“Yeah, of course.”
“Do you . . . I mean, do you like it when people use she and her when they talk about you?”
Her eyebrows knitted in the center. “Honestly, not always. But he doesn’t really fit right now either.”
“What does?”
She sighed. “I’m not sure. Both? Neither? Something else altogether? Maybe they and them, eventually, after I tell my parents. She and her work for now. They feel okay. I’ve been reading a lot about it all lately. There’s this term—?nonbinary. It means someone who doesn’t identify as only male or female or maybe identifies as both or neither. So . . . I guess that’s me? For now, at least.”
“Nonbinary.” I rolled the term around in my mouth. “Sounds kind of badass.”
She laughed and nudged closer to me. “I know how I feel, but putting that into words is hard.”
“And that’s okay. You know that, right?”
She nodded, but that little pucker remained between her eyebrows.
The memory makes my stomach hurt and I release a huge sigh.
“I’ll tell them, okay?” Charlie says now. “I will. It’s just—”
“It’s another change,” I say.
“Yeah. I’d just gotten used to them knowing about us. And then they’ll ask me why.”
She bites off the word like it tastes bad. Even wrinkles her nose a bit.
“Charlie, we’re fine.”
She nods, rubbing her palms on her jeans. “Of course we are. Best friends forever.” Then she gets up and grabs her ball from the rack. She hurls it down the lane, nothing sloppy about it, and decimates all ten pins.
“Spare,” she says as she sits down in the chair in front of the computer. As if I don’t know.
We bowl through our next few frames in silence. I’m playing like crap, pitching it into the gutter more times than not. Anger sparks in my gut every time her sparkly black ball hits a pin, and I let it ignite and grow into a flicker and then into a flame. Because this is exactly what I didn’t want to happen when we broke up. All this . . . fuck, all this awkward, passive-aggressive bullshit. And being angry with Charlie about how our relationship is going down makes sense.
It becomes clear that Charlie’s going to win. We barely talk for the rest of the game and I hate the silence. For once, I want to hear my own voice, the edge to it as I scream. I feel something building, rising up in a heated rush through my toes to my legs and up my middle. When the game is over—?187 to 162—?Charlie must see the red settling into my cheeks as she ties on her Converse. She yanks up both of our pairs of bowling shoes and turns them in at the counter without a word. I come up behind her, holding out her leftover licorice whips, and she yanks those from me too.
“What the hell, Charlie?”
“I am not the one you’re mad at,” Charlie says, chucking the candy into the trash. “I know you’ve had a crappy day and it sucks, but even if all this shit with Owen and Hannah wasn’t happening, I am not the one you’re mad at.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know what it means. This is all you, Mara.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She closes her eyes and bites her lower lip. “Look. We should just go. I’m tired and so are you and you probably need to go home and talk to your mom.”
“I don’t want to talk to my mom. I want to talk to my best friend.”
It slips out before I can stop it, this cold, callous tone I’ve never used with Charlie before. Not even in the first few days after we broke up.
She narrows her eyes at me, but her glare is more hurt than pissed. I feel a prick of guilt underneath my burning skin, but the heat is just too damn good right now. Too damn distracting. I fold my arms and wait her out. This is Charlie and me. We don’t fight. Neither of us can stand it for very long, and dammit, I do not want to be the one to break. Not tonight.
Just when I think she’s going to crack, to soften and take my hand like she always does, she moves past me and out the door without another word.
Chapter Six
