Page 145 of The Friend Scheme
Good, I think.He should feel bad about this.
“Well,” I say. “I better head home. Um, what are we going to do about the flights?”
He wipes his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Obviously I’m not going to hang out with you anymore. I think getting on a flight together would be so unbearably awkward.”
“Right. Take your ticket. I’ll move my flight to later on tonight.”
He picks up his phone. He can do that from here. He emailed my ticket to me earlier, so I already have it on my phone.
This sounds like a good plan.
“So you really don’t want to see me again?” he asks.
Not bloody likely.
I think back to when I first met him. When I ran into him in the bathroom. It wasn’t a random meeting. He was in there, on purpose. To pick a target.
He chose me.
I get why, but it still hurts.
“I don’t think I can. I can barely even look at you right now.”
He nods. “Okay. Well, for the record, I want you to know that, for me, this friendship is real. I know you might not believe that, and you have no reason to ever trust me again. But I really do consider you a friend of mine. If you ever decide you want to be friends again, you can always message me. Okay?”
“How would that even work?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the son of a cop. I’m the son of a criminal. I’m sorry if I’m being too on the nose, but that’s a horror show waiting to happen if I’ve ever heard one.”
“You’ve thought we were on opposite sides before, and you made it work.”
Yeah, but I honestly feel like the cops are a step further than his being a Donovan. Sure, we’ve been at war with them for the past year, and it’s been tense since the fifties. But people like me have been fighting with cops forever. It’s been nonstop. There is no circumstance where we will totally get along.
“This is different. We can’t be friends. We’re fundamentally incompatible.”
His face falls.
I think that’s a good note to end on, so I pick up my backpack. He just watches me.
I sort of hate this. But for some reason, a part of me is hoping he’ll stop me. That he has more to say.
He doesn’t, though. He just sits there, looking crestfallen.
That’s where I leave him.
I walk away and don’t look back.
I didn’t cry until I was seated on the plane.
It’s funny, the smallest thing set me off. I boarded and got my seat. I’d already returned to the hotel, gathered my things, and then got an Uber to the airport. The whole while I was thinking about what went down, obviously. But I managed to keep it together.
And then, once we were in the air, I looked at the seat beside me.
It was empty.
