Page 78 of What You Wish For

“Oh, yeah. I’m talking, ever. And that’s really saying a lot because—Idon’t know if you’ve noticed but this whole entire planet is just crawling with girls.”

I shrugged. “Well, we are fifty-one percent of the—”

“They’re everywhere! You can’t even get a donut without running into at least one! Sometimes five or ten. That’s what I’m saying. In my whole life of being constantly bombarded by girls… you”—he pointed at me—“are the prettiest one I ever saw.”

This had to be the drugs talking. I was absolutely nothing special. Not a head turner or a showstopper. Just a perfectly ordinary human.

But what else was there to do but play along?

“Okay,” I said. “I did not get that vibe.”

Duncan nodded. “Yeah. Well, you’ve gotta hide it, right? You can’t just drool all over people. I remember it exactly. It was your first day.”

“It wasyourfirst day,” I corrected.

“Nope. You were wearing… I don’t know. All gray. And your hair was different then.” He looked up at my pink bangs. Then he reached out and patted them. “No pink.”

Wait—what?

“And remember we had those cubbies in the faculty lounge, but yours was jammed—and I walked in to find you just beating the shit out of it.” There was admiration in his voice. “And then I came in and showed you the exact place to smack it, and it popped right open like Fonzie.”

He was talking aboutAndrews. He was talking about four years ago. He was talking about the old me. The mousy me. The forgettable me.

And then I suddenly felt… nervous. Or maybe more like… alert. Like every nerve in my body had been called to attention.

Duncan was neither nervous nor alert. He leaned his head back, savoring the memory. “That was a cool moment for me. Wasn’t I so badass in that moment?”

“You were,” I said, still taking it in.

“That might have been my life peak,” he said then, blinking. “It might have been all downhill from that day.”

“I thought you were talking about when we first met here. At Kempner.”

“Oh. No. But I played it cool then, too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “kinda more like ‘ice-cold.’”

He nodded, likeYeah.“I’ve never been great at gauging that stuff. And now I’m a tough guy all the time, so it’s even harder.”

A moment of quiet, then he added, “But, yes. It would be safe to say that I had a thing for you.Havea thing for you.”

Some of it had to be real at least, right? The drugs couldn’t make him remember something he didn’t remember.

“At Andrews?” I had to ask. “You had a thing for me?”

“Oh, yeah. So bad. But you really couldn’t stand me, so… I gave up. Eventually.”

“I could stand you,” I said, like he was crazy. And then, wanting to emphasize but too flustered to do it properly, I said, “I could stand you very much.”

Duncan frowned.

“I didn’t hate you is what I’m saying.”

“Oh,” Duncan said. “That’s surprising. But you sure hate me now.”

I didn’t hate him now, but I wasn’t confessing to that. “You’re very different now,” I said.

Duncan laughed. “No shit.”

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