“You did meet a girl. Me.” I was being deliberately obtuse, but it seemed only fair to make him suffer a little while his parents both fought over him because they actually wanted to see him. The rising bile lodged itself in my throat and burned before I could push it—and the thought that caused it—down again.
“I led her to believe that things went a little better between us than they actually did.”
“You mean you didn’t tell her about calling my family messed up and denouncing my pettiness?” I wagged my finger at him. “You shouldn’t lie to your mother, Adam.”
“Thank you for the morality lesson. The point is I told her about the girl in the apartment next door, and it made her happy. I like making her happy, and it will make herreallyhappy if I show her a picture of you.”
“Why me? Why not find a picture of a girl online and tell her it’s me?” Then I rolled my eyes at his nonverbal reaction. “Do you have a condition? You blush a lot.” Of course my comment only made him redder.
“You’re...unique-looking.”
Ah, so he had tried to find a random girl online. I swished my waist-length braid over one shoulder in a dramatic flourish. “Beauty is its own punishment sometimes. I’m constantly told I could be a model if I were taller and had a different face and body.” When he didn’t so much as crack a smile, I dropped my arms with a sigh. “I believe I was offered an apology.”
That same uncomfortable look thinned his mouth again. Apparently, apologizing ranked up there with asking for favors. “I don’t know anything about your family, so I was wrong to make assumptions about them.”
We both stared at each other for several seconds.
“That’s it?” I asked. “Do you ever get in trouble?”
“What?”
“Forget it. You obviously don’t, because you suck at apologizing. You should have just told me you were sorry that I was offended. That way you take no responsibility.”
He waited for me to say something else and when I didn’t, his nostrils flared and he turned to walk away, obviously deciding that putting up with me wasn’t worth his mother’s happiness.
I tried to remember how I’d felt when my family first imploded. A volatile mix between fragility and... Nope, it was all fragility back then. The thick skin I’d had to develop over long months volleying between lawyers, bitter accusations, and even uglier admissions until I found that indifference served me much better than the hot and cold emotions ever had.
Adam was clearly in the kill-all-humans stage of the process, so pushing his buttons the night before probably hadn’t been the wisest course of action on my part. And to be fair, I didn’t know anything about his family either.
If I let him storm off, I’d be stuck alone until Shelly came back, and that was reason enough to call out to him. Or it should have been, except there was an uneasy sloshing in my stomach reminding me that he wasn’t the only one who’d overstepped last night. “Look, I’m sorry, too, okay, for the crack about your dad getting a girlfriend.” I shifted my jaw to one side and willed my insides to settle. I sucked at apologizing, too. “Just take your picture already.”
Adam stopped but didn’t come back.
It nagged at me, how quickly he’d managed to reverse our situations. I was the one apologizing to him. “Will it help if I promise to be nicer in the future?” At least I could try. I was always trying.
Adam did come back, if somewhat reluctantly.
“And maybe we should avoid talking about our parents,” I said.
“Fine by me.”
“So are we gonna do this thing?”
His phone was out in a second, and his thumb hovered over the screen. He didn’t take a picture.
“Could we go outside or something?” He looked around, gaze snagging on the flickering light bulb a few yards away. “It’s...”
“Super bleak and depressing in this hallway?”
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”
As if I had any more promising offers in my dad’s equally bleak and depressing apartment. “Can you drive?”
Adam shook his head. “I turn sixteen in February.”
“My birthday’s in January,” I said. “What about your brother?”
“I’d rather stay in the hallway.”
