I can’t tell anyone about Connie.EspeciallySophia. I know how close those two are.
Shit.
Maybe Connie was right.
We’re just a disaster waiting to happen.
Sophia obviously picks up on whatever I didn’t say out loud and springs up from her horizontal position. Her mouth drops open, blue eyes scintillating.
“Is there someone else?”
I shake my head, acting clueless. “No. Why would you say that?”
She extends her arm, pointing a finger at me, her mouth opening even wider. “Thereissomeone else.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say quickly, now acting squirrelly.
“Why? Do I know them?”
I avoid eye contact and mumble, “It’s nothing, drop it.”
Sophia flashes me an unimpressed face. “Fine. You’re no fun.” She drops back onto her back. “You realize you haven’t told me anything of substance, right?”
Guilt pricks at my conscience for being so closed off. I can’t help it. I snap closed like a spooked clam in the ocean anytime there’s even a whiff of vulnerability in the air.
I decide to move onto a less precarious subject.
“It’s my first class tonight, I guess I’m just nervous.”
“Woodworking?” Sophia asks with far too much hope in her tone.
As if the workshop Ozzy gifted me for my birthday back in October is somehow going to be the key to my rehabilitation. I hate how it felt like charity, especially from Ozzy.
But I still accepted the gift, unwilling to admit how much Iwanted those classes. Ever since I learned a few basic skills in prison, it’s something I’ve wanted to continue learning.
I guess Ozzy remembered.
I should be grateful. Instead, it makes me bitter, and I’m too messed up in the head to explore the reasons why.
“Yeah,” I cross one ankle over the other. “Woodworking,” I mutter.
“Oh, you’re going to do great,” she assures. “You’ve always had a knack for that stuff.”
She’s back on her phone. I think she knows if she pays me too much attention, I’ll clam back up again. But she still lifts her gaze to meet mine and smiles before looking back down.
“Remember when you used Dad’s old scrap wood and made a birdhouse out of it?”
I chuckle weakly. “Yeah, what a piece of shit.”
“What?” she says, looking back at me. “The birdhouse? Or Dad?”
It’s one of those jokes that are only funny to people like us—those who got the shit end of the stick and never caught a fucking break. Most people would find that kind of humor sad and morbid.
Instead, we fall into a fit of laughter.
I sitin the driver’s seat of Sophia’s parked car, watching the snow fall onto the windshield. It melts as soon as it hits the glass. I don’t have a car of my own yet; my driver’s license was only reinstated a few months ago. It was taken away when I was convicted. Another piece of my life to be ashamed of—stuck borrowing my younger sister’s car like some fucking grade-A loser.
I arrived too early for the woodworking class. I’ve been wasting time in the car, landing on Connie’s Instagram pagelike a moth with a death wish. She’s posted a new video. It’s one of those skits where she reenacts classic tropes from romcoms. It was only posted a few hours ago, and it already has thousands of likes and comments.
