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He gestures to the open passenger door.
He’s quiet as he drives and, much to my surprise, he doesn’t take me home. He drives into the city, where the streets are rife with drunkards. Buskers strum as close as possible to the entrances of bars and clubs, and stumbling men and women with smeared lipstick shovel sloppy kebabs down their gullets.
As Chase pulls up before a Wetherspoons, a man is quite obviously pissing in a flower pot outside. He calls something to the bouncers, and he rushes to shove away his penis as they give chase down the street.
‘Wait here,’ is all Chase mutters before he gets out. Two new bouncers appear at the doors, and after showing them his I.D, I watch Chase disappear into the building.
Two minutes pass. Then five. Seven.
Fuck it.
I flash one of the bouncers my tattoo, hoping he’ll be exhausted enough to just let me in. He sighs at his colleague and waves me through.
Inside, it’s bustling with noise. Laughter and the raised voices of rowdy men greet me, but I barely glance at them. All I can think is Archer, Archer, Archer—
People start looking and pointing towards the glass doors at the rear of the pub, and I surge towards it. My hands push open the doors—
Chase has Archer by his collar, Archer’s nose leaking blood, as Chase sneers in his face, ‘If you touch her again, you fucking piece of shit, I’ll kill you.’
Archer cracks a bloody smile.
Chase loses it. He shoves Archer away and swings for him again, but then two bouncers move in and grab Chase by his arms. Chase pushes them off and holds up his hands.
‘I’m done.I’m done.’ He throws Archer one final, parting glance.And we’re done.
The bouncers escort Chase out.
Archer’s grin follows him, but it soon turns into a snarl as his eyes land on me. He doesn’t even say anything to me, doesn’t even acknowledge me.
He simply spits blood at my feet and turns back to his mates, who swarm him.
As if I’m nothing to him.
Nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
One and the Same
Archer doesn’t reach out to me for the rest of the week, and I’m too embarrassed to break the ice. But something lingers in my subconscious, something that wakes me during the night to check my phone, something that turns my food rubbery and my appetite to dust. My dreams are plagued with reels of him cheating, and every waking moment is spent in quiet torture as I relive that night, forcing my mind to fill in any blank spaces where a woman might have been wordlessly watching, her eyes too keen.
I only speak to my dad in passing. We haven’t talked about his illness, and he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to, either. Sometimes I wonder if that night ever happened at all, but then he’ll suddenly go silent, the laughter dying in his eyes, his face crumbling, and nothing I say will help him out of that pit.
Jan seems to help, though. She pops round most nights to watchPrison Breakwith him, because apparently, during the three days I was away for Chapter One, that became a thing. On Friday I’m in the kitchen baking cookies because I’m bored out of my mind when their laughter trails in, and I can’t help but smile. Before I go to bed, I lean against the living room doorframe and watch them.
Their eyes are glued to the TV, my dad’s slippered feet propped up on the pouffe, Jan curled in a blanket. For some time, I thought Jan would replace my mum, but I realise now that definitely isn’t the case. Because although they’re near enough to touch, neither Jan nor Kevin reach out to each other, needing to feel the other’s warmth. They’ve both lost someone they loved, and that knowledge lingers in the space between them.
They need each other’s company, if only to pretend.
Chase doesn’t bother me. Sometimes I’ll hear his voice from my room and I’ll peer out the window to see him joking with my dad, those stupid, beautiful dimples making something in my chest clench, but I turn away from him before I see him glance up to my room, his smile falling.
Archer doesn’t have to talk to me now, but he can’t avoid me at school.
Only, I don’t see him between classes, and he’s not sitting at his table in the cafeteria, either. Cassie and Demi, who both bombarded me with vulgar texts after Chase and Archer’s encounter, sit across the room with some girls, and each day, they make it their sacred duty to dig me out as I pass them.
Only Chase, Greg, Dave, and Brian sit at the usual spot, and their smiles are wide and welcoming as I sit with them. Even Chase, who I sometimes catch sneaking covert glances at me when he thinks I’m not looking, eases into casual conversation, about how horses are scary as shit and how Brian was pissed out of his head last week and rolled into sloppy dog poo and how close he may have come to being born a grain of rice and how terrifying that would be. And I smile and laugh and feed the jokes further with small sentences, and I wonder if we’re all just trying to force people to see a certain version of us—the one where we’re happy and content, the one where we save the falling apart until we’re alone. And I wonder if we were honest, with ourselves and with each other, that maybe the world would be a more forgiving place.
I cast back to something Kai said, about being unable to comprehend that everyone else has their own lives with their own thoughts, and I glance around the cafeteria and I wonder what all these people are enduring, what they aren’t showing the rest of us.
