Evil all along, p.17
Evil All Along, page 17
part #8 of The Last Picks Series
Before my brain could catch up with me, I followed.
Keme must have noticed because he stopped and turned around. I stopped too. He waited. And then he turned to the bus. I followed again. He stopped. It’s like something off TV, a dull voice said at the back of my head. It’s like a skit we practiced.
“What are you doing?” Keme said.
“I don’t know.” But that wasn’t the right answer, so I said, “I’m going with you, I guess.”
A surprisingly adult weariness spread across his face. “Go home, Dash.”
But when he took a step, I did too.
“Knock it off,” Keme said as he turned to face me again.
“No.”
“You’re not going with me.”
“I am.” My own laughter startled me. “I know this is crazy, but I actually think I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
Another choreographed pair of steps.
“Dash!”
“No, let’s do this,” I said. “Come on, I’ll buy the tickets.” I started to step around him. “Where are we going—”
The shove caught me off guard. He was so much stronger than he looked, and I almost lost my balance. Where his hands had connected with my chest, a blunted ache was already taking shape, and I realized with something like shock that I was going to have bruises.
“You’re not going with me,” he said, the words so low I had to strain to hear them.
Another laugh worked its way out of me, shakier than the first one. “It’s a free country, Keme, I can go wherever I want—”
When I took another step, he shoved me again. Harder this time. I stumbled, my sneaker caught a crack in the sidewalk, and I fell. I landed hard on my tailbone, and the thud sent a jolt of pain up my spine.
“Hey,” the bus driver shouted, but his voice was muffled. “What’s going on down there? I’ll call the cops.”
Keme stared down at me. His eyes were blank, like he wasn’t seeing me. Rage made his features almost unrecognizable. I’d joked a lot over the last year and a half about being scared of Keme, but in that moment, the emptiness of his expression was the first time I’d truly felt afraid of him.
My chain of thought was automatic, the result of years of telling myself the same thing over and over again—because it was so often true, and because it had become truer, or seemed truer, the more I thought it. I was bad at relationships. I was bad at people. I could never read a situation right. All the years I’d spent with my anxiety spiking every time someone texted to invite me out, or every time I got cornered at a party, every interaction that made me question what I was supposed to say or do, what the other person wanted from me. It had been worst with Hugo, because there had been so much at stake, but that feeling of confusion and uncertainty and lack of confidence in my ability to have a healthy relationship—romantic or otherwise—went back as long as I could remember.
So, this was my fault. Again. I’d tried. I’d shown up for Keme, literally. I’d been brave, pushing myself beyond my comfort zone, because of what Indira had said. And what had happened? I’d made a fool out of myself. Keme hadn’t been waiting for someone to show up and love him. He hadn’t wanted a friend—or, at least, he hadn’t wanted me. The doubts from the last few days crept in again: we’d never really been friends, and all the bullying had been because I was exactly what he’d told me—a joke.
And then, through the pain of a bruised butt and bruised pride, I heard myself saying only a few minutes before, It feels like everyone has abandoned you.
His dad, who had died when he was a child.
His mom, who was always disappearing into her pills, or into the next man, or into herself.
Bobby.
Millie.
And Indira saying, He’s not trying to tell you something. He’s trying to ask you something.
I planted my hands on the sidewalk.
“Stay down,” Keme said. He was opening and closing his fists at his sides, and in the cold air, his breath burst from him in white shreds.
“No,” I said. The word came out sounding surprisingly confident—surprising to me, anyway. But everything in that moment felt surprising: the rawness of my scraped palms, the frozen grit of the sidewalk as I pushed myself up, even the ache where I’d landed. “I’m going with you—”
Before I could get upright, Keme shoved me down again.
“Hey!” The Greyhound driver honked the horn. “Hey! You don’t knock it off, and I’m leaving without you!”
“Go home,” Keme said. He’d moved. Or I had. Or maybe the bus. Because now he was standing in front of the headlights, and his silhouette was crisp-cut against the rest of the night. “Go away! Leave me alone!”
I shook my head. I gathered myself. “I’m going with—”
He shoved me down again. Harder, this time. And when I hit the ground, the force of the push flattened me, and my head cracked against the sidewalk.
Shadows moved over me. Clothing rustled next to me. Someone’s breathing sounded close and wet and labored. In the distance, air brakes popped, and gears made a grinding noise. There was something hot at the back of my head, but my neck was cold.
“Just leave me alone,” Keme said, his anger thinned out by—what? “I just want you to leave me alone.” And then he rose from his crouch, and I realized the shadow over me had been him, and I stared up at the ice sheet of stars.
He was asking me a question.
Over the rumble of the bus, the sound of his steps clipping away came back to me very clearly.
The thought came again with dreamlike lucidity: He was asking me a question.
Somehow, I rolled onto my side.
His dad.
His mom.
Millie.
Even—if only in Keme’s mind—Bobby.
I focused on getting on my hands and knees. That sense of wetness curled along my nape, ran warm then cold over the side of my neck. The bus was rattling so loudly that the noise seemed to take up all the space inside my skull, and when I moved, the world seemed to zoom in and out greasily. Darkness irised shut at the edges of my vision. Adrenaline, that little writer voice said at the back of my head. And maybe a touch of shock.
