Page 3 of Together We Rot

Lucas’s cheeks burn scarlet. “Flirting? She’s my lab partner, Vee. What was I supposed to do? Not talk to her on the off chance you decided to stop hating me and make up?”

Lucas’s friend Kevin Garcia sits in the middle of their fight like a skittish referee. He looks so thoroughly out of place in their argument that it’s almost funny. He’s Waldo hidden in the middle of a battlefield, giving a little smile while surrounded by fallen soldiers. Except Kevin’s not the red-and-white-striped-T-shirt kind of guy. He’s a walking advertisement for the weird and unexplained.

Today he’s wearing an extraterrestrial-themed Christmas sweater, I Want to Believe (In Santa) scrawled on the front, with a UFO led by reindeer. He’s “Jack and the Beanstalk” tall, with black hair cropped close to his warm brown skin. He’s one of those guys that would have girls lining up for him if he wasn’t so obsessed with Bigfoot.

Kevin catches me looking over and gives me a sheepish half smile. We’re not friends, but I guess it’s one of those “Congrats, you’re the only one who found me on this page!” sort of things. I don’t return it.

His smile drops and he occupies himself with the syrup container beside him.

Ronnie whips away from Lucas. “Last I checked, making out with your lab partner wasn’t on the syllabus... and for the love of God, I keep telling you to stop calling me that.”

Lucas’s earlier bravado is gone completely. He sucks in a sharp breath and guards his heart with two tightly crossed arms. “We were broken up... Ronnie. It was one stupid time and it meant nothing and we never—we didn’t—it wasn’t like that. It was a mistake, and it ended as soon as it began. Please, can we not do this here?” He waves his hand around like here speaks for itself.

Ronnie’s having none of it.

“If you’re not going to order,” she snaps, “then leave.”

Lucas tuts. “Give me a Sprite, then, and Kevin will have a...” He looks over to Kevin and Kevin lurches in his skin. He pushes the syrup dispenser away like he wasn’t just playing with it.

“DrPepper,” Kevin answers. “Please.”

Ronnie sneers. “Two lukewarm waters coming right up.”

She spins on her heels, but Lucas’s hand lurches out to capture her wrist. Kevin sneaks a pleading look my way again, and he gingerly tries to remove Lucas’s arm.

No luck.

“Veronica, you know I don’t like her, right? It’s always been you. I didn’t come to fight. I was thinking... maybe... Well, my dad’s in Iron Mountain at the moment, so I’m having a bit of a get-together at my place. I was hoping you’d come and we could talk about us and—”

That does it.

My fury propels me toward them in seconds, and I don’t miss Kevin’s sigh of relief. He won’t be relieved with what comes next.

“Didn’t you hear her?” I snarl, slapping his arm back toward the floor. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Where the hell did you even come from?” Lucas massages his temples as though I’m the one giving him a headache. “This has nothing to do with you, Wil. Butt out.”

“If it’s about my best friend, it has everything to do with me.” I’m sure I look like one of those dogs with the foaming mouths, peering at him from behind a flimsy fence. My smile is nothing more than clenched teeth and unblinking eyes. A face that says, “Try me; I dare you.” My finger juts toward the door and I point a path from here to the parking lot. “Walk away right now.”

If someone told me a year ago that I would be standing here defending Veronica Clearwater, I would’ve thought they were on something. But that was BMD—Before Mom Disappeared. Back when we both still lived in separate worlds and Mom was the glue keeping the universe tethered together. It was back when Ronnie wasn’t a social pariah like me but genuinely popular—ponytail bobbing behind her head, soft gold shimmer swept across her lids. When she spent every second slung around Lucas’s arm, giggling when he pressed kisses into her cheek.

But neither of us is the same person we were junior year. Fate had Ronnie and I slumping into the bleachers at the same time, worn out and ruddy-eyed and alone. We’d talked about everything and anything. The carton of milk she’d dumped on her stupid ex’s head. Elwood’s stone-faced silence as he ran away. The night my mother went missing and the night her father took one too many pills. He had slipped into the night with a single note scrawled beside him: We can’t keep doing this. She’d cried on my shoulder and I’d cried on hers and that one afternoon changed everything.

I’d rubbed off on her like a bad case of poison ivy and she’d kept me from spiraling to the point of no return—and if you asked me now, I’d say I’d do anything for her.

Lucas’s cheeks burn scarlet, his teeth grinding together like flint sparking a fire. His eyes whip from mine to hers. “You know she’ll turn on you, too, Vee,” he spits, “just like she did with Elwood. She doesn’t know how to trust people.”

Elwood Clarke. The name stokes a flame inside me, rekindling something that never quite died in the first place. He used to sit by my side, his eyes lighting over the tiniest of things, always rambling incessantly about his butterfly collection. We made sense hanging out together. I was the girl that was quick to bite someone’s head off and he was the skittish boy who needed me to. Best friends until suddenly we weren’t. Before everything in my life went to hell in his family’s handbasket.

Now when I think of him, it’s like swallowing a lit match. The longer I dwell on what we were, the bigger the hole burns inside me.

Lucas’s hands clench at his sides and I know he’s on the verge of saying something particularly nasty when he stands. He doesn’t disappoint: “Elwood was a mess after you. You know that, right? You ruined a lifelong friendship and you didn’t even care. So, what, Wil, did you get tired of ruining your own relationships after your mom left? You had to go and ruin other people’s too?”

He’s taller than me, but it doesn’t stop me from getting close. “Anything else you want to say? You don’t know shit, Lucas. You don’t have a clue what I’ve been through.”

He didn’t spend days sprawled beside Mom on the couch, her nimble fingers twisting intricate braids. He didn’t shadow her every summer in the garden with a wicker basket, dutifully collecting fresh herbs and listening to her prattle on about each one. He didn’t cry so hard, he threw up when days turned to weeks turned to months of his mother never, ever coming home.

I grind my teeth and hold my ground. Keep talking, Lucas. See what happens.

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