by Callie Hart
She didn’t apologize for the way she treated me when she asked if I would visit Zen at the hospital with her. I didn’t expect her to, somehow. When she spins to face me, remorse all over her face, her hands fiddling fretfully with the tassel on the zip of her purse, and she says the words—
“I’m so sorry, Silver. I know saying sorry’s never gonna be enough to make up for the way I was…but I am, okay. I’m really sorry. And I missed you. I missed my friend. I don’t deserve it, but I hope we’ll be able to be friends again. Proper friends. The way we should have been before.”
—I find that I can’t bear the sincerity or the cautious hope flickering in her eyes. I want to run away from it all as fast as humanly possible and pretend that it isn’t even happening. “It’s okay. It’s fine, Hal. You don’t need to apologize.”
“Like hell she doesn’t,” Alex growls, stabbing his fork in her direction. “She loved you. She trusted you, and you let every single person in this school believe she lied about being raped, when you knew for a fact that it was true. You could have told the truth. At least some of the assholes in this school might have given her story credence if you’d come forward and told Darhower what you saw that night.”
A pit of agony burns in the center of my chest, spreading out, out, out, making it hard to breathe. I love Alex for what he’s doing; he’s standing up for me when no one else would, and I could hug him for it. But I also really, really need him to stop. I can’t do this now. I can’t do this here. “Alex—”
“No, he’s right,” Halliday says, nodding firmly. “I know what I did was worse than Zen and Melody. I found you covered in blood. I saw the state you were in. My statement could have made a difference, but I was a coward. It’s a little late, but I’m figuring out how to not be a coward now. High school makes us into the worst versions of ourselves, but I’m trying to do better.”
“I say you forgive her,” Zander says cheerily, popping a fry into his mouth. “Looks like she means it. And she’s so pretty. I hate to see a pretty girl cry.”
Alex pivots on the bench, glaring at the guy sitting next to him. “Why can’t you ever just shut the fuck up, dude? For real. This has nothing to do with you.”
Halliday looks like she wants to crawl under the table and die quietly, where no one will be able to see the life wilt out of her. I get where Alex is coming from. I’m not going to be able to just snap my fingers and forget everything that’s happened since Jake dragged me into that bathroom. I’ll never be able to forget it. But I think…I think I will be able to forgive Hal. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or next week even. But a day will come, probably soon, when I don’t look at her and only see all of the times she sneered at me over Kacey’s shoulder as the Sirens shoved past me in the hallway. I’ll see the silly, quirky, sweet girl I used to burn around Raleigh in the Nova with. I’ll be reminded of all the good times we’ve had, instead of all the painful, sad, angry moments, and the hurt of the past year will eventually soften. Until then…I’m willing to try.
I catch Alex looking at me in my peripherals and I know he’s worrying about me. This is a lot, after all. He’s seen me at my worst. He’s held the pieces of me together when I’ve fallen apart, and some of that heartbreak was Halliday’s fault. I’m not used to having someone look out for me, and it’s making my eyes prick like crazy.
“How about we just focus on the fact that you’re the captain of the football team now,” I say, clumsily changing the subject. Finesse has never been my strong suit. The less time we sit here, stewing in tension and guilt, however, the better. Halliday smiles meekly at me—a silent thank you for taking the pressure of her. From the smug smirk on his face, Zander’s perfectly happy to divert the course of our conversation in Alex’s direction. I can already tell that the guy has plenty to say about Alex’s new role and can’t wait to aggravate him some more. Alex, on the other hand, plunges the tines of his fork into his lasagna and spits out a string of curse words so colorful that the nerds sitting at the table next to us all trade terrified looks.
I don’t blame them. Alex is an intimidating guy even when he’s silent, expressionless and minding his own business. Irritated and giving his emotion free rein, my beautiful boyfriend is so savage and menacing that it’s a miracle the nerds don’t pack up their laptops and flee the cafeteria like a flock of startled lemmings. “I broke Travis McCormick’s middle finger,” he states icily.
