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“Yes, you did. You said that everyone leaves me because I’m intolerable.”
“I said you had a shitty personality.”
“Thanks, that’s so much better.”
Okay, fine, I was harsh, but he didn’t have to go and insult me right after. Why does this always happen? Why do we oscillate from friends to enemies in a single day, in a single hour, in a single minute? It’s exhausting.
I close my eyes. I wish…
Lucas’s voice sounds like it comes from far away. “Look at me.”
“Go away,” I say.
“Charlie. Look at me.”
I don’t open my eyes.
Fingers touch my jaw, and I slap his hand away.
“Look at me,” he repeats, voice like granite, and the closeness of it jolts my eyes open. He’s holding himself above me, a knee on the couch. If he slackened his arms, he’d flatten me. “I could have anyone I wanted,” he says.
I don’t respond. I can’t.
“Anyone,” he repeats, as if I didn’t hear him the first time. “Anyone.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say there was a waver to his voice. As if he were trying to convince himself.
His face drifts close. “No one’s ever left me. I’ve never had to chase anyone. I always get what I want. I do. Do you understand that?”
I want to swallow. I can’t.
“You think I’m jealous of you? You think I’m jealous of your relationship?” He says the word relationship the way someone would say horse shit. “Do you really think I spend time thinking about you? Because I don’t, Charlie. Most of the time, I forget you exist.”
He starts talking about how he used to touch me like this when we were in high school. How he used to shove me around. How I was so short and skinny and tiny. How he could break me in half if he wanted. How he still could.
I know this speech. I know it off by heart — even if he says different things each time, I know the sentiment. I’m small and weak and contemptuous, and he’s big and strong and could destroy me any time if he so wished.
He goes on and on, and I let my eyes unfocus. His voice turns into white noise.
I think about the Monday morning I ran down the high school hallway, waving at him and wearing a huge smile, excited to tell him about the ghost pepper I’d bought online. He’d looked at me up and down like I was a squashed insect.
Eventually, he moves, so he’s no longer holding himself above me. I sit up. I stand up. I move away from the couch and pick up my shoes and pull them on. I let the door slam behind me as I head downstairs to meet my girlfriend.
CHAPTER TEN
Then
Misa Tanaka-Randall held her 13th birthday a month into high school and invited everyone in the year level. The excitement was palpable in the classrooms Friday afternoon, hours before the party was scheduled to begin. Teachers paused their lessons to reprimand us for not listening, but no one paid attention. We were too busy discussing what our first high school party would be like. Surely, we wouldn’t play the basic birthday games. We were too old for pass the parcel and musical chairs. No, we’d do grownup, teenage stuff. There’d be music. There’d be the opposite sex. Maybe there’d even be kissing.
Lucas and I arrived together. The party was in Misa’s backyard, which had enough lawn to play a soccer game, and there was a tin shed at the very back. Misa greeted us with two red plastic cups, the kind I’d seen in movies. We had a choice of drinks: cola, lemonade or orange juice. There were bowls of chips and lollies and chocolates.
After we filled our cups with lemonade, we joined the circle of other boys. Looking back at it now, the memory makes me both laugh and cringe. We stood around awkwardly and talked extremely loudly whenever a group of girls passed, puffing ourselves up and trying to impress them with stupid dares. Hey, I bet you can’t climb that tree. Hey, I bet you can’t jump that fence. Hey, I bet you can’t eat that whole pack of chips in one minute.
Some of the kids would act wild, as if they were intoxicated, when all they’d had was soft drink. Girls would stick together, tugging down their skirts and awkwardly adjusting their crop tops. Only Misa was really brave enough to come over to us and strike up a conversation, but she was the host after all. She wore a daisy-printed dress and had drawn on cat-eye eyeliner, and I thought she looked extremely grown up.
“You guys wanna play a game?” she said.
All of us nodded dumbly, except Lucas. Nothing ever made him dumbstruck.
