What to Say Next(44)
“I’m sorry. That sucks.” I wish I were more surprised by this information. I wish we could all see each other more clearly.
“David’s right: He really does have a clown mouth,” Violet says, bumping her elbow against Annie’s. “You don’t really want to go to the prom with a guy who looks like the Joker.”
Annie doesn’t laugh. Just blinks a few times to suck back the water in her eyes.
“You don’t want to go to prom with a jerk,” I say. “What he and Justin did was really wrong.”
“Yeah, maybe. Still, there’s some weird shit in that notebook,” Annie says, fiddling with her giant earrings. “Be careful around that guy, Kit.”
“Come on, out of context everyone’s journal is weird,” I say, not sure why I feel the need to defend David, even to Violet and Annie. He’s not mine to defend. “But I didn’t read the whole thing. Just enough to get the gist.”
“Really?” Violet asks, her eyebrow cocked in surprise.
“It just didn’t seem right.”
“You should,” Annie says. I shrug. Before everything with my dad, I didn’t really understand the need for privacy, for the desire to be free of other people’s questions. Now I do.
“What’s the Accident Project?” Violet asks, in a voice that’s soft, tentative. Almost a lullaby. Like she’s asking something easy. Like what’s my favorite food or television show or if she can borrow my Spanish notes. “Is that why you keep skipping classes and didn’t go to the newspaper meeting? Because you are working on that?”
“What?”
“The Accident Project. What. Is. It?” Annie asks, with none of Violet’s gentleness. “We have almost all the same classes, so I know it’s not for school. What are you doing with David?”
“That’s…that’s, um, in there?” I ask, wondering how much David has written down. Did he expose me to all of Mapleview? I try to remember how I’ve even framed the question for him. I want to know the exact last second my dad’s accident could have been avoided. When the brakes needed to have been pressed. If the whole thing could have been stopped in the first place. I want to make mathematical sense out of the inexplicable. Now it just sounds insane.
“Like I said, you should read it. See who you’re ditching us for,” Annie says. “So you’re not going to tell us? About the Accident Project.”
“It’s nothing. Really. And I’m not ditching—” Annie shakes her head at me, gives me the palm of her hand, and before I can finish speaking she’s already halfway toward her car. I turn to Violet. “I’m not ditching you guys. It’s not like that.”
“She’s just, you know, pissed about Gabe,” Violet says. “And we miss you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. This hurts, I want to say. Even just standing here talking to you. It all hurts more than you could possibly imagine. I want to show her my watch, how time barely moves forward. How I don’t much care for this version of me either. I stay quiet.
“Do you really like him? David, I mean,” Violet asks, and her voice is hopeful, as if my liking him will excuse everything else, like the fact that I no longer want to hang out with her and Annie. I don’t deserve her forgiveness or her understanding. If things were the other way around, if Violet suddenly ditched me for some random guy without much of an explanation, I’d have no sympathy.
“I don’t know. He’s really easy to talk to,” I say. “I like being around him.”
What I don’t say: I can tell him things that I can’t tell anyone else. Like about my dad and my mom. Maybe one day about me. He weighs information honestly.
What I don’t say: He moves time forward.
Violet nods, but she looks sad.
“You used to like being around us too.”
—
It’s bad enough that I get a guilt trip from Violet and Annie, but then a few minutes later, as I sit in my car and garner up the courage to put the keys in the ignition and head home, I get a text from my mom. Awesome.
Mom: I know I’m not your favorite person right now, and my timing isn’t great, but I really don’t think you should hang out with David Drucker anymore.
Me: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Mom: Saw that “Guide to Mapleview” link. Annie’s mom sent it to me.
Me: How dare you. THAT WAS HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL.
Mom: I’m just worried about you. That’s all.
Me: Leave me alone.
Mom: Sweetheart, what’s “the Accident Project”?
Me: Screw you.
Pi doesn’t work. Neither does the periodic table. I try simple counting, and I make it all the way to three hundred thousand, but I cannot let any of it go. My notebook is in the public domain. Kit must have read the whole thing by now. Even positing the assumptions that (1) she didn’t see the link until after four p.m., which allots thirty-five minutes for a pit stop on her way home from our meeting and 2) that she reads at a painstakingly slow rate, a page every five minutes, which I realize makes no sense given her high PSAT scores, she would have made it all the way to the end at least an hour ago. Which means that it’s all over: us sitting together at lunch, the Accident Project, me being in any zone. The Venn diagram of our relationship has un-Venned.