Starry Eyes(56)

“Pardon me?” I say, lightly shoving his compass hand with mine.

He chuckles. “You’re pardoned. And forgiven. And absolved for all your sins. So let’s focus and get through here, because I’m starving.” He steadies his compass again. “Okay, so as I was saying, all of these tunnels eventually lead into a huge cavern room. If we hit that, we’ve gone too far west. So I think we can just choose a tunnel and try to walk in a northern direction.”

“We go to the right, then?” I say.

“Wrong north. Otherwise known as south. Take a left.”

He’s awfully merry for someone who has only a vague idea about where we’re going. We head left and continue into the cave, walking in silence for several minutes. A noise echoes in distant tunnels, and this raises my pulse. I probably should have asked about bats. Or maybe I’m better off not knowing.

As he navigates a sharp turn in the tunnel, I stew over his words.

“Sins?” I say.

“What?”

“You said I was absolved of all my sins. What did you mean by that?”

“I was just teasing.”

I don’t think he was.

After a short silence, he says, “I mean, you know how I feel about Brett. But Andre Smith, too? Are you into jocks, or something? What was up with that?”

This conversation is moving into territory that I don’t care to relive. “Andre was nice to me when I needed a friend.”

“Yeah, I saw him. Being nice to you.” He pauses and then says, “But I didn’t know you were seriously seeing each other. Brett caught me up and told me . . . well, more than I needed to know.”

I stop walking. “What did Brett tell you?”

“Can we talk about something else?” Lennon says.

“No, we can’t. Because if Brett was gossiping about me, I think I have a right to know.”

Lennon considers this and continues walking, until I have no choice but to either catch up with him or be left behind in the maze.

“Tell me,” I insist.

“All right,” he finally agrees. “Brett said you and Andre were, you know . . . exchanging body heat.”

That’s a funny way to put it. In a way, it makes it seem worse. Like Lennon—someone who sees all kinds of crazy sex toys on a daily basis—can’t even bring himself to say what Andre and I did out loud.

“Andre and Brett talk,” Lennon adds. “Multiplayer.”

“What?”

“Online gaming. One of the sports games, FIFA or Madden, or something. I don’t know. I only play survival horror games. Maybe a little Minecraft. Okay, and some Final Fantasy, but don’t tell anyone about that.”

“I don’t care.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask for it,” he says. “Brett volunteered it.”

“I only saw Andre for a couple of weeks.”

“I saw you guys out at Thai Palace once.”

“You were spying on us?”

“The restaurant is across the street from my place of employment,” he says irritably. “So no, I wasn’t spying. I don’t own a telescope.”

Ugh. I was hoping we could avoid bringing up that mishap. Like, forever.

“And if you want to know the truth,” he continues in a crabby voice, “I thought it was sort of shitty of you to flaunt that in my face.”

“I didn’t even know you saw us! How could I be flaunting?”

“A million restaurants on Mission Street, and you pick that one?”

He’s actually 100 percent right. I did pick that restaurant on purpose. I was still mourning Lennon at the time, so yeah. I wanted him to see me with someone else. I know it was shallow, but I was in pain.

What’s puzzling me now is his complaining about it. Because if I didn’t know better, I’d think he sounds as if he’s mad about me dating Andre, and why would that be? Could there be some truth in Brett’s torch-carrying remark?

Is he having second thoughts about us? Why? What changed?

The path splits again, but this time one of the side tunnels only heads east. Lennon hesitates, checking his compass and glancing down our current tunnel. It looks to curve ahead, and that’s back where we came from, so he points us down the eastern tunnel.

It’s even wider here, and the walls begin changing. Gone is the smooth rock. Now it’s craggy like the fabric of a curtain, and the ceiling is much higher. It also feels as if we’re ascending.

“Funny that you heard all about me,” I say after several minutes of walking. “Because I didn’t even know you were dating someone.”

I hear my own voice, and it sounds petty. What is wrong with me? Maybe I’m grumpy because of the dropping temperatures in here. My fingers feel like ice, and I really wish I weren’t wearing shorts.

“Maybe you weren’t paying attention.” He’s said this before, and I don’t understand why. Am I missing something? Before I can ask, he throws me off guard and says, “I dated Jovana Ramirez.”

Oh.

Jovana. She’s one of the nouveau-emo girls who hang out at the skate park with the stoner kids. I don’t really know much about her. I certainly had no idea she and Lennon were a thing. “When?”

“We started seeing each other a few months ago. We like a lot of the same bands.”