Chapter 2 #2
“It's for a school project,” I say.
“Don't you bullshit me. I am not the one, and today is not the day. The whole town is talking about this and there's an entire police investigation!”
“Nobody has to know,” I say, looking at Felix, who takes my cue and uses his glassy gray-blue irises to deliver pitiful but irresistibly beautiful puppy eyes.
“And they better not!” Dinah shouts. “Because guess who they'll come after if they find out? Me! Because I'm responsible for you! Everybody will walk past this house and say, ‘That's crazy old Dinah's place! She can't control her idiot nephew!'”
“You're thirty-seven. That's not old,” I say.
“Shut up—but thank you. You're gonna pay me back for every single piece of makeup you stole from me. And the day you graduate, you're out of here.”
“I'll pay for it, Ms. Dornoff. It's my fault, too,” Felix says.
“No, no. Not a dime from you. Wade needs to stand on his own for once and fix his fuckups. Sorry to say, but y'all will probably never even see each other again after you graduate,” she says as she closes the door. “That's just how life happens.”
“Whatever,” I say to Felix. “She likes to stir shit between people when she can.”
But (and this is a big but) at the same time, I've never thought much about what happens after graduation. What if it's true that I won't see Felix again?
The door flies open once more. Dinah marches in and snags her blouse away from us, then slams the door behind her.
“If the cops are looking for us, maybe we should delete the videos,” Felix says.
“I don't want to! Ugh, fine,” I say, pulling up our account and deleting the evidence. There go all our work and glory before we could even get a hint of positive attention.
“At least we know who to call now if we need someone to bail us out,” Felix says.
We've gotten this far with the gnome, so we might as well finish it. Besides, we've got to commemorate the last night of summer vacation.
Once the gnome is sufficiently dragged up, we pull out Felix's camping tent that he brought in a duffel bag. We have a campout every year on the night before school starts. It's obviously meant for outdoor camping, but who in their right mind would sleep outside on a night like this?
When we settle into our sleeping bags, I start thinking about what Dinah said. “Do you think she was right about us never seeing each other again?”
“No way,” Felix says without skipping a beat.
A brief, faint flash glows through the tent and quickly disappears. A roll of thunder murmurs in the distance. My heart tightens. Both of us stay quiet until the second peal of thunder rolls through the sky.
(Please make it go away)
“Shit,” Felix says, looking at me.
(You're my little champ)
I start to take quick, sharp breaths. I checked the forecast today. I check obsessively. They said all sun and no storms.
It's not the first or last time they'll be wrong.
“Tetris time,” I say, pulling it up on my phone. Playing Tetris is the only way I can semi-get through a storm. It's not a perfect solution, but dragging the blocks into the right spaces still prevents me from dwelling on the lightning and thunder.
“It's late August. Too hot for tornadoes,” Felix tells me as I dive into the game.
“Tornadoes can come from hurricanes, and those come in August.”
Felix rolls his eyes. “Obviously not a hurricane.”
Cold comfort. Every storm is the same to me. Like a growling junkyard dog behind a wobbly fence.
Now rain pours furiously on the house. The game disappears from my screen and a low-battery symbol pops up.
“Oh, come on,” I say, tossing the phone.
“I have an idea,” Felix says, telling me about something he saw on social media. There's a garment called a thunder jacket that you can wrap tightly around dogs that are having an anxiety attack during storms or fireworks, and supposedly it's effective.
“Okay, okay, thunder-jacket me, then,” I say, desperate for anything at this point.
Felix curls up behind me and squeezes his arms around me.
His breath feels warm against the back of my neck.
I feel his pecs press into my back, his thick biceps cushioning my own scrawny arms. He started going to the gym at the beginning of the summer because his dad was worried all the time he spent coding on his computer was weakening his muscles.
“Is this working?” he asks. Another flash of lightning and I shake.
“I don't know.”
“Okay, kill, fuck, or marry,” he says, which is an interesting way to distract me. “Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Pennywise the Clown. You go!”
I try to gather my thoughts as the thunder continues shaking the house. “Umm. Kill Michael Myers because he's boring and has no conversational skills,” I say. “Leatherface can cook, so I'd marry him.”
“But he's a cannibal and you're a vegetarian.”
Good point. We are fundamentally incompatible diet-wise. That would be a strained marriage. “If we married, he'd have to learn some vegetarian recipes for me, right?”
“So that leaves Pennywise the Clown?”
“He probably splooges cotton candy,” I say, which could be a good thing if you like cotton candy.
Felix laughs. “He's got big hands. You know what that means.”
I've got to credit Felix for being brilliant enough to distract me from my PTSD using the sex properties of a demonic clown.
“And he's played by Bill Skarsg?rd. I mean…”
“Mean what?” Felix asks.
My body gets tense again. Where was I going with that? Why? That was a dumb thing to say.
“Nothing.”
“Do you think Bill is hot?” he asks me dead seriously.
Now I'm panicking about both the storm and this. “No, no, no.”
“There's nothing wrong with that, right?”
Shit, shit. He thinks I'm gay. Gotta rebound from this somehow. Maybe lighten the mood with a joke.
“Says the guy who is big-spooning another guy.”
Felix lets me loose and rolls back to his side of the tent. “You're the one with a poster of a shirtless guy on your wall.”
I sit up. “What?”
“Nothing. See you in the morning.”
He plops his head down onto his pillow, scratching the back of his wavy brown hair once before going completely still in a way that seems angry.
I don't even notice until now that the storm is moving on. The lightning has become faint again and the thunder grumbles faintly, like it's missed me this time but will come for me again.
I lie down and continue to watch Felix, in hopes that I'm overthinking this and can sleep it off.
Instead, I can't stop thinking about how good it felt when he held me.