Page 24 of Endless Anger
So goddamn predictable.If they were going to be creeps, they could at least be creative about it.
Lucy crosses her arms, her face falling with their departure. She lifts her chin, glaring daggers at me. “Why did you have to do that?”
“Oh, sorry, were you enjoying their sleazy attention? I can ask them to come back if you’re into that.”
“I’m obviously not,” she snaps, reaching out to jab me in the chest. She reeks of Malibu and pot, and her sapphire eyes are a little glassy, but somehow she manages to focus on me. “But I had it under control,pretty boy. I don’t always need you coming to my rescue. I’m not a damsel in distress.”
“Didn’t say you were,” I reply, taking her elbow and heading off in the opposite direction those two guys went in. Farther away from thefire, the soft pop music playing from a portable speaker somewhere, and the crowd.
I drag her into the sunflower stems, forging a path through the overgrown flora. We’ve practically had this place memorized since we were kids, but I doubt she’ll be able to find her way out in her current state.
At first glance, she doesn’t seem or sound that off, but I can see it: the subtle flush of her cheeks, the wide stare, and how she keeps looking down at her feet so she doesn’t fall over them.
Small things you only notice when you’ve spent a lifetime watching.
Still, I didn’t step in tosaveher. There’s no doubt in my mind that if she needed to, she could easily take care of herself, even if she often chooses the path of no resistance. If it were her life or theirs, I want to believe she’d pick hers.
Stepping in was forme. Because I’m a jealous piece of shit who doesn’t want to see her smile at anyone else.
But I can’t admit that. I don’t even know if she feels the same, and if she doesn’t?
There’s no way she’d ever forgive me for ruining our friendship and making things awkward.
Eventually, we come to another much smaller clearing, and I stop walking, dropping to my ass as she seems to contemplate going back the way we came.
“Aplana emergency officials don’t know the full scope of this field,” I tell her, leaning back with my palms on the loose dirt. “It’d take them a while to find you.”
My uncle Grayson’s been cultivating the massive sunflower field for as long as I can remember; it was a project he began specifically to make my aunt Violet’s green thumb happy and then evolved into some sort of game with the Aplana Island city officials, who consider the plants an invasive species.
If anything, that only incentivized him more to make it bigger. Thicker. The entire back of the Jameses’ house is obscured by the giantyellow and green plants through the autumn, providing us a place to escape when we really need it.
Lucy doesn’t turn around, crossing her arms over her chest as she continues staring into the stems. “You can’t keep doing this.”
I pull my phone from my pocket, opening some random game. “Doing what?”
“This. Cutting in when I’m just trying to live my life.” She spins around, stumbling a bit, and throws her arms out to the sides to catch her balance. “You’re making it hard for me to exist.”
“And here I thought I made your life easier.”
“No.” She stares at me, her blue eyes shadowed by the moonlight. “Not for a long time now.”
Despite the dark sky, I can see every soft line of her face, and I hate it.
The divide between us that cracked open when I graduated in the spring seems to grow infinite in this enclosed space. I’m watching it split, standing on the edge, ready to jump, but there’s no time before it becomes insurmountable.
I suppress the curdling in my stomach, ignoring how her words feel like a serrated knife to my gut as she walks over, dropping to the ground beside me.
“How am I supposed to get through this school year without you if I’m reliant on you always being around?”
“But I am around,” I say. “Just because I’m not there?—”
“You being somewhere on the island isn’t the same as youbeing there with me.” She sighs, extending her legs and folding her hands between her thighs. Her feet swing from side to side, as she’s unable to ever fully sit still. “We’re barely a month in, and I can feel the difference. I didn’t mind that people were no longer speaking to me or certain clubs were shunning me, because it’ll all be over next year, right? We’ll go to Avernia, as long as we both get in, and the people here will forget I ever existed.”
Impossible, I think, gritting my teeth.No one could ever forget you.
Still, the other part of her sentence fills me with dread, bleak and hollow.
“In the meantime though, I think it’d be smart if I learned to live without you a little bit. You’re not around to take notes for me or stop by and make sure I get somewhere on time. It just feels like I should take some responsibility, don’t you think?”
