Until now.
I finally turned my head to look at Victoria, who kept glancing from Evan to me. “Holy fuck,” her mouth was saying again and again. But even her foot was tapping the floor. She saw me looking and stopped. I was trying to send her messages with my eyes, like, “I think I’m going to die and I want to leave now, please,” but she wasn’t getting it. The place was too dark and too loud. Damn those speakers. Why couldn’t we listen in the back? Why couldn’t I have broken up with Evan tomorrow? Why couldn’t I be a procrastinator like Victoria?
I bet he lied about flossing, too.
“Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait!” The music had stopped now—it was just Evan and a roomful of his new friends, screaming the words at the top of their lungs. The rest of the band was watching the crowd surge back and forth with the kind of look little kids gave Jonah when he took a part-time job as Santa Claus last Christmas. Are you really real? (Side note: Jonah in a Santa costume = Best Christmas Ever.)
“Thank you, we’re the Do-Gooders!” Evan shouted, putting his fist in the air as he pulled his guitar off. The rest of the band walked offstage, but Evan? I swear to God, he strutted. Just like a chicken.
“Is this really happening?” I grabbed Victoria’s hand and held it in front of me. “Is this a dream? Am I dreaming? Are you about to turn into a Cadillac or is a unicorn gonna run through the room?”
“No, you’re awake.”
I closed my eyes and then opened them wide. “Could you please just lie to me?”
Victoria, without taking her eyes off me, pulled on Jonah’s sleeve. “Uh, you might wanna start leading us out of here, sweetie.”
“Is Jonah dreaming? Am I in Jonah’s dream, maybe?” Jonah was holding on to Victoria’s hand, and she had mine, and we were making a little train through the crowd of people.
“No, you’re having a meltdown. You’re going Chernobyl on me. And make your eyes normal—you look like a fish.”
“Is it a bad thing that I can’t feel my feet?”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.”
“Um, excuse me, did you not just see what happened?!”
“Hey, Aud, that was an awesome song!” Kids waved at me as if I’d written The Song. As if I would write it!
“Good thing you broke up with him!”
“Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait!”
I heard that one every time I took a step. Everyone was flushed and excited, like they had just come out of a revival and been saved and had to go tell five friends about what they had seen.
“I’m going to kill them,” I told Victoria.
“No, you’re not.” Jonah tugged her to the left and I zigzagged behind them.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “I’m not going to kill them. I’m going to kill Evan.”
“That would make a fantastic college entrance essay. ‘I Killed My Boyfriend and Still Managed to Maintain a 4.2 GPA and the Lead in the Spring Musical.’”
“Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait!”
“Fuck off, Pete, you asshole!”
“You would never write a song about me, would you, Victoria?”
“I wouldn’t write a song like that about you, that’s for sure.”
“The spring musical?” I was momentarily pulled back from the edge. “When have I ever starred in the spring musical?”
“Fuck if I know. Do we even have a spring musical?”
“They did South Pacific last April.”
Victoria laughed through her nose. “I don’t think I had to be there to know how it went.”
By the time Jonah got us back to the car, I had pulled my hair over my shoulders so that it hung toward my stomach and hid my face. “Buckle up, Cousin Itt,” Jonah said into the rearview mirror.
“Now would be