The One Without Words

❀ chapter fourteen | boys and their drama ❀

I'd first seen Jack with my friends last Wednesday, but it didn't stop then. For the next week, every time I walked into the cafeteria and headed for our usual table, Jack would be there. Sitting in the corner, looking very much uncomfortable while my friends talked to each other as if he wasn't even there. At least when Seth wasn't interrogating him, that is. 

"I'm not gay!" Eli exclaimed from the spot next to me, breaking his tense silence. "I told you already, pansexual."

Seth smirked and turned to Jack again. "Yeah, so, are you pansexual like our special snowflake Eli here? Or are you gay?"

Jack shook his head.

"So, you're into pu-"

"Jesus, Seth," Megan said, her face scrunching in disgust. "Stop tormenting the kid."

"Tormenting? I stopped doing that, like, a week ago. Now we're bros."

"More like you want him to be your replacement now that Eli's fed up with your bullshit," I said, hoping to instigate some drama. "What's going on between you two anyway?"

"Nothing," Seth and Eli said at the same time.

Megan and I exchanged looks.

"It's kind of funny, Seth," Megan began, "how you're always going on about how girls start the most drama, but look at you now."

Seth sat up straighter in his seat. "The hell is that supposed to mean?"

Megan smiled that sly, kind of cute smile of hers. "Even Romy is chill compared to how much of a drama queen you are."

"I'm chill period," I scoffed.

Megan adjusted one of the bright clips in her dark hair. "That's such a lie and you know it. Right, Ms. I went to juvie but didn't tell anyone?"

"How do you know about that?" I shot Jack a knowing look, then asked him, "Did you tell them?" When he didn't answer, I crossed my arms over my chest. "Great. Thanks a lot."

"Actually," Megan said, "I heard it from Penelope Dupont."

Suddenly, it was as if the most recent versions of myself collapsed into one. Romy with her friends, Romy in the flower shop with Jack, and Romy in juvie. Three separate lives running parallel but never meeting. An unlikely intersection in the most boring place imaginable—a stuffy high school cafeteria.

"How do you know Penelope?" I asked quietly. My juvie partner in crime, pathological liar with the makeshift altar to Satan underneath the bunk bed we shared.

Megan's smug gaze pierced through me. "She's auditioning for that beauty pageant with me. Probably my biggest competition looks-wise, but I don't think that girl has a chance of winning. She's batshit crazy."

Penelope at a beauty pageant? Probably her parents' doing, maybe their way of recovering her reputation after her juvie stint. I wondered if Anika was still locked up, and I almost felt a pang of something thinking of her, alone and hopelessly trying to convert some of the others girls into her personal cult. When she got out, unlike me and Penelope, she wouldn't have a well-off family to go back to—for her, it was back to foster care, and then the streets once she turned eighteen. Better hope the devil helped her then.

"Don't even start with that beauty pageant shit," Seth groaned. He looked at me, his small pupils dilating in the cloudy gray of his eyes. "But it's true you went to juvie?"

"Yep," I said flatly.

"You're not gonna tell us about that?"

"Nope."