Page 11 of I Love to Hate You
Dan walks away, leaving Kendrick and I standing there gawking at each other like dogs meeting for the first time, both of us wondering what the other is about to do. I don’t want to speak first, but he doesn’t say anything, so I have no choice but to break the ice.
“You ready?” I ask, because I can’t think of anything else. My brows are furrowed and my nerves are sensitive from how he stepped all over them a few minutes ago with his laughter, but I try to push it aside for the sake of the assignment.
“Sure,” he replies.
His face only changes long enough for the word to come out of his mouth before going right back to the stale expression he had. He’s bland and emotionless, and I hate it.
I release a frustrated sigh before aiming my body toward the corner of the room and taking off. “Come on then. Let’s do it over here.”
Kendrick follows me closely until we reach the corner. I place my back against the wall and face the class, while Kendrick blocks me in, pinning me with his gaze. Once we’re settled, we fall back into silence. The indistinguishable voices from the other groups all mix into a chorus of ideas that makes me feel like we’re already behind and need to get started, but all I’m thinking about is how Kendrick laughed at me and then glared at me like I was wrong for being offended by it.
“So, what do you got?” he suddenly asks with a shrug of his oversized shoulders, before giving me that blank stare again.
“What do you mean?” I inquire, one eyebrow raised.
Kendrick scoffs. “What do you mean what do I mean? What idea do you have to pitch to the asshole sitting at the desk behind me?”
“Why doIhave to be the one with the idea?”
“Well, you’re the one who had the perfect answer. Don’t you have the perfect idea?”
“Oh, I see what’s going on,” I fire back, tilting my head to the side as the annoying realization hits me in the face. “You want to ride my coattails. So I’m supposed to come up with the idea and how to pitch it, while you stand there and look pretty?”
“Pretty? You’re calling me pretty?”
“It’s just a saying, you idiot.”
“Who the fuck are you calling an idiot?” he snaps, mirroring me with a tilted head. Suddenly, his eyes come to life and there is fire spewing from them as he instantly looks enraged.
“Whoa, how about you calm down, psychopath,” I say without an ounce of fear in my heart, and to my surprise, the anger in his face relents, fading to something more surprised than mad.
“You’re a brave one, aren’t you?” he asks.
Now it’s my turn to scoff. “What, am I supposed to be afraid of you?”
“Do you think you should be?”
“No. I know you think you’re somebody special, and all these people around here might be scared of you, but I’m not. You’re lucky I’m not a man, otherwise I’d kick your ass myself.”
A pause passes between us, neither of us moving or blinking until Kendrick’s face morphs into a smile.
“That’s a line fromFriday.”
My face contorts into a confused frown. “What?”
“You just said a line from the movieFriday, with Ice Cube,” he goes on. “At the end, when Deebo and Debbie are arguing in the street because he hit her sister. She says, ‘All these … people … around here might be scared of you, but I’m not. You’re lucky I’m not a man, otherwise I’d kick your ass myself.’ You stole that line from a movie, and you’ve got the nerve to callmean idiot?”
Another silent moment filled with wide eyes goes by before I say, “Wow, you’re really an asshole, aren’t you?”
“I’m not the one plagiarizing movie lines,” Kendrick shoots back.
“No, you’re just the prick sitting in the back of the class laughing at me for answering the instructor’s question.”
“Oh, my god, I wasn’t laughing at you.”
“I heard you!”
“No, Maya, what you heard was me chuckling at how those two girls immediately tightened up when you looked at them. They were filled with rigor mortis just from your gaze, and I found it to be both familiar and hilarious, so I laughed a little, but I wasn’t laughingatyou. Geez. So sensitive.”
