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“Me too.”
“Truth,” Jason says.
“Is it easier for you to talk to me over the phone?” I ask.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Why?
“Sometimes, I feel like I’ve got to put on this face. I feel like people expect me to be a certain way. And then I just…become that.”
“An asshole?”
“No, I mean…perfect. My dad is always like…you’re either a winner or a loser. There’s no in-between. And I get it, he expects big things from me, but…I don’t know.”
“It sounds like a lot of pressure.”
“Yeah. Exactly. Right now, it’s like…I’m just talking to air.”
“Air that talks back.”
“Something like that.”
We lapse into silence, and for a minute, I just listen to him breath on the other end. I can feel the air between us, through the phone cords.
Through my curtains, the sky starts to glow orange.
“Pick dare,” I tell him. “Truth or dare?”
“Dare,” he obliges.
“I dare you to hang up.”
There’s a long silence on the other end and, for a moment, I think he did it.
“Jason?”
“…I dare you to hang up.”
I can’t help but grin.
18
Donovan
The water sucks.
So does sunshine.
Cloudless days. Salty air.
I judge all of it from Healing Touch’s stern.
The sun beats down on me. My uniform shirt is made with thick threads, and it’s not long before I’ve got splotchy sweat stains on my pits and my back. I’ve got a jar of polish beside me and a washcloth in hand.
Polishing these monster boats is the worst task in the marina. It’s pure manual labor. No way to speed up the process. Just hours of rubbing hard, clockwise circular motions into the fiberglass, and then repeating the same motion to clean the wax off.
A fucking pain in my ass.
