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Hunter, sweet Hunter, how can he hate himself?
Something inside me, something I didn’t know I had, begins to pump through me. I scoot toward him. It puts me super close, but I feel like maybe that’s okay for now.
“I wish you wouldn’t hate yourself,” I tell him. “You’re way too good of a person to hate yourself.”
“I’m not a good person,” he insists, continuing to type. “I’ve done a lot of stupid shit.”
“So has everyone else in the world and, trust me, not a lot of people acknowledge that.” I give myself a second to collect myself. “I mean, look at me. I’ve been accused of murdering my parents and, to be honest, I could have …” I trail off as I admit the painful truth aloud.
He turns toward me, his eyes searching mine. But I look away, too ashamed to believe that.
“You really don’t believe that, do you?” he asks. “Please tell me you don’t.”
I lift a shoulder. “It wasn’t fully proven that I didn’t do it. There just wasn’t evidence that I did. And everyone has always thought I did, so …” I release an unsteady breath.
“Trust me; not everyone else thinks you did it. Maybe people have said that to you, but I’m guessing that’s a result of your stupid bitch of a cousin. People are such damn followers. One person says something, and everyone else is like, ‘oh yeah, that has to be true,’ because god forbid they think for themselves. Then they’d actually have to discover who they are as a person, and they’d actually realize how much they suck. Well, either that or they can’t dig any deeper because they don’t have the emotional intelligence to think past the basic layer of first thought.”
I angle my head to the side. “Where the heck did that come from?”
He lifts a shoulder. “Ms. Collinworth, one of my art teachers, was really into philosophy and psychology, and she was always talking about stuff like that in the hopes that we’d dig way deep into our psyche and be able to splatter our emotions all over a canvas.”
“Did it work?”
“It did for a while, but her methods were a little too out there for a lot of parents, particularly religious ones, and the school ended up letting her go after a semester.”
“That sounds like a small town thing.”
“Oh it definitely is,” he assures me. “Honeyton has a very poor education system. It’s why I can’t wait until I graduate and get the fuck out of here. I feel like college will be a lot more like “Ms. Collinworth’s teaching style.”
“It probably will if you go to a good college.” I feel a little uncomfortable talking about this since I know I won’t be going to college. Well, unless I can save up some money, like a lot of money. And since I have zero dollars to my name, it’s looking pretty bleak. “Do you know where you want to go yet?”
“Not yet, but only because Jax, Zay, and I have to agree on the location,” he says. When I give him a puzzled look, he adds, “We agreed to leave this shithole of a town together, so wherever we end up, we all have to be on board.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes sense … What’re some of the choices?”
“New York, L.A., Seattle,” he says. “We obviously want to live in a bigger city.”
“That sounds cool. What’s your first choice?”
“Oh, Seattle, for sure. New York’s on the bottom of mine, but Jax wants to go there, so we left it on the list.”
Interesting that Jax likes New York when he’s mentioned a few times that he doesn’t like being around a lot of people.
“What about Zay?”
“Zay’s still up in the air about all of them.”
I bob my head up and down like I understand, but I don’t because I won’t ever have the choice to move to a big city with endless possibilities.
“What about you?” he asks curiously.
My brows pull together. “What about me?”
He smiles, lightly tugging on a strand of my hair. “What’re you planning to do after you graduate?”
“Oh … I’m not sure yet. To be honest, I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Really?”
