Reese Chapter #2
He lifts his beer again and drinks, then lowers his beer to his side.
“Okay,” she says, pulling playing cards from her hand and laying them down on the coffee table, and then she asks what time
he thinks he’ll go, and he looks at his phone to see when the sun will rise. At the same time, we hear the bedroom door fly
open. Mae and Cass come running down the stairs into the living room again, Mae announcing to everyone, “We want to have a
sleepover tonight. Can Cass sleep here?” looking directly at Emily, hands in the prayer position, practically begging. “Pleeeease?”
It’s not that I care if Cass sleeps here, because I don’t. It’s that I’m still mad at them—so mad that I could rage—and I’m
not giving up the bed because I am never sleeping on the porch ever again. That bed is mine.
“They are not sleeping here,” I say in front of everyone. “No fucking way. I am not listening to them all night.”
On the sofa, Aunt Courtney stiffens. I can see on her face that she wants to grab Cass’s precious little ears (though it’s not like she doesn’t hear kids swearing at school) and cover them, and I hate myself for acting like that.
Emily tries apologizing for me, for my language, for my behavior, but Aunt Courtney just shakes her head and says, “It’s fine.
Elliott will probably just go to bed early, so he can get up early and fish.
We can keep them. And then another night they can sleep at your cottage. ”
Emily says okay. Mae and Cass run upstairs to pack Mae’s things. I envy them because they have each other, and I have no one.
Uncle Elliott gives them the key to their cottage and they go running back alone for the night, no doubt planning their next
dumb prank, a way to get back at me for being mad at them.
I’m sitting on the bed alone, on a patterned quilt with bears and trees on it. Mae and Cass are gone now; they’re at Aunt
Courtney and Uncle Elliott’s cottage for the night. I have the room all to myself and I should be happy about it—it’s what
I wanted, right?—but instead, I wish someone was here with me. I stare at the wall. There’s an empty space in my chest. It
hurts, like someone took my heart out, and now there’s a hole left behind. I think over and over again how I will never have
friends, how I will never fall in love, how no one will ever like me.
The room is small. The double bed practically fills it. I go on my phone (though I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself)
to see that Skylar has been with Gracie again. I wonder if she saw what Mae and Cass posted before I finally deleted it, if
she read the comments, if she agreed with them. She hasn’t texted me in days, not since I sent her the picture of the taxidermy
fish and she told me it was cool. She doesn’t know anything about Daniel.
I wish I could tell her.
I wish I could tell someone.
I wish I could tell someone that I’m lonely and scared. That I feel like no one likes me. That I worry no one ever will. That
I’ll be alone forever.
Voices carry upstairs and through the open door. It makes it ten times worse. It makes me feel even more lonely than if I
was in the cottage alone. There is a thickness in my throat. The need to be friends with Skylar again is so intense it feels
like physical pain.
I have my back to the door. I don’t hear him come in at first. I don’t know how long he stands there in the hall, watching
me from behind, until I hear the sound of his annoying little laugh.
He says, “Imagine having no friends.”
I whip around. Wyatt stands behind me, leaned into the doorframe, looking smug as fuck. His arms are crossed. He turns and
looks at himself in the bedroom mirror and fixes his stupid hair. When his eyes come back, he looks down on me literally and
figuratively.
He sneers.
I say, “Imagine being an asshole.”
“Where’s your boyfriend?” he asks, looking almost proud of the fact that he is an asshole, not denying it.
“I don’t know,” I say. “You tell me.”
Wyatt’s laugh is arrogant. He stands up straighter and comes further into the room. “I guess he doesn’t like you anymore.”
I try to pretend his words don’t hurt. “I guess not,” I say, though I don’t tell him that he never did actually like me. Of
course he didn’t. Because what would a guy like Daniel ever want with a girl like me?
“What do you want, Wyatt?” I ask. “Why are you even here?”
“Why not? It’s not your room. It’s not your house. I can go anywhere I want.”
I push myself up from the bed. I breeze past him for the door, our elbows bumping.
“Watch it,” I say, even though I’m the one who ran into him.
