What was up with me and these jerks in my life? It was like God wanted me to meet the best and worst in extremes. There was no in-between with anyone I met.
“You good with that, Jason?” Mr. Cooper asked him.
From behind me, the guy I honestly couldn’t stand said, “Yup.”
Yup.
Of course this would happen.
I had survived my grandmother’s funeral yesterday. My sister was graduating tomorrow. I guess I could make it through this too.
“Great,” I found myself mumbling.
Today was going to be a good day. Somehow.
* * *
I could counton one hand the number of people in my life that I genuinely hated.
Most of the people I could technically call my family.
Honestly, that was pretty much it.
Hating someone for me meant that if they needed a transplant and I was the only person in the world capable of giving them what they needed, I still wouldn’t.
But I would more than likely give a complete stranger a kidney if they were nice and asked.
To me, there was a difference between disliking a person and hating them. There were plenty of people who I disliked for one reason or another—they were selfish, mean, rude, stuck-up, and any combination of all of those things. But if they absolutely needed something that I had, chances were, I would give it to them. Maybe I wouldn’t smile as I did it, but I would do what needed to be done. If it was the right thing to do.
I’d met a lot of assholes in my life—I was related to most of them—but Jason… Jason was in a league of his own.
That was saying a lot.
I was pinching the tip of my nose so I wouldn’t be tempted to pinch him instead that afternoon.
“Why did you do this?” I asked him slowly, trying my best to sound like Ripley, all nice and calm even though I didn’t feel either emotion… On the inside, I’d kicked him in the balls at least four times in the last five minutes.
Maybe even twenty times.
The smirking-shrugging-useless papercut lifted his shoulders like he didn’t know why he had clearly ignored the instructions I had left him to do while I’d been at lunch. They couldn’t have been any more precise.
Two coats of primer.Two coats of primer. Two. Not one. Two.
And what had he done?
One coat.
And in the time it had taken me to go to the bathroom, talk to Mr. Cooper about what had happened at the funeral, and for him to tell me that he was pretty sure he’d found a replacement for the mechanic leaving, Jason had gone ahead and started adding color without giving the primer enough time to dry. I wasn’t even sure where he had gotten the paint from.
It wasn’t even a rookie mistake. It was an idiot mistake.
I had told him at least five times we had to let the primer dry for at least twenty-four hours after the final coat. Not ten minutes. Especially not when one coat hadn’t been enough in the first place.
I could feel my left eyelid begin to twitch already. I took another deep breath through my nose and then let it out of my mouth. He’d done it on purpose. I knew he’d done it wrong on purpose. I’d bet my life on it.
“It looks all right,” he tried to say, turning his back to me to do who the hell knows what.
My eyes took in the wheels and unease slithered right around the collar of my shirt. “Jason, it needed two.”