But somehow, I got to my feet.
Because he was asking me a question.
And I was going to answer it.
My vision was still doing that weird zooming thing, and for what felt like a long time, I couldn’t seem to find him. Then I did. He was lit from the side by the glow of the headlight. His face was twisted with an expression familiar from long hours of watching me be unbelievably terrible at Xbox—like I was too stupid to survive. He made a drawn-out sound in his throat, the pitch rising toward the end, and took a threatening step toward me.
“I’m not leaving,” I said. The words hung in the emptiness of the night, like the string of a tin can phone stretching out between us.
Keme took another of those challenging steps. “Why are you so stupid? I don’t want you to go with me. I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody.”
I nodded. It made silent fireworks go off inside my head—no pain, only those bright, disorienting flashes.
Keme advanced again. “Don’t just stand there!”
I probably should have said something to that, but I seemed to have run out of words.
He reached me on the next step. Over his shoulder, the bus seemed to float, lit up inside with low-wattage light like the world’s grimmest UFO. The driver had gotten out of his seat and was staring at us. And maybe it was the concussion talking, but I could have sworn he was holding a carpet sweeper like a baseball bat.
“You’re a loser,” Keme said. His breath was hot in my face, white, whipping away on the breeze. “You’re so freaking sad. Do you have any idea how pathetic you are?”
He shoved me, but his heart seemed to have gone out of it—it was barely a push, and even in my current condition, it didn’t move me. He pushed me again, and this time I caught his wrist.
“I don’t need you,” Keme said. His voice was coming apart the way paper did when it got wet. “I don’t need anybody!”
My hand was still latched on to his wrist. I pulled, and he came.
“I hate you,” he said. “I hate you!”
He shoved me again as I drew him into a hug.
For one long moment, he was a bundle of wiry muscles and raised hackles and, God, so many elbows. And then he collapsed against me and started to sob.
Chapter 17
Believe it or not, the people at Cold Stone are not thrilled when you come inside covered in blood. I guess, to be fair, it’s probably a health code violation. They did still let me use their restroom, but you could tell they didn’t like it, and attitude goes a long way in the service industry.
“Stop being such a baby,” Keme said as he dabbed at the back of my head with a paper towel. His heart wasn’t really in it, though— the words were snotty and loose. His eyes were so red and puffy that I was surprised he could see what he was doing, and his hands trembled against my hair. A few seconds later, he mumbled, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I still had that lucid brightness that might have been a warning sign. “I’m actually planning on being a huge baby about this.”
Keme’s groan might have qualified, barely, as subvocal.
“I’m going to make Bobby do so many sweet things for me.”
His sound of disgust, on the other hand, definitely moved into the vocal range.
“I’m going to make him give me a million kisses.”
“Why are you like this?” Keme moaned, but mostly to himself. “Why can’t you be a normal gay who can actually help me with my hair?”
“Keme, that’s such an ugly stereotype. And I did help you with your hair. Remember when Indira had to cut off that chunk in back because I got chewing gum stuck in it?”
To judge by the look on his face, Keme did, in fact, remember it, and I was quickly losing whatever pity points I’d earned.
The laceration on the back of my head had stopped bleeding, and aside from the beginning of a massive headache, I felt normal. Ish. Between the two of us, we got each other moderately cleaned up. Because I was now the walking wounded and, for a few precious hours, had the moral high ground, I insisted Keme let me buy him some ice cream, mostly so I wouldn’t be the only one eating ice cream. Also because I wasn’t sure the last time Keme had eaten.
In late October, Cold Stone didn’t exactly have a line out the door, so it wasn’t long before Keme and I were settling into a booth, me with a chocolate-dipped waffle-cone bowl of Birthday Cake Remix (extra sprinkles), and Keme with the boyest of boy flavors: Peanut Butter Cup Perfection.
We ate in silence for a while. Keme couldn’t look me in the eye.
He put his spoon down abruptly and said, “You might have a concussion.”
“I don’t think I do.”
For some reason, that made him roll his eyes. “You need to see a doctor.”
“Maybe.”
He picked up the spoon again and poked at a peanut butter cup. In a low voice, he said, “Bobby’s going to hate me.”
“Why? I tripped stepping off the curb, and you were nice enough to stick around and help me.”
“You can’t tell him—”
“That’s what happened, Keme. That’s what I’m going to tell him.”
Keme went very still and covered his eyes. His whole body tensed as he struggled. When he spoke, the words were so distorted they were almost unintelligible. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “No more apologizing, got it? We’re friends; friends don’t get hung up on the little stuff.”
He shook his head.
“You’re still my friend,” I said. “Am I still yours?”
It felt like a long time before he whispered—pleaded, really—“Dash.”
“And I love you.”
Honestly, the best part was I could actually see his adolescent boy horror rising at the prospect of feelings. He made himself smaller in the booth. His shoulders came up. He pressed his hands more tightly against his eyes. But you’ve got to give it to Keme: he doesn’t back down. Finally, he managed to say in a breathless rush, “I love you too.”
