no matter what I did, I couldn’t get warm. I’d never be warm again. It was as if all the warmth had been sucked out of the world.
Even if she had planned this, if she’d been that conniving and ruthless, could I fault her? It was nothing more than I deserved.
Dee
Even a brief glimpse of Alex had been too much for me. I’d wanted to get out of here but now I had to wait to make sure he was gone. That’d be even worse than dealing with Pete or Ferdie.
Someone knocked on the door. I ignored it. If it was Alex, coming to try to explain things or talk his way out of this, I had no words for him. I’d knock him to the floor again.
The door opened. It wasn’t Alex, it was Carlie.
“Are you okay?” she said.
I tried to smile.
“Sorry, I made such a mess of things and after Holden had given us such a great chance. I’m an idiot.”
Carlie walked across the road and hugged me. I didn’t know her that well and normally I hated hugs but she made me feel like life wasn’t such a huge disaster after all.
“It’s not that bad,” she said, stroking my hair. “It’s really not.”
I pulled away a little.
“Come on, Carlie. I knocked Alex to the ground in the middle of his song. Well, not his song. He stole that song. It was Jake’s, my brother’s.”
She grinned. “Yeah, and it was awesome!”
“Huh?”
“You should’ve seen him, squirming around like a fish that’d jumped out of the tank. Not able to get up because his pants are so tight. It was in the top ten best moments of my life.”
She started to giggle and I actually smiled for real.
“I guess it would’ve been kind of funny. Is Holden angry at me?”
“Hell no. He’s been freaking out, wondering how to top that though. Did you hear the crowd screaming? They loved it. Half of them probably thought it was part of the act. The other half, well, they probably think you’re a jealous girlfriend or something. It’s not the end of the world, Dee.”
She sat on the table, pulling a beer out of the tub, shaking the water off it and handing it to me, then getting herself one.
“Pete will kill me.”
“Yeah, there is that. But you know what he’s like. If it gets the band attention, he’ll love it. You just have to put a positive spin on it for him. He’s not so tough.”
I sat down beside her, swigging on my drink. The beer tasted good.
“There’s a bigger issue, though. How do you feel about Alex?”
I shrugged.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”
I wondered how much Sally had told her.
“I really don’t know. I hate him. I really hate him. He destroyed my life.”
Carlie put her arm around me again, so I told her about Jake and the accident. Somehow, in the retelling, it didn’t seem so bad. Not that Jake had died but Alex’s part in it. I knew now that it hadn’t just been him being a total prick but that Jake too had played a part in it. That didn’t exonerate Alex but it didn’t make him a murderer, just an idiot with a bunch of other idiots. They’d done something stupid and Jake had been the one to pay the price.
“Now, I wonder, if it’d been the other way around, how I’d feel. If it’d been Alex who’d died and Jake driving the car. I’d never be able to hate Jake or hold him to blame. Of course, Jake would’ve paid the price for it. Our parents aren’t rich bastards who can get around the law.”