“You should have seen it.” Zander chuckles. “The moron thought he could take on our boy all by himself. He was stupid enough to flip Alex the bird, and then…crack.” Zander mimes something snapping in two. “Fingers aren’t supposed to stick out at a ninety-degree angle. I haven’t seen anything that gross in a while.”
“And then he smacked you in the face? That’s where you got the bruise?” I ask. Alex looks over my shoulder, at the wall behind me. When I duck to the left, attempting to make eye contact with him, he shakes his head, looking up, suddenly intrigued by the paintjob on the ceiling.
“No. That was from after.” His voice is too light. Too airy. Clearly, he’s trying to skirt around a piece of information that he doesn’t want to part with. Unluckily for him, Zander’s all too happy to fill in the blanks.
“Kyle, Lawrence and Naseem tried to take him down and stamp on his head when Coach Foley left to take a call. One of them landed a punch. Kyle? I think it was the Kyle kid. That’s when I jumped in and joined in the party.”
“Yeah, you didn’t need to. I had the situation under control.”
“He really did,” Zander says, around a mouthful of burger. “He punched Lawrence so hard the fucker’s probably still seeing stars. Hey, man, can you shoot me over that ketchup?”
Alex grumpily snatches up the bottle of tomato ketchup and slams it down in front of Zander. The guy looks a little surprised, like he was expecting Alex to tell him to go fuck himself. “Thanks. Anyway, he cracked Lawrence’s head so hard, I think his helmet split in two. And that Naseem kid looked like he was about to run crying out of the gym when Alex dodged his right hook and kicked his knees out from underneath him. I would have left Alex to take care them by himself, but then three other assholes started throwing their weight around, and I decided to lend a hand. One against three’s pretty manageable odds. One against six? Even you’re not that good, Moretti.”
Alex and Zander have a unique relationship. I say relationship, because friendship just doesn’t feel right. Alex lets Zander speak to him in a way that would have him ripping someone else’s arm off, no doubt about it. He also looks like he’s on the verge of beating Zander within an inch of his life at other times, too. Their dynamic’s so complicated that I feel like I’m suffering from whiplash whenever the two of them are together.
Alex pulls a face, shoving his tray away, his food stabbed at, poked and prodded, but otherwise untouched. “You should have let them kick my ass,” he says grimly. “Break a few bones. That way Foley wouldn’t be able to force the captain’s badge on me.”
Zander closely inspects a fry, holding it up to the light like it might contain some secret hidden message inside of it. “Friends don’t let friends get the crap kicked out of them, homie. Unless they’re being released from juvie and you don’t want to suffer through a bullshit emotional goodbye with them. In that situation, it’s perfectly acceptable to bribe another inmate to lynch them unexpectedly, so said friend doesn’t want to speak to you ever again.”
Alex rolls his eyes. Next to me, Halliday opens up the brown paper bag she brought with her to the table, gingerly offering it out to me. I already know what’s inside. The smell hits me before I manage to take a peek. Halliday always used to make lemon bars for her brother’s bake sales. Three or four times a year, I’d show up randomly at her place, conveniently ‘just in the area,’ and Halliday would have to make an extra batch of lemon bars to replace the ones that I inhaled.
She must have planned out coming to sit with me today. She labored in her kitchen last night to make these, a
nd the whole time she must have been freaking out about what I was going to say to her. She probably pictured me grabbing a lemon bar and smashing it into her face, soap opera style. She has an overactive imagination like that. I take one from the paper bag, giving her a small smile in return.
Okay, so this feels weird, and not entirely uncomfortable, but…as I look around the cafeteria, I notice something remarkable. People are talking to one another, laughing over memes, gesticulating wildly as they laugh and chatter. They’re all engrossed in their conversations, and their late math assignments, and their crush that’s sitting on the other side of the room. None of them are looking at me.
For the first time in a very long time, I, Silver Parisi, am not sitting on the outside, looking in. I’m just another random student at Raleigh High, and that feels fucking incredible.