I let him dangle for about five seconds. Then I said, “That was literally the best thing of my life. I’m going to remind you, like, ten times a day that you told me you loved me. God, I wish I’d gotten it on camera.”
He dropped his hands. His eyes were wide and even redder than before, but a lot of the guilt and self-loathing had been replaced by, well, the usual mixture of teen indignation and outrage. “What is wrong with you?” he asked and then attacked his ice cream.
For a while, we sat in silence.
“It was the rent money,” Keme said. He was speaking into his ice cream, his gaze fixed on the dish—probably, I guessed, so he wouldn’t have to look at me.
“What?”
“That’s why I got in that fight with JT.” And then, as though I might be an idiot: “I didn’t kill him.”
“I know you didn’t kill him. What happened?”
“Mom said she’d paid him. The back rent, all of it. She gets a check every month, and I gave her some—” He stopped and blushed and then, as though daring me to ask follow-up questions, said, “I had some money for Homecoming tickets. I wasn’t going to use it, so I gave it to her. But then she told me it was too late, and they’d gotten evicted even though she paid the rent.”
“Had she paid it?”
He pushed his ice cream around morosely. “I don’t know. She’s not good at that stuff. She forgets.” His eyes came up in another challenge. “She’s not a bad person.”
There were so many things I wanted to say to this boy who was trying to defend the woman who had abandoned him. They all got caught in my throat, though, so I only nodded.
“I went to talk to JT about it. But he said she’d never paid, and I said she had, and he said if she didn’t have a receipt, then she hadn’t paid, and—and I lost my temper.” He picked at the vinyl banding on the table with his thumb. “I was already mad.”
He didn’t have to say, From seeing Millie and Louis, for me to know what he meant.
“My guess is Channelle was stealing rent money,” I said. “It’ll be hard to prove because she and JT are both dead, and I don’t know if JT was in on it.”
“He wasn’t,” Keme said. “He was fine until she came along.”
That was interesting, and I wanted to follow up on it, but there was something else to address first. “I don’t want to make you mad, but Foster might have stolen your mom’s money. I found a stash in the camper. Of course, he might have gotten it from Channelle—did you know they picked him up for the murders?”
Keme snorted. “He didn’t kill anybody.”
And he sounded so intensely self-satisfied that a sneaking suspicion raised its head.
“Keme,” I said.
He looked up from his ice cream.
“Did you beat Foster up?”
Keme’s got a great poker face, but you could practically see the testosterone radiating off him.
“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to know.” A hint of bitterness slipped out in spite of my best efforts as I added, “It would have been nice to get one solid lead on this murder, though.”
Neither of us seemed to know what to say to that.
I was the one who broke the silence, of course. Keme could have sat there all day and not said a single word. Literally.
“Do you want to talk about Millie?”
He glared at me over a peanut butter cup.
“I’m proud of you for telling her how you feel,” I said.
He made an unspeakably rude gesture that you definitely aren’t supposed to do in a Cold Stone.
“I know it’s not going to make you feel any better right now,” I said, “but I think you should be proud of yourself too. It takes a lot of courage to do what you did.”
That made him screw up his face into an even angrier look. He dug around with the spoon for a while before he finally burst out, “What does that mean?”
“What?”
“Why’d you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
He kicked me under the table.
“Oh my God, Keme!”
All I got, though, was a scowl.
“I was just thinking, though,” I said, “that the downside to acting like an adult, and to being brave, is that once you do it, well, you kind of are supposed to keep doing it.”
He ate some more ice cream before grudgingly asking, “What does that mean?”
“It means Millie wants to talk to you. And I know it’s going to be hard, but I think you might want to hear her out.”
“I don’t. She already said everything she needed to say.”
“If you believe that, you obviously don’t know Millie. More to the point, though, you two used to be inseparable. You were best friends. I’m not saying your relationship isn’t going to change, but it’d be a shame to throw it all away because you can’t get over a little embarrassment at having your pride hurt.”
Keme scraped his spoon around his now-miraculously empty ice cream dish. “This?” he said. “You acting like an adult? It’s so gross.”
“Thank you.”
He made a disgusted sound, tossed his spoon in the paper cup, and shoved it away. He stared out the window. He looked like every teenage boy in every teenage movie who is considering doing something he absolutely did not want to do.
“Being vulnerable is a two-way street,” I said into that gloomy, hormone-filled silence. “Yeah, it was very brave of you to tell her how you feel. But it takes a lot of bravery to listen, too. To sit there. To open yourself up to the other person when they need to tell you something. Because it means leaving yourself unguarded. And it means you can get hurt.”
Keme shook his head again, but it was softer this time, more tired than anything else.
“No one can blame you for feeling the way you do,” I said. “You have every right to be hurt, to be angry. The world isn’t a fair place, and it’s been particularly unfair to you.” I tried to think of the best way to say it, but I was tired and drained and possibly concussed, so I said, “But you don’t have to feel that way forever. Not if you don’t want to.”
