I catch Alex looking at me in my peripherals and I know he’s worrying about me. This is a lot, after all. He’s seen me at my worst. He’s held the pieces of me together when I’ve fallen apart, and some of that heartbreak was Halliday’s fault. I’m not used to having someone look out for me, and it’s making my eyes prick like crazy.
“How about we just focus on the fact that you’re the captain of the football team now,” I say, clumsily changing the subject. Finesse has never been my strong suit. The less time we sit here, stewing in tension and guilt, however, the better. Halliday smiles meekly at me—a silent thank you for taking the pressure of her. From the smug smirk on his face, Zander’s perfectly happy to divert the course of our conversation in Alex’s direction. I can already tell that the guy has plenty to say about Alex’s new role and can’t wait to aggravate him some more. Alex, on the other hand, plunges the tines of his fork into his lasagna and spits out a string of curse words so colorful that the nerds sitting at the table next to us all trade terrified looks.
I don’t blame them. Alex is an intimidating guy even when he’s silent, expressionless and minding his own business. Irritated and giving his emotion free rein, my beautiful boyfriend is so savage and menacing that it’s a miracle the nerds don’t pack up their laptops and flee the cafeteria like a flock of startled lemmings. “I broke Travis McCormick’s middle finger,” he states icily.
“You should have seen it.” Zander chuckles. “The moron thought he could take on our boy all by himself. He was stupid enough to flip Alex the bird, and then…crack.” Zander mimes something snapping in two. “Fingers aren’t supposed to stick out at a ninety-degree angle. I haven’t seen anything that gross in a while.”
“And then he smacked you in the face? That’s where you got the bruise?” I ask. Alex looks over my shoulder, at the wall behind me. When I duck to the left, attempting to make eye contact with him, he shakes his head, looking up, suddenly intrigued by the paintjob on the ceiling.
“No. That was from after.” His voice is too light. Too airy. Clearly, he’s trying to skirt around a piece of information that he doesn’t want to part with. Unluckily for him, Zander’s all too happy to fill in the blanks.
“Kyle, Lawrence and Naseem tried to take him down and stamp on his head when Coach Foley left to take a call. One of them landed a punch. Kyle? I think it was the Kyle kid. That’s when I jumped in and joined in the party.”
“Yeah, you didn’t need to. I had the situation under control.”
“He really did,” Zander says, around a mouthful of burger. “He punched Lawrence so hard the fucker’s probably still seeing stars. Hey, man, can you shoot me over that ketchup?”
Alex grumpily snatches up the bottle of tomato ketchup and slams it down in front of Zander. The guy looks a little surprised, like he was expecting Alex to tell him to go fuck himself. “Thanks. Anyway, he cracked Lawrence’s head so hard, I think his helmet split in two. And that Naseem kid looked like he was about to run crying out of the gym when Alex dodged his right hook and kicked his knees out from underneath him. I would have left Alex to take care them by himself, but then three other assholes started throwing their weight around, and I decided to lend a hand. One against three’s pretty manageable odds. One against six? Even you’re not that good, Moretti.”
Alex and Zander have a unique relationship. I say relationship, because friendship just doesn’t feel right. Alex lets Zander speak to him in a way that would have him ripping someone else’s arm off, no doubt about it. He also looks like he’s on the verge of beating Zander within an inch of his life at other times, too. Their dynamic’s so complicated that I feel like I’m suffering from whiplash whenever the two of them are together.
Alex pulls a face, shoving his tray away, his food stabbed at, poked and prodded, but otherwise untouched. “You should have let them kick my ass,” he says grimly. “Break a few bones. That way Foley wouldn’t be able to force the captain’s badge on me.”
Zander closely inspects a fry, holding it up to the light like it might contain some secret hidden message inside of it. “Friends don’t let friends get the crap kicked out of them, homie. Unless they’re being released from juvie and you don’t want to suffer through a bullshit emotional goodbye with them. In that situation, it’s perfectly acceptable to bribe another inmate to lynch them unexpectedly, so said friend doesn’t want to speak to you ever again.”
Alex rolls his eyes. Next to me, Halliday opens up the brown paper bag she brought with her to the table, gingerly offering it out to me. I already know what’s inside. The smell hits me before I manage to take a peek. Halliday always used to make lemon bars for her brother’s bake sales. Three or four times a year, I’d show up randomly at her place, conveniently ‘just in the area,’ and Halliday would have to make an extra batch of lemon bars to replace the ones that I inhaled.
She must have planned out coming to sit with me today. She labored in her kitchen last night to make these, and the whole time she must have been freaking out about what I was going to say to her. She probably pictured me grabbing a lemon bar and smashing it into her face, soap opera style. She has an overactive imagination like that. I take one from the paper bag, giving her a small smile in return.
Okay, so this feels weird, and not entirely uncomfortable, but…as I look around the cafeteria, I notice something remarkable. People are talking to one another, laughing over memes, gesticulating wildly as they laugh and chatter. They’re all engrossed in their conversations, and their late math assignments, and their crush that’s sitting on the other side of the room. None of them are looking at me.
For the first time in a very long time, I, Silver Parisi, am not sitting on the outside, looking in. I’m just another random student at Raleigh High, and that feels fucking incredible.
“This is nice,” Zander says, winking at me from across the table. “You and blondie are sharing sugar. Alex hasn’t tried to kill me in well over five minutes. I don’t wanna get ahead of myself over here, but I’d go so far as to call this progress.”
21
ALEX
Monty: Come by the bar tonight. This doesn’t need to be a thing, kid.
The first night I worked at the Rock, I was shown how to clear the waitress’s stations. I was shown how to operate the POS and ring in orders. The bar tenders gave me the lowdown, explaining how they’d tip me out well if I herded people to drink at the bar instead of the floor sections. And at the end of the night, after busting my ass, making sure I did exactly what I was told, Monty ushered me into his office, where a bald guy with a moustache was lying unconscious on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and he educated me on what my job would involve after the bar had closed and the punters had all left for the night.
I was to be the errand boy. The bag man. I was also the guy who did most of the heavy lifting. Turned out the guy with the moustache was missing a couple of fingers thanks to the pair of pliers Monty kept in the top drawer of his desk. As he sat behind a bank of screens, scrolling through security footage, he lit up a cigarette and tasked me with collecting up the guys dismembered fingers and putting them in a Ziplock baggie filled with ice.