“So what is this?”
“Nothing,” he says, but his jaw is clenched and he’s watching Jason like he wants to jump him all over again.
“Ow. Backoff!” Jason says as they fall to the ground. Marcus knees Jason in the stomach, and my heart beats fast in my chest as I watch the whole thing.
“Marcus, whatisthis? What’s going on?” I ask, then wince as Jason tugs Marcus’s head by yanking on his hair.
“What the hell is this?” Mr.R says, returning from his phone call just before they kill each other. “I leave for five seconds and you two are acting like three-year-olds.”
He pulls Marcus off Jason.
“He started it,” Jason tells his dad, and as he stands, I notice he has a busted lip. The busted lip he told me happened during a soccer game a week before the accident. Just last month. It came fromMarcus.
“Is this usual?” I ask Marcus. “Is this a thing that happens with you two?”
I’m realizing more and more that there were many things Jason didn’t tell me about, things he let me believe even though they weren’t true.
“Only once,” Marcus says, barely looking at me.
I turn to Marcus, gesturing at the scene in front of us. “Hurry up and explain this to me.”
Marcus makes no move to do so.
“You’re being so ridiculous! I told you what was happening in all my memories,” I point out. “Even when it was uncomfortable.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” he says in a voice that I can only describe as dull, dead, indifferent. “I didn’t need to hear every twist and turn in you and Jason’s feelings for each other.”
I’m stunned. “Then you should have asked me to shut up! Instead of laughing along and hugging me but secretly resenting me.”
He turns to me, surprised, a look in his eyes that might be hurt. Then he laughs. “Wow. So all this time and that’s what you think I’ve been doing? That’s what you think of me?”
“You have no idea what I think of you,” I say, and he just laughs again.
“You know what? Fine,” I say. “I think you’re a fraud. I think you’re someone who has two faces, and for a while I thought your real face was the face you wore that night when we met, but now I think I was wrong.”
I look him up and down. “This,” I say, “is your real face. Youdon’tgive a fuck. Youdidn’tcare at all that night. Youhaven’tcared about me all this time.”
Marcus reaches out to touch my shoulder. “Zadie…”
But I shrug him off. “Don’t touch me. You don’t like beingcompared to Jason? No wonder. Because he’s so much better than you will ever be.”
I blink hard after what I’ve said. Because it surprises me too.
“I didn’t mean…” I start to rephrase, but it’s too late. Marcus has a hard look in his eyes.
“You’re right,” he says, and starts to walk away from me, hands in his pockets.
Every time he catapults back to my side, he just keeps walking again. Like he can’t stand to be next to me.
And finally, the gods put us out of our misery.
We’re sucked out of that memory, hurtling through space and time again.
The electric feeling in my brain finally stops.
I wake up in my own bed, in my own room, with even more questions now than answers, and a heart that is unexpectedly broken.
Twenty-Five
