“We’re the same height. Why are you moving everything?”
“You’re on top of the steering wheel,” Charlie says, tilting the side mirror one fraction of one degree. “If the airbag goes off, you’ll break your ribs and puncture a lung and die.”
“Are my mirrors going to kill me too?”
“I mean, yeah, if you need them to reflect anything other than the side of your own car.”
“My car has a backup camera.” So does Charlie’s car, obviously. This should not be a new concept for him.
Charlie looks at him like he’s never heard anything so dumb in his life, opens his mouth, shuts it with a click of his back teeth, somehow managing to silently convey that Simon’s basically using tarot cards and vibes to maneuver his car.
Charlie drops an arm along the back of the passenger seat, looks over his shoulder, and backs out of Lian’s driveway in a way that leaves Simon feeling faintly insulted.
Heroically, Simon doesn’t ask where all Charlie’s opinions on vehicular safety were when he rammed his old truck into the car of a certain guest director six and a half years earlier.
“So,” Charlie says, when they’re heading east on Franklin. There’s some weight in that syllable, enough to clue Simon into the fact that he’s been cornered. At least now he knows why Charlie insisted on driving him home: Charlie’s going to give him an insulting lecture about how Simon had better not tell anyone what he saw in Lian’s garden. Simon thought Charlie hadn’t seen him, but he must have been wrong.
“You’re leaving the show, aren’t you,” Charlie says.
It takes Simon a second to recalibrate his irritation. “You see, the problem is that nobody ever told you how secrets work. Nobody was supposed to tell Alex, and Alex wasn’t supposed to tell you, which means you weren’t supposed to let me know that she told you. Hope that clears things up!”
“You really are leaving, then?”
“Nothing’s set in stone,” Simon says, even though it nearly is.
“You were going to leave without giving anyone a chance to saygoodbye. What, we’d come back in August and you just wouldn’t be there?”
“I guess there would have been a press release or something, like when Samara left.”
“That isn’t the point, Simon!” Charlie’s hands flex on the steering wheel. “You’ve worked with these people—dozens of people—for years, and you weren’t going to give them a chance to say goodbye?”
The idea of saying goodbye to everyone involved with the show makes Simon want to check himself into a special hospital by the sea. “Most people leave shows in between seasons. The cast and crew find out when they find out. This is very normal and you’re the one making it weird.”
Charlie pulls into a car wash parking lot, hits the brakes, and turns to face him. “But you had a chance to be better! You could care, just a little, about people’s feelings.”
And that hits too close to home because Simondoes. He does care what people feel. He obsesses over it, getting so anxious that it’s all he can think about. When he’s super anxious, he stops being able to think straight about how normal people react to things. Other people’s emotions become illegible. And then he really does fuck up.
Tonight at dinner, Simon probably spoke twenty words. Twentywords. And he wasn’t even that anxious, at least on his own personal scale. It had practically been okay. But being in a group of people—or sometimes being around anyone, and sometimes just sitting alone in his house and remembering people exist—makes some fundamental part of himself shut down, and the best he can hope for is a quiet retreat into his mind, and that everyone will read his silence as dickishness and not literal mental illness.
“Uh,” Charlie says, and Simon realizes he’s been sitting still, his face in his hands, for a while now.
Simon makes himself lower his hands. “You donotget to judge me. Not about that.”
“Do you—don’t fucking kill me, Simon, but I have to ask—do you need medicine right now?”
What Simon needs is a time machine to go back and hide those prescription bottles before Charlie could see them. “What I would love is not to be in a poorly lit parking lot with a man who’s yelling at me.” Simon’s just being a dick—he isn’t afraid of Charlie—but he needs this to end.
Charlie recoils as much as he can in the driver’s seat of a car. “Sorry,” he mutters, and puts the car in gear.
“Jamie doesn’t know I’m thinking about leaving,” Simon says when the car is moving. “So if you and Alex and whoever else you told could just keep it together when you see him at the wrap party, that would be great.”
He’s expecting Charlie to pounce on that—Simon’s being a bad friend, not even caring about Jamie’s feelings—but he doesn’t say anything, and the silence lasts until he’s parking in Simon’s driveway. It doesn’t occur to Simon until he’s letting himself into his house that now Charlie has to walk home.
Simon can’t sleep, which is no surprise. Historically, it takes him five to seven business days to process one single unanticipated emotion, and tonight he’s been handed a slew of them.
He’s seriously considering borrowing Jamie’s copy ofA Scorched Landto see whether dragon romance might be the mental anesthesia he craves, when his phone buzzes. It’s his niece. If it’s one o’clockin California, that means it’s four in the morning in Connecticut, but Nora is seventeen and has the sleep cycle of a bat.
Nora:Dad wants to know if you’re coming to my graduation
