“You’ve drawn a hundred pictures of her. Just draw another one or give me one of those.” I motion toward the portfolio.
“When you look at her what do you feel?”
“Are you f**king serious? Forget it.” He can kiss my ass if he wants to start talking feelings with me.
“You obviously want it for a reason.”
“I want a picture to jack off to. What do you care?” I keep drawing so I don’t have to look at him, but I’m mutilating the sketch I’m working on. I’ll have to start over, but I don’t care.
“Joy, fear, frustration, longing, friendship, anger, need, despair, love, lust?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“All of it,” I reply, because I’m all in now whether I like it or not.
“I can have it to you in a couple of days.”
***
True to his word, Clay walks into class two days later and hands me an oversized a cardboard folder and tells me not to open it until I get home. There’s a part of me that almost hoped he had forgotten or that it was a bad dream and I had never really asked. Then he shows me another drawing he’s added to his portfolio and now I know where Sunshine has been for the past two days.
“You’re obsessed,” I tell him, handing it back.
“Am I the only one?”
“Yes.” He’s looking at me skeptically and I know this was a huge mistake, but it’s one I can’t take back now. “I just wanted a picture. I wouldn’t have asked if I knew you were going to be such a dick about it.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, and for a moment, smug Clay is gone. “I’m not going to tell her.”
I accept this and we don’t speak for a minute during which time my brain leaves my body and deserts me.
“What are you doing tonight?” I ask him.
“You asking me out?”
“Dinner at Drew’s at six.” I’ve officially gone batshit crazy. Drew’s parents are out of town this weekend, but his mom made a ton of food and insisted that we still do Sunday dinner. Then they decided to come home early, so Drew moved it to tonight.
“You’re out of your mind.” Clay agrees. “First the picture and now this? I will not be a victim in whatever self-destruction you have planned.”
“You can stalk the object of your obsession some more.” I tilt my head toward his sketchbook. “Bring Yearbook Michelle if you want.”
“You do realize Drew will shit if Michelle and I show up at his house.”
“Yep.”
“Six o’clock?”
“Six o’clock”
CHAPTER 34
Nastya
I’ll take control any way I can get it now. I may not be able to prevent some random psychotic from finding me in some random location at some random time, but I can control what I do to him when he gets there.
I’ve taken enough self-defense classes over the past two years to know that there were several things I could have done that day. I’m no martial arts expert. Not even close. All I really know are a couple of difficult, but seriously awesome takedown maneuvers, along with some key dirty street-fighting moves; but even those may have been enough. I could have gouged his eyes or crushed his windpipe or boxed his ears or kneed him in the groin or employed the always classic gold standard—scream and run like hell. I didn’t do any of those things. Know what I did? I smiled and said hi. Because I was polite. And stupid.
***
Drew’s driveway is empty when Josh and I pull up. Josh picks up the cupcake carrier—a gift to me from Margot for no particular reason—and carries it in to the house while I follow. I try not to smile, because I’m used to seeing him carrying lumber, so a pink plastic cupcake carrier is something different entirely. Drew and Sarah are in the kitchen where Mrs. Leighton would usually be. I can smell dinner immediately. Italian.
“Josh,” Sarah bites out as soon as we walk in. “Aren’t you supposed to reheat food no higher than three hundred-fifty degrees?”
“It’ll heat faster at four-fifty,” Drew argues.
“It’ll dry out,” Sarah lilts in a sing-song voice. It seems like this argument has been going on for a while. She glances over at me and I get the disgusted look she seems to save just for me.
“Depends on what it is, but yeah, it’ll probably dry out,” Josh says, moving around them to put the cupcakes on the counter. The kitchen is stifling from the heat coming off of both compartments in the double oven and I wonder if the meticulously-piped Swiss buttercream on those cupcakes can survive. My hand didn’t freak out at all while I was doing it, so they look perfect.
“See!” Sarah says in Drew’s face, triumphantly walking over to the oven to lower the temperature. I guess Josh’s word holds when it comes to reheating food as well.
“Suck it,” Drew says.
“Your girlfriend’s here. Ask her.” Sarah smiles overly sweetly at me before disappearing down the hall towards her bedroom.
“I hate her,” Drew says, but he lets the girlfriend comment go.
I look around the kitchen at the number of bowls and dishes littering the countertop. Mrs. Leighton must have known it would end up being more than the four of us because she made enough food for an army.
Within the next fifteen minutes, the doorbell rings four more times. Piper walks in first, dressed in an outfit she must have coordinated with Sarah. She says hi to Drew and Josh before she heads to Sarah’s room without acknowledging me. Her arrival is followed by Damien Brooks and Chris Jenkins. Chris I know from hammer-wielding shop fame. He looks at me awkwardly and says hi. Ever since the hammer incident, he’s tried to ignore me even more. I wasn’t sure that was even possible, but he’s been doing an admirable job. Damien I’ve seen around but never met. He looks at my chest but doesn’t say anything. Chris has a case of beer in each hand. Damien has a twelve pack in his left and a bottle of tequila in his right. Clearly Drew gave them a very different description of Sunday dinner, and now I get why he moved it up to Friday. Of course, I may also have been a little more creative with the invitation I issued to Tierney Lowell in the bathroom a few days ago. When the doorbell rings for the third time, I’m the only one who’s expecting her.
***
I was in the girls’ restroom at the far end of the foreign language hallway on Wednesday. Tierney must have seen me and followed me in, because she obviously wasn’t using the facilities. When I got done washing my hands, she handed me a paper towel with a gesture so full of menace that I had to respect her, because anyone who can make handing you a paper towel look like a threat, is impressive. Of course, she still hadn’t stopped glaring at me, and I didn’t want to seem rude, so I glared back. It was so completely absurd that I wanted to laugh. It took a serious amount of throat clenching to keep from erupting, but I had invested myself in that particular stare-fest and I don’t like to lose. She obviously had something to say, so I wished she would just get on with it, because she wasn’t going to intimidate me no matter how many rumors I had heard about her: drug dealing, illegal abortions, knife wielding. I even heard she brings glass to the beach.