Page 40 of Alive At Night

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing my brain not to think about Juni’s tears or the beeping of hospital machines. It was years ago now, but the memories had never faded. Not even a little, and tonight was no different. My brain wasn’t listening to my request to forget; it never did when it came to anything involving Juniper.

That accident changed everything. Juniper thought it was because I blamed her for it, and that was honestly for the best. Better than her knowing the wake-up call it gave me, the realization it caused me as a teenager of why she got so under my skin, of why her determination to sneak into my family bothered me so much when I—

It didn’t matter anymore. The confusion. The anger. It launched a resolution in me, and I hadn’t been able to escape it since.

Fuck.

With the flick of my thumb, I switched to my messages app and sent a text to my mom. There was a change of plans for tomorrow.

* * *

The shockon Juniper’s face when I walked into the office the following day was enjoyable. Her expression was back to being animated and scrutinizing. Irritation and confusion swept over her features, and I sat back, watching her try to piece the puzzle together. She wanted to know why I was in the office when I said I’d be gone, but she was visibly trying not to care. Not to ask.

It was all very Juni-like.

So was her reaction when she walked into Gemma’s apartment later that night to find me sitting on my sister’s couch. Her jaw came unhinged as she gaped at me before pulling herself together and facing Gemma with a look of disgust.

“Do you realize you have an interloper on your couch?”

Gemma winced apologetically. “Julian asked if he could get a ride at the last minute, too.”

Juniper’s sharp gaze jerked back to me. I smiled, twirling Gemma’s car keys around my finger. “I think something might be wrong with my brakes, too.”

A lie, and she knew it.

“And you couldn’t fix them?” she challenged. “Imagine that.”

“I’ll be in the car,” I said, getting to my feet and striding toward the door. When I brushed past little Miss Elle Woods, I choked a bit on the sudden cloud of floral perfume. God, that was going to fuck with my concentration while driving, wasn’t it?

As soon as the apartment door shut behind me, I heard Juniper groan to Gemma.

She could be mad. I’d let her rant to Gemma all she liked about me; that was fine. I didn’t care if she was angry. I cared that we didn’t relive the Halloween weekend from nearly a decade ago, when thick snow had blanketed the ground and the two of them hadn’t made it to the party.

Unsurprisingly, the car ride was quiet. But not in the way that it was yesterday. Tension simmered beneath the silence tonight. Anger and anxiety—a mix of it. Rain pelted against the windows, reaffirming my decision to drive Juniper and Gemma home. As proud as Gemma was, I knew driving in bad weather made her nervous. Actually, I suspected any kind of travel made her nervous. And Juniper was so eager to prove herself all the damn time that it led to disastrous decision-making.

Gemma made Juniper sit in the front, trying to be nice. Or something. But it made the entire ride awkward and unpleasant. All I could smell washer. All I could feel was her irritation, her presence. But after two hours of breathing in bouquets of roses, we finally made it to Whitebridge.

Juniper huffed exaggeratedly as she got out of the car in front of her parents’ house—an idyllic two-story in the center of our small town. She promised Gemma she would see her tomorrow at the party before giving me a quick glance filled with bitterness.

Feeling’s mutual, Lily.

I pulled back into the road, and it took Gemma approximately half a second before she jumped on me.

“I thought maybe since you were working together, the two of you might have…fixed things.”

“Fixed?”

Gemma was delusional if she thought that Juniper and I could be fixed. That would imply that we were broken, which couldn’t be further from the truth. This was just the way we were. This was the way we always would be, too.

“You know.” Gemma sighed. “Figure things out.”

“What’s to figure out?”

I saw Gemma throw her hands up in the rearview mirror. “Why you hate each other.”

“I know why I hate her.”

“And why’s that?”

---