“Yeah, well, I wasn’t in the mood to see him today.”
Or any day.
“You’re never in the mood. Whatever, it’s your funeral. Have you met your new roommate yet? I?—”
Val started coughing, and a flash of panic sparked through me as I began rubbing his back. “Are you sick again? Have you not been taking your meds?”
Val brushed me off with impatient hands. “I’m fine,” he rasped. “A bug flew into my mouth. Ugh, fucking gross.” Hecleared his throat a few times while I laughed at him, pretending that the fear his coughing fit had dug up wasn’t still lingering.
“Anyway,” Val said, making a sour face. “Have you met your roommate yet?”
I plucked a blade of grass from the ground and started fiddling with it. “No. Not sure why anyone would transfer here, especially after the semester’s already started.” I didn’t really give a shit who my roommate was anyway because it didn’t matter—I probably wouldn’t like them regardless of who they were.
Everyone who came to Ashbrook was an elite asshole.
“I overheard dad saying something about a fight, but who knows. You’re probably gonna just spend all your time outside anyway, so I guess it doesn’t really matter what he’s like.”
“Yeah, probably.” I’d always preferred to be outside and away from people. Everyone was either boring or they wanted something from me, and because we’d grown up under the cozy umbrella of wealth, every interaction was a calculated move. Nobody took the time to get to know someone unless there was something to be gained. Genuine feelings towards others didn’t really exist.
It was the same in my family.
Love was a transaction, conditional and coercive; it didn’t truly exist. Love was wielded as a weapon whenever necessary, a way to get something if I gave something.
So I gave them hell.
I got it in return, but I didn’t really care and Val was the exception. He’d always been different from Everett and our parents—an outcast in their eyes, just like me.
Too different—in a bad way—to be fully accepted into the circle.
We had each other, and that was enough.
“So…I keep hearing stuff about what happened last spring,” Val said softly. I glanced over at him, tensing up. He was picking at a loose thread on his shorts and not looking at me as he spoke. “Maybe we should—I dunno, maybe we should try to talk to Dad again? I feel like?—”
Resignation edged with a weary sadness coiled in my chest as I took Val’s hand. “Hey. It’s okay. I’ll be out of here soon. It’s not like I got in any real trouble for that, especially since there was no way to prove it was me. So just…just let it go.”
Val gripped my hand in both of his. “How can you say that? After everything he’s done, don’t you want?—”
“I don’t care.” And I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Val brought it up at least once a month and tried to get me to talk to Albert again, but if he didn’t believe me our entire childhood, why the hell would he start now?
There was a long moment of quiet, and I stared off at the dark clouds on the horizon. They were getting thicker and rolling in fast.
“You don’t care about anything,” he finally said. Val’s sigh was filled with something hopeless, and that cut into me deeper than I wanted to admit.
“I care about you.” I bumped his shoulder with mine.
“Yeah, and that’s it. You don’t care about anyone else, you don’t care about consequences, you don’t care about yourself?—”
I stood up and brushed off the butt of my pants. “Okay, I’ve heard that enough times that I already know how it ends. I’m starving, I’m gonna grab some food and see if my new awesome roommate is here yet.”
Val stayed seated and looked up at me with big, dark eyes. “I’m just saying. I worry about you.”
He didn’t need to worry and I wished he wouldn’t, but I understood completely because I worried about him constantly.
“Yeah, well, there’s nothing to worry about so stop wasting your energy.” I crouched beside him, then booped him on the nose. “And if you keep flapping your mouth, you’ll just catch more bugs.”
Val rolled his eyes as I stood up, and when I held out my hand, he took it and let me haul him to his feet. He was a lot smaller than me, and even at nineteen he looked much younger. He’d been a premature baby with a lot of health issues that still lingered to this day, but he had the strongest spirit of anyone I’d ever met.
He was the only reason I put up with the awful family I’d been adopted into. The only reason I knew that real love did exist.
