❝I know it's hard for you to be friends with a girl without objectifying her - but lucky me, not everyone's you!❞
❝Oh yeah. 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨. The lady goth protest too much.❞
❝𝘿𝙤𝙩𝙝, Gavin. Doth.❞
→ From Van Zandt family disappointment and Grade 8...
A/N: I really just wanted this to be an easy chapter, so here we are. Some nice Audrey and JT interaction and a little bit of growth before shit gets real.
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I think there's something to be said about detachment and isolation. It's mostly bad, sure — but there's a side of it I think I missed until that point.
Before the rave and the bridge, for all my sadness, most of it was a lie. I wasn't sad; sad was just a more acceptable version of angry, and I was angry almost all the time. Most of my life.
I was angry for all the things I knew I'd never have, a sort of prophecy I saw written on the faces of my parents and the people around me, but I rarely let it show. For all my sass, I hid the bite in my tone. I stuffed my clenched fists in my pockets. I loosened my tense jaw. Anger was the enemy. Anger separated my mother from her family, and hurt her every day. Anger rotted inside my father when he had nowhere to put it and opened the door to vice, which ended up killing him.
Anger hurt every person I cared about, so I hid it away from everyone. Except for Alex. And Spinner, but that's a revelation for another time.
It was flawed logic, blaming anger. I get that — or I was beginning to get that. I was beginning to understand how often I cried when I wanted to be angry, but fear of what my rage could do or who it could hurt made me useless. A car stuck in the wrong gear.
Even just before my friends started avoiding me, my anger was a quiet bitterness I immediately felt bad for showing. As if my declaration from last year was only a half-truth. I was done caring — until I wasn't. I was still so desperate to experience life the way my mother talked about it — the warm, fuzzy nostalgia of old friends laughing in aging photos, in rooms both too bright and too dark to tell who was who. The 80s film version of high school. Something I had to stop reaching for before I felt it for the first time.
I didn't want the ideal, and the moment I realized this, the moment I took a step back, every single person around me became just a bit more real. Likewise, school felt a little less like a forced death march.
My new favorite thing was listening to how people answered questions in class. How they tiptoed around things. How they stalled. How they interrupted. I noticed how Hazel organized her pens and highlighters on her desk between laughing at everyone's jokes, and how utterly distracted Terri was while doodling a heart around her and Rick's names together. I saw how Paige smiled differently when she looked at Spinner, this sort of adoring look I couldn't quite place when he pulled out her chair for her or held open the door. I noticed he did those things a lot.
