Page 8 of Longing for the Minotaur
I rise to my feet. Banon follows me with his eyes but doesn’t deny it. Then I turn around and go the rest of the way up the stairs.
He doesn’t follow me.
The rest of the weekend is miserable. Banon and I studiously avoid each other. Our parents shoot us odd looks when there’s silence over the dinner table. On Monday, Banon goes home, even though he said he was going to stay for the whole week.
He doesn’t come back.
One night, I’m sitting on the porch in my big coat and texting with one of my friends from school, who’s also gone back home for the break, when the sliding glass door opens. Marissa steps out, wearing her coat, and sits down on the porch beside me.
I put away my phone to be polite.
“What’s going on, girl?” she says in that voice she uses when she’s trying to be hip with me. “Talk to me.”
“About what?” I’m not sure where she’s going with this.
“What happened with Banon? Clearly something did. You two haven’t spoken a word to each other, and then he went home.”
Ugh. I knew this was going to come up eventually when he peaced out for the week.
“It’s nothing. Just… hashing out old stuff.”
“What kind of old stuff?”
I grumble. I don’t want to open this wound again.
“Just about back in high school. He wasn’t really great to me, you know.”
“He was a bit full of himself.” She cocks her head. “Not as much now, though.”
Little does she know, I’m still nothing to him.
“Yeah, all right,” I say, noncommittal.
A pregnant silence passes between us as I fiddle with my phone in my pocket.
“You know, I met Banon’s father in a really unusual way,” Marissa finally says. “He was my bully in grade school.”
“What? You married yourbully?”
She nods, rubbing her cheek. “Yep. He was so mean to me because, well, he liked me and didn’t know how else to show it. And he didn’t want the other kids to notice he had a crush, so he was extra mean to me.” She chuckles. “We met again not long after I graduated college. We were both in line at the DMV. The first thing he did was apologize to me.”
“Wow. I guess you forgave him, huh?”
“I mean, he was a kid at the time.”
“True,” I say. “I’m glad you had him while you could.”
I don’t really know what this has to do with my situation, though. Unless she knows that…
No, I don’t think so. I’ve always kept hidden very carefully how I feel about Banon. If I outed myself, that could do terrible things to my family.
Marissa pats my back. “Me too. Anyway, I hope maybe you can forgive that idiot kid of mine for what he did when he was younger. It’s not representative of who he is now.”
I don’t want to tell her that just last night he told me we weren’t family. That we’ve never had that. That we’re just strangers bound together by our parents’ marriage.
“Okay,” I say with a shrug. Marissa pats me on the shoulder.
“Want some leftover pie?”
