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“Well…do you or not?”
“I guess,” she says.
“He’s not funny, Ally. Don’t laugh at him,” Darci says.
She shakes her head, then goes back to eating and not bothering to look up.
Darci’s mom changes the subject to prom court and limos and whether or not Mark and Grace would let Ally come if she just went with her friends. Ally nods and pretends to be interested in the conversation, but I’m pretty sure there’s not a chance in hellthey’ll let her go. She either doesn’t care about going, or she knows it too—it’s written clearly on her face.
After breakfast, we all pile into my dad’s Nissan. I make sure to get in on Ally’s side of the car so she ends up in the middle. Darci looks at me with revulsion, like I’ve committed some unspeakable atrocity just by getting into the vehicle. It’s obvious that she wants to say something…anything that will get me out of the car, but she comes up empty-handed.
My stepmom puts on some Christian rock channel, and something cringy plays through the speakers about some dude who wants to get it on with Jesus or something. Darci buries herself in her phone, her fingers flying furiously over the keyboard. I take advantage of how distracted everyone else is and move Ally’s bag so that it’s covering her hand, then hook her pinky in mine.
“You look really pretty,” I whisper in her ear.
She smiles but doesn’t look at me or say anything.
I glance over at Darci one more time, then lean down and kiss her quickly on the shoulder. But when I look up, I meet my dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
Shit.
I lean back in my seat and resume my usual bored, slumped against the window position for the rest of the drive.
When we get there, there aren’t any doughnuts.
My dad and Lydia shake hands with people and make small talk while I follow behind them. People I don’t really know tell me how nice it is to see me there and that I should come more often, and Ipretend to care before we all file into the pews and Darci and Lydia leave to join the choir.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” my dad whispers to me once they’re gone.
“Praising the lord?”
“You’re going to get all of us in trouble,” he says.
I look at Ally, sitting just a foot away from me. She’s chewing on her lip and staring straight forward.
“Are you going to tell them?”
“No. But you need to knock it off.”
“Okay,” I say.
He shakes his head, and we both sit back in our seats, fully aware that I’m not going to knock it off.
People are fucked up. And incredibly disappointing.
I spent four years at this school a loser. Unknown at best, detested at worst until they all decided I was a murderer. Then, they all knew exactly who I was. Everyone suddenly claimed they’d been paying attention to me for years and that none of them were surprised.
Those days between when we found her body and when we knew my arrest was inevitable—they feared me. They gave me a wide berth in the hallway and averted their eyes.
And it felt…good.
Now that I’ve been to jail, but it turns out I’m not a murderer, something changed again. Some of them are definitely still terrified, but a lot of them are intrigued. They all seemed to want a piece of me today.
I can’t decide how I feel about that. I mean…I’d be stupid not to take advantage of the girls breathing down my neck, but I thinkI liked the fear better. It was genuine and warranted, at least as far as they knew, and I felt powerful.
This new thing where I’m suddenly interesting after all these years because I went to jail for something I didn’t do? It’s a weird reminder of how I’d been nothing before and how I’m actually still the same, and I think maybe I’d like to give them something to be afraid of again—maybe when I’m done with Ally.
I park at my mom’s house and walk inside. I’ve always spent Thursday nights here, so I figure I might as well fall back into that routine—try to feel normal, even though I don’t feel normal at all.
