“How can you afford to pay for everyone’s breakfast when you don’t even have a job?” Mackenzie, who decided to sit opposite me, asks.
“How do you know I don’t have a job?”
She looks away for a moment, embarrassed. “Do you have a job?”
“Do you?”
“I do. I work for—”
“Didn’t ask, don’t care,” I respond, and she laughs around the word, “Bitch.”
Then she sobers and adds, “You didn’t answer my question.”
I tap my nose and sip my coffee. It’s not the best but it will do.
“You’re super evasive,” she comments, her smile fading now. “In a bad way not a good way.”
I stare her down, wondering what her deal is. “And you’re super nosy, in a bad way… not a good way.”
She looks away, out of the window, and chews on her lip. After a moment she apologizes but it sounds insincere and forced. “I’m not the best company in the mornings. I don’t like not knowing things.”
“I can tell,” Nokosi says, having my back as always.
She ignores him and continues. “I just find it all a bit weird.”
“What?” Bobby asks, looking at the girl who is sitting to his right.
Joseph and Mack’s friend, the giggler, are sitting opposite Nash on the other table looking over with inquisitive gazes.
“That a new girl rolls into town and throws actual cash at a fancy school that costs thousands per semester, a furnished house in the richer side of town, yet no job to speak of.” She shrugs her shoulders.
“Have you been putting your nose in my business?” I ask, suddenly seeing Mackenzie in a darker light, one more threatening. I completely underestimated her.
“It’s what I do. I can’t help myself.”
“Don’t go down this road, Mack,” I warn, gritting my teeth. “You won’t like what you find.”
“Is that a threat?”
I shake my head to clear it. What am I doing? Mack is obviously good at getting information. The last thing I need is her poking around where I don’t need her poking and provoking her isn’t going to entice her to stay away. “It’s a private matter, one I don’t like talking about.”
“I can tell,” she rebuts, shrugging her shoulders like she doesn’t give a fuck.
This bitch… she’s starting to piss me off. But she’s dangerous. She asks all the right questions. She’ll be an excellent detective one day. “You want to know where and how I have money?”
“Yes,” she replies, and I take back what I said about her being pretty. She’s fucking ugly and I hate her. But I also need her off my back. I don’t like that she’s not intimidated by me.
I start to lie, “My mother—”
“Your mother the environmentalist that nobody has ever met? Your mother who doesn’t work where you said she does or if she did it’s under a different name and also… if she did, she wouldn’t be earning nearly enough to throw the amount of paper bills you threw at the school to get a place.”
I decide at this juncture it’s best to tell the truth. Maybe it will make them all so uncomfortable they’ll never talk to me about it again. Dad always said the most convincing lie is one based on the truth. Well… let’s hope he was right. Although this one is all true. Sadly. Such is the tragedy that is my life.
“My twin sister and I were assaulted…” Nokosi tenses and everybody’s eyes swing to me. I’m not being loud but I’m not being quiet enough so that nobody hears. Luckily her smug face starts to fade into something a bit softer, more understanding. “It was brutal, it scarred us both for life. The money we have is the compensation from the assault. They were loaded. They paid well to make us disappear. End of conversation.”
“You said they…” she points out and I want to reach over and punch her in the face. “There was more than one?”
I nod bitterly. “There were five of them and two of us. Happy now?”
The glass of OJ in Nokosi’s grip cracks and then shatters. That took some serious strength. Orange juice spills over the edge of the table and between his legs but he doesn’t see it. His eyes won’t leave me.
He looks devastated, angry, upset. All of them swirling around his eyes.
“I am so sorry,” Mackenzie breathes as Bobby rushes to clean up the OJ. “I should never… I feel terrible. I can see I’ve made you… I’ve made us… I do this, okay? This is why I don’t have friends. I’m not a trusting person. I’m too paranoid. I hate myself for it, but I live for it. I’m sorry. So sorry.” She reaches for my hand, but I pull away. I’m not taking comfort from this bitch who put me on the spot in front of people I consider friends. “If there’s anything I can do to… I just…”
“Stop,” Bobby tells her softly. “Stop talking.”
The waitress places our food down, but nobody starts to eat. Suddenly everybody has lost their appetite, everybody but me.
“Get the fuck over it, guys.” I stab a piece of bacon with my fork and pop it into my mouth. “At least now you all know why I’m a fucking psycho. And let me just tell you, if you breathe a word of that to anybody, I will pluck your eyeballs out and feed them to the person beside you.”
Nobody knows what to say. It’s awkward now. I made it awkward.
No… Mackenzie made it awkward.
I look at her again. “Satisfied?”
“No. I wish you’d robbed a bank to be honest.”
At that I laugh lightly and wag my brows at her. “Maybe I did.”
Willow
“We need to tell Lilith about this,” Nokosi declares.
We’ve put three coats of white paint over the dirty garage walls and I don’t have anymore excuses to keep him to myself. That’s so bad isn’t it? Wanting my sister’s boyfriend all to myself…
I think he knows that’s my game too because he’s been keeping his distance ever since I told him I wanted to kiss him. It’s crazy thinking that was almost a week ago. He’s been around twice since. Not nearly enough.
“I know,” I murmur, looking at him with puppy dog eyes. “But not yet. Please. I just need more time to think. If she knows we’ve been hanging out, one, she’ll get insanely jealous and two, she’ll think that means I want to stay.”
“Why don’t you want to stay?”
I raise my hands and let them hit my thighs with a slap. “Because I want to see more of the world before I die.”
His head dips. “I get that. I respect that too.”
“It’s not like she can’t come back when I die.”
He nods again. “I totally understand that too. Have you told her that?”
I walk away from him and play with the end of my braid. My hair feels so dry these days. Another symptom of the meds, perhaps? Who the fuck knows anymore?
“We just end up arguing about it.”
He blows a raspberry. “Siblings fucking suck sometimes. But… I can’t keep hiding this from her because you’re worried about the fallout.”