But her eyebrows pull in and she asks, “What happened?”
Reluctantly, I explain, “So… this other guy was messing with me—the son to one of my stepfather’s friends—and all of a sudden, this guy jumps in the middle of it, picking a fight with him.” That’s an understatement, but I’m not sure how to describe it. The way he smiled so amicably, showing his teeth, even though his eyes were hard and frightening. The way his whole demeanor seemed to buzz and crackle like a live wire. The curve of his shoulders, twitching and impatient.
He wasn’t just picking a fight.
He was an addict looking for a fix.
I’d know it anywhere. I’ve seen it in Doug a thousand times—that gleam in his eyes that taught me how much control I didn’t have. That I could be good, quiet, as unobtrusive as possible, and that it would never matter. When Doug got that look, he wanted something to hit.
“He pretended like he was jumping in to defend me or something, but it was obvious he just wanted to get into it. Had a real smart-ass mouth on him, too.” I tug at my sleeves, covering my wrist and the tattoo. “Anyway, look. The thing is, I don’t like fights. Shit’s hard enough, you know?” She doesn’t. She can’t possibly know. But she offers a nod anyway. “I just fucking hate them. And this guy—this total bully—stepped in, making an already unbearable situation even worse. So I just…”
“You just what?” I look up and realize all Georgia needs is a bowl of popcorn. She’s into my drama like I’m describing a CW show.
“I jumped in to stop it.” I reach up to touch my jaw, still feeling a phantom twinge. “And the guy fucking decked me. Hard.”
It fractured my jaw, hurt for weeks, and still aches sometimes. But the worst part wasn’t the blow. It was the fear. It was the touch. I’d been shoving all this vicious terror into the back of my chest for years, piling it up, unknowingly molding it into something lawless and beastlike, but I’d done it. I’d kept it contained. Hidden. Confined.
Until that night.
One savage touch from him, and now I can’t even handle something as simple as a handshake without falling apart. That’s the real crime—something Georgia probably couldn’t understand. How could she, when even I don’t?
Georgia shifts to a sitting position, wrapping her arms around a pillow. “Wait. You’re saying this same guy works at the garage?”
I jerk a shoulder in a tense shrug. “Apparently. I walked in, and there he was. It took him a minute to recognize me, but he figured it out.” It didn’t take me long at all. I knew it the second his face emerged from under that car hood. Handsome—pretty, almost. The Devil in sheep’s clothing. He was exactly the same as I remember, buzzing and crackling, wired and unpredictable. I think I probably even knew it was him before I ever saw his face, the way my body reacted, beyond my control. My teeth clench in frustration at the memory. “Fucking asshole.”
“That sounds pretty terrible.” Georgia’s tone is sympathetic but somehow stilted. She looks a shade paler, so I figure maybe she’s not used to hearing about stuff like this. “But, you know, maybe there was something else going on with him. Or maybe he has his own problems that he’s dealing with.”
I gape at her, beginning to suspect that Georgia is painfully naïve and too optimistic for her own good. Must be a nice world she lives in, where people do kind things for the sake of it and bullies just need, like… what? Understanding?
Give me a break.
“Even if that were the case, that doesn’t mean his problems have to be my problems.” I clench my jaw. “Either way, I’m going to do everything I can to stay the hell away from him. The last thing I need in my life is another toxic, aggro dude who can’t control his temper.”
I glance back up at Georgia, worried I’ve revealed too much, but she’s busy staring down at her hand, twisting her ring around her finger. Like the car, I don’t expect this girl to understand where I’m coming from, but now that I’m starting a new life, I’m thinking my old routine of hiding and denying is for the birds. Starting over here, I’m going a different way, establishing my boundaries early. Firmly.
Rule number one: Keep your hands to yourself.
Rule number two: No assholes.
As the afternoon passes, the dormitory fills up with returning students. Georgia, I find, is a pretty popular person, and why shouldn’t she be? She’s pretty and nice and normal. She has a lot of friends popping by to say hello.
Half of me is fascinated by these people—girls mostly—coming in and out, lying on the same bed, touching one another’s things, fingers always moving and pressing and brushing and stroking. There’s an intimacy in the movements that I’ve never experienced or wanted. I feel like I’m watching a nature documentary, expecting them to turn into primates picking bugs off of one another.
The other half of me is simmering with impotent fury. I knew this was coming, intellectually. Sharing a space with someone, being at their whims, comes with a certain amount of compromise. Why shouldn’t she have people over? This is her home, too. It makes me want to get up and pace around, shove my fingers into my hair and pull. I just want them all to get the fuck out. As much as I try to fight it, the space feels even less like my own than it already had, which wasn’t much to begin with. Skin itching from having so many people in such a tight space, I keep cracking my knuckles, trying so hard to school my expression into something easy and blank that I’m pretty sure I just end up looking like a psycho.
It’s hard to miss the looks—curious and wary. I’ve spent months fighting the escape of this wild, nervous thing inside of me, but I’ve never perfected the act of normalcy. I focus my energy on organizing my desk, just to give my hands something to do, feeling like an animal. Trapped. Cagey. Observed.
I wonder what Georgia would say if she knew that bully who just ‘has his own problems’ was the catalyst to the way my lungs feel shrunken and flooded.
A girl name Caroline comes in, dressed in black and red flannel pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. She has on thick glasses and gives me a quick smile when we’re introduced.
“What happened to Zadie?” she asks, claiming the end of Georgia’s bed. “I thought you two got along okay.”
To be honest, I’d wondered myself, but thought it was rude to ask. I like Caroline already.
“She moved in with Daphne when her roommate changed schools,” Georgia says. She’s facing the closet and changing out of her shirt and into a tank top. When she bends over, I see the top curve of a tattoo sticking out of her shorts, right above her butt cheek, but I can’t make out the design. “She didn’t like that I had ‘guys over all the time’.” She uses air quotes and rolls her eyes, then looks at me. “For the record, it was only like two—well, maybe three—guys, and I specifically picked a weekend she wasn’t here. I made sure they didn’t touch her stuff or bother her at all.”
My face screws up in response. Guys, here, in my space? I bite back a strained groan at the thought. But then I remember Georgia so sweetly offering to give me three hundred dollars, just like that, and I think… okay. Fuck.