“This is nice,” Zander says, winking at me from across the table. “You and blondie are sharing sugar. Alex hasn’t tried to kill me in well over five minutes. I don’t wanna get ahead of myself over here, but I’d go so far as to call this progress.”
21
ALEX
Monty: Come by the bar tonight. This doesn’t need to be a thing, kid.
The first night I worked at the Rock, I was shown how to clear the waitress’s stations. I was shown how to operate the POS and ring in orders. The bar tenders gave me the lowdown, explaining how they’d tip me out well if I herded people to drink at the bar instead of the floor sections. And at the end of the night, after busting my ass, making sure I did exactly what I was told, Monty ushered me into his office, where a bald guy with a moustache was lying unconscious on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and he educated me on what my job would involve after the bar had closed and the punters had all left for the night.
I was to be the errand boy. The bag man. I was also the guy who did most of the heavy lifting. Turned out the guy with the moustache was missing a couple of fingers thanks to the pair of pliers Monty kept in the top drawer of his desk. As he sat behind a bank of screens, scrolling through security footage, he lit up a cigarette and tasked me with collecting up the guys dismembered fingers and putting them in a Ziplock baggie filled with ice.
“Couldn’t do as he was told,” he’d said, blowing a smoke ring and then poking his finger through the middle of it. “Mack here knows he’s supposed to make a drop on Tuesdays. If he doesn’t make a drop on Tuesday, we run low on product for the rest of the week. I don’t wanna be scrambling to keep customers happy just because one of my employees can’t follow simple instructions or get up off his lazy ass to do his fucking job. You understand, right, kid?”
At the time, I nodded, kept my mouth shut, and put Mack’s fucking fingers into the Ziplock without flinching. I recognized the situation for what it was: a test. Monty had wanted to apply a bit of pressure, to see how I’d react to the sight of such flagrant blood and violence. What he hadn’t realized was that I’d used that evening as a fact-finding mission, too. I learned a lot as I listened to him talk.
Monty reached down into hell and plucked me out of the darkness. He saved me from being assigned to yet another shitty foster care situation that was bound to go bad, and I was seriously fucking grateful for that. But I quickly discovered that he had a vindictive side. He didn’t like being disobeyed, and he didn’t like the people he considered his property acting like they had a mind of their own. When someone did that, it inevitably ended in bloodshed. Almost immediately Monty established himself as an unforgiving benefactor, whose punishments were nothing short of swift and ruthless.
It's with this knowledge in mind that I formulate a three-word response to Monty’s text—one that I know is going to irritate the hell out of him.
No. Fucking. Way.
I like my fingers. I like the way they’re attached to my fucking hands. I need them to play guitar and make Silver come. And I didn’t just forget to make a run on a Tuesday. I handed a bag that was very precious to Monty over to a man who Monty apparently hates. God knows what was really in that stupid fucking bag, or why half the criminals in the state of Washington were trying to get their hands on it. Honestly, I don’t even think Monty knew what was so valuable about it. He just knew that everyone else wanted it, and he was willing to do whatever it took to make sure he got it before anyone else could.
I fucked up his entire powerplay, and for that Monty’s gonna want my head on a stick. He can tell me ‘this doesn’t need to be a thing’ as many times as he likes. This is most definitely a thing for him, and if I’m stupid enough to step foot inside his office, I might as well resign myself to the fact that I won’t be leaving with the same number of appendages that I walked in with.
My cell buzzes in my pocket again as I hurry down Main Street, hiking the strap of my gig bag a little higher on my shoulder. I’m not interested in Monty’s response, but I check the phone anyway, more out of habit than anything else.
Silver: You nearly here? I’m two seconds from walking out…
I smirk to myself, imagining the anxious look on her face. She makes a point of radiating this unstoppable, self-possessed, fierce attitude all the time, but every now and then I get to see an uncertain side of her and it’s frankly fucking adorable. It makes me want to wrap her in cotton wool and protect her.
Me: Arriving any second. Cold feet?
She replies immediately.
Silver: FROZEN
When I enter the diner, rushing in out of the cold, the bell above the door jangles, announcing the arrival of a new customer to the five or six people seated in the booths. Silver looks up from her phone screen, her nerves giving over to relief when she sets eyes on me. The black Billy Joel t-shirt she’s wearing looks new; I don’t think I’ve seen it before. Her thick, gorgeous hair is down for once. She’s wearing a touch of make-up, too—just a little lip gloss and some mascara. Evidently, she made an effort to look presentable before she left the house, which makes me feel shitty since I definitely did not.
The ripped jeans and the plain black t-shirt I snagged from my clean laundry pile two seconds before I ran out of the apartment just now have seen better days, and my zip up hoody has gotten so thin that it barely counts as an extra layer of clothing. For the first time, I regret not making more of an effort to look good for a girl. I make a mental note to order some new threads online. It’d be quicker and easier to just bite the bullet and head to Bellingham to pick some stuff up from a store but fuck that noise. Shopping makes me break out in hives.
“Hey.” Silver slides over in the booth, chewing on her thumb nail. I dump my guitar on the opposite bench next to hers, then sit my ass down beside her, taking hold of her wrist and forcefully guiding her hand away from her mouth.
“They serve food here, y’know. No need to resort to autosarcophagy.”
“What the hell’s autosarcophagy?”
“Self-cannibalism. People are weird as fuck.”
Silver whimpers, grimacing as she slumps against me, hiding her face against my chest. “I think I have tennis elbow,” she groans.
Running a hand over the back of her head, petting her, I disguise my smile in the waves of her hair. “No, you don’t.”
“Yeah, I do,” she argues.
“Try again, Argento.”
She pinches my side, growling like a feral tiger cub. “Fine. Mom asked me to look after Max. Sounded important. If I don’t head over to her place now, she’s probably gonna lose her job.”
“You really think I don’t know your mom’s still in Toronto? You can quit mumbling weak excuses into my t-shirt. They aren’t gonna get you anywhere. We told Cam we’d do this, so we’re doing it. End of story.”
Across the other side of the diner, Harry spies us sitting in the booth and waves, beaming from ear to ear. He makes a beeline for us, carrying a gargantuan basket of fries. “This is gonna be great, kids,” he says, setting down the food. “We haven’t had live music here since Wesley Daniels quit playing the harmonica on account of his asthma.”
<
br /> I like Harry. He’s the kind of guy to include me when he calls a group of teenagers kids. It makes me feel wholesome, which is really fucking entertaining. Wholesome is something I have never been. He’d probably come up with another less generous name for me if he knew the fucked-up, dark shit that goes on in my head. Or the fucked-up, dark shit I do to the sweet, innocent-looking girl sitting next to me in the booth, for that matter.
I reward his endearing naivety by giving him a genuine smile. “We’re honored that you’d have us.”
“Actually Harry, I’m so sorry to do this to you, but I’m not feeling we—”
I clamp my hand over Silver’s mouth, widening my smile. “Don’t listen to a word that comes out of her mouth. Silver’s been stuck down by a bout of nerves. She’s gonna be fine once she gets up there and starts playing.”
Silver groans through my fingers, which makes Harry frown worriedly. “You’re sure? I mean, you don’t have to play if you don’t want to. It’s not a problem. If you don’t think you can do it, the juke box is fine.”
I’m not planning on uncovering Silver’s mouth but she sticks her tongue out, wetting my hand, and it feels fucking gross, so I release her. “Parisi,” I warn. “What’s the big deal. You’ve played for me before. Your students, too. There’s no one here.”
She casts uncertain eyes around the diner, nervously plucking at the hem of her t-shirt. Finally, she adopts a resigned expression, snagging a fry from the basket in front of us and shoving it into her mouth. “Fine. I’ll play. But if I smash all of these fries and then throw up all over the stage, I will not be held accountable.”
Harry accepts her terms surprisingly quickly. “You’re a star, Silver. Your dad’s gonna be so proud.”
