would squirt ketchup on my locker and claim it was menstrual blood, they held emergency sessions to replace me as president of Key Club and the Honor Society, and someone wrote a parody op-ed in the school newspaper about why I should be in charge of sex ed because I was so experienced.
Eventually the principal not-so-subtly recommended I be moved to a different school to finish out my senior year since the prank wars were becoming, in his words, a ‘distraction.’ So I graduated in obscurity from a school twenty miles away, left for college and moved across the country, basically disowned my parents, and started using my middle name so nobody could find me.
“Which worked until last year, when we ended up plastered everywhere online because of Kennedy’s wedding.
You would have thought they’d all have other crap to care about after over a decade, but I guess I left quite an impression with that speech.
Now they’ve posted all about it in a Facebook group for the next reunion and everyone is taking bets on whether or not I show up, even though I didn’t technically graduate from there.
I thought if I could make this big deal with Warren, if it was my name in the papers again for a good reason, if I could save Simon Says and become the COO …
I could show up there and finally rub it in Juniper’s face. Tell all of them off.”
“That was so much worse than I was expecting,” Kate said finally, when it felt like there was no more air left in the cabin.
“I mean, I kind of thought maybe it was like a guy who had broken your heart, or, I don’t know.
Maybe you’d been in a cult or something?
A hostage situation as a child. But this … this is fuuuuuuuucked up.”
“Awful,” Veeta said decisively. “Your parents are awful. And now I know why you keep your mother’s number as ‘Spam Risk—Don’t Answer’ in your phone.”
“The worst part is, my parents don’t even think they did anything wrong.
They thought they were helping other families by sharing their research.
And maybe they were, I don’t know. I mean, they sold millions of copies of their books.
That’s how I paid for college. It’s just that helping other families was more important to them than I was.
But honestly, they did me a favor, teaching me you can never trust anyone no matter how much they claim to love you.
I avoided so much heartbreak in college by adopting the fuck ’em and leave ’em policy.
Turns out, I really was into all that freaky stuff they said I was. ”
“That is not the lesson,” Veeta said, their voice harsh. “Everyone has trauma, Juliette. Everyone has pain. I’m a nonbinary brown person. Every day of my life is navigating ignorance and bigotry the two of you couldn’t begin to imagine.”
“I’ll just go back to looking for that flare gun now,” Kate whispered, taking the hint.
“That doesn’t give me an excuse to be an asshole,” Veeta continued, “and neither does it for you. Don’t get me wrong, I love your boss bitch persona.
You terrorizing Jeremy into quitting was genuinely the highlight of my intern year.
He never respected my pronouns, he left snotty tissues all over the intern area, and his favorite comedian was Shane Gillis. ”
“Unforgiveable,” Juliette snorted.
“Despicable,” Veeta agreed. “Some people need to be drop-kicked into the sun, and you do it in a way that makes them feel bad about their whole lives. It’s brilliant. But you’ve gotten too good at it, and you don’t know when to turn it off.”
“Uh-oh,” Kate said. “Nobody panic, but it’s possible I pulled the cord on an inflatable raft.”
“Kate, Veeta is trying to say something here,” Juliette said. “And it’s not possible to be too good at something. What you’re describing is perfection.”
“That’s not perfection, it’s a trauma response,” Veeta said, the eye roll evident. “You had to perform perfection your entire childhood to get your parents’ attention, so now you think the only way to gain love is through achievement. Pretty classic overachiever origin story stuff.”
“Okay, there is a substance here, very foreign in nature,” Kate said. “Which is now all over my hand. Do we think they keep the skin-melting kind of acid on boats?”
“Kate, please,” Juliette said. “And don’t lecture me on trauma responses, my parents literally wrote the book on them. There’s nothing wrong with having goals in life.”
“There is when you use them as a substitute for authentic human connection,” Veeta shot back.
“Humans are a disappointment as a species, we all know this. I’m just getting ahead of the game by being pre-disappointed.”
“No, you’re dooming every relationship you have by expecting that people will disappoint you enough to justify never trusting them in the first place.
Of course people will disappoint you. That’s like saying everybody will die, so they might as well not bother living.
The point is to let people let you down.
Let people fail. Let yourself fail. It doesn’t mean the end of everything. It just means you’re human.”
“Does anybody else smell leaking gasoline?” Kate asked in a small voice.
“Kate!” Veeta and Juliette groaned in unison.
“Yep, sorry, just might be sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Don’t mind me.”
Juliette huffed a sigh. “Okay, fine, yes. I find trusting people … challenging. My parents used me as a prop for their careers, my schoolmates envied my success, and I unnerved a lot of my teachers for, quote, ‘staring too intensely.’”
“I definitely get that,” Veeta murmured.
“I feel that way right now and I can’t even see your eyes,” Kate added.
“But I guess I could let you help me, sometimes. As a favor, since you all seem to want to so badly.”
“Fuck yeah!” Kate shouted.
“That was a lot of enthusiasm for what was a very tepid admission of fault,” Veeta said.
“What? No, I found the flare gun! Well, I found a gun. Let’s hope it’s a flare gun.”
“Let’s hope you’re not pointing it at any of us, just in case,” Juliette said, hauling herself up to a hunched position.
The worst of her motion sickness seemed to have passed—onto the boat’s floor, unfortunately—and she was able to feel her way toward the stairs.
They’d been down in the hold so long the ambient light of the open ocean was almost blinding, and Juliette had to shield her eyes from the glare of what she guessed was the full moon.
But the light was too close and way too bright, and as Veeta and Kate crowded up the stairs a sharp sound pierced the air.
“This is the US Coast Guard, please identify yourselves.”
“Ack!” Kate cried, defensively raising her hands above her head and accidentally pulling the trigger on the flare gun. It sent a bright flash of red light into the sky, illuminating the sleek outline of a Coast Guard boat.
“Hands where we can see them! Prepare to be boarded!” came the booming voice.