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“Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”
Zane’s eyes were softer now. His shoulders didn’t carry as much weight, either.
“Besides, I guess I deserve it,” he added. “She’s been our friend for so long, and we’ve always kept it that way. On the surface, anyway.”
“I know,” I started in. “Still, you don’t deserve—”
“But man, you guys left,” Zane continued, uttering that last word with infinite sadness. “You both went to college, and it was just me and her for a while. I guess we were lonely. The two of us took comfort in each other. One night she came over, and… well…”
It took a few seconds for me to realize what he was implying. My jaw dropped open.
“Are you saying—“
Zane folded his hands behind his neck and nodded. “We’ve been doing it for years, off and on,” he said. “More off than on, really. But—“
“Holy SHIT!” Axel and I cried simultaneously.
Our friend simply shrugged. Zane was still staring at us, but now one corner of his mouth was curled into a half-smile.
“Can you blame me?” he asked. “I don’t blame you. All three of us did the same thing. I just happened to do it first.”
“Wait a minute,” squinted Axel. “When we left for school, Ariana hadn’t even had a steady boyfriend yet.”
“Thanks mostly to us always being around her,” Zane countered, “but yeah.”
Axel blinked. “So she was still… I mean, wasn’t she…”
“Yes. She was.”
My eyes went wide with the sudden revelation. Jealousy struck like a thunderclap.
“And so you…”
“Yes. I did.”
“ZANE!” Axel shouted. “You broke our pact!”
“We all broke the pact!” Zane boomed back. “All of us except Ari. She never made any pact. She was off-limits as far as we were concerned, but she’s always been free to make her own choices.”
The jealousy began eating away at me. It didn’t make him any less wrong, though.
“And now you’re saying she chose you,” I insinuated.
“Not at all,” Zane countered. He stared back at us for a long moment before I realized he was smirking.
“It looks like she chose all of us.”
~ 32 ~
ARIANA
“Wouldn’t you rather have a bigger place?” my landlord asked again. “A better place?”
The man stood in the doorway, his glasses resting crookedly on his already unsymmetrical face. He’d broken those glasses, I knew. One of his kids had sat on them over a month ago, and he’d fixed them with a 2-part epoxy he found on a shelf in the back of the shed. It was the same epoxy my father had used to glue the reflector on my bike after I’d snapped it off jumping ramps. The same epoxy he’d left behind, when my parents moved away.
“I mean, just look at the lighting in here,” he said, leaning inside and looking around. “It’s terrible.”
“So change it,” I challenged him. “I could definitely use some better lighting.”