He laughs. I go downstairs, trying to get as far away from him as I can.
But Wyatt walks behind me, down the stairs and into the living room, where people still sit, playing their dumb cards.
I say back, over my shoulder, “You’re such a little shithead. Go away. Stop following me.”
“Reese, please.”
No one cares that Wyatt is provoking me. They only care about what I said.
I go out onto the porch because, even though it’s the last place in the world I want to be, it’s the only place where no one
is.
I stand at the screen, looking out, wondering if Daniel is out there somewhere, watching me.
It’s not dark yet, though the darkness is coming. It will be here soon.
Emily comes to stand on the porch with me. “We have people over, you know? You can’t just behave like that. Do you want everyone
to think you’re—”
“What?” I ask, spinning around to look at her, cutting her off but then wondering what she was going to say. That I’m out
of control? That I’m a freak? “Am I embarrassing you?” I ask.
She pulls the door shut because I am. I am embarrassing her. She cares more about what other people think than that I’m upset.
She doesn’t even ask what’s wrong, why I’m mad, what Wyatt did.
Instead: “You can’t speak to your bother like that, Reese. Just because you’re upset doesn’t mean that it’s okay to call him
names.”
“Do you even care why I’m upset? You don’t,” I say, answering for her. “All you care about is that I called him a shithead and that I embarrassed you in front of Uncle Elliott and Aunt Courtney. You care about everyone else but me.”
She crosses her arms and says, “I don’t know what happened upstairs, but I’m sure whatever it was, that your brother doesn’t
deserve to be called names like that.”
My hands curl into fists. Sad, angry tears fill my eyes.
“You really are so gullible. You think Wyatt is the perfect child. You have no idea that he’s been selling Grandma’s antique
silverware right under your nose for money to gamble with.”
She pulls back, upset not that Wyatt would do something like that but that I’d tell more lies about him. “Wyatt wouldn’t do
that,” she says. “He knows how much Grandma’s things mean to me.”
The door opens and Wyatt comes out. The look on his face tells me he heard what I said. He knows I was talking about him,
that I told on him.
Emily’s eyes flick to him. “She’s lying,” he says, all innocent-like, and I can already tell she believes him over me, that
she genuinely thinks he would never do any of those things.
He can do no wrong in her eyes.
I go on. I tell her, “Not only that, but he’s been selling drugs right here while we’re on vacation. He meets random people
in the woods and sells them actual drugs.”
She laughs. “You don’t expect me to believe that Wyatt is a drug dealer. He’s fourteen. Where would he even get drugs?” Before I can tell her, she says, “It’s not nice to tell lies, Reese.”
Wyatt sneers like it’s funny.
I throw my hands up in the air. “This is unbelievable. This is genuinely unbelievable. Why don’t you just take his phone?
Just look at his phone. You’ll find everything there. Betting apps. Probably texts and Venmo payments from his customers.”
On the other side of her, Wyatt’s gaze is intense.
His arms hang long. As I watch, he flexes his fingers and then curls them into a ball.
Flex and then curl. “It’s not true,” he says, his voice toady, sucking up to her, and I wonder what he’ll do to get back at me for telling.
“You know I would never do something like that, Mom. I don’t know why, but she’s making it all up. I don’t know what I did to upset her.”
I push past both of them for the door. I walk out of the room. I go into the living room, moving with such momentum that everyone
in the room stops dead and watches. Emily follows me in, muttering something under her breath about how this isn’t done and
how we’ll talk about this later, as if I’m the guilty one, as if I deserve to be punished for telling the truth.
I spin around. I look her right in the eye and say, “I hate you. I wish you’d die.”
Emily grimaces. She draws physically back from my words. She takes a deep breath to try to get a hold of her emotions, because
people are here, people are watching. I turn away. I go running up the stairs, my feet pounding. I go into the bedroom and
slam the door. It doesn’t stay shut. It bounces back open and so I slam it again.
I stand in the room at the foot of the bed, shaking, taking slow, uneven breaths.
I meant what I said. I do hate her. I hate all of them. I wish they all would die.
I sit down on the edge of the bed, heart pounding, and imagine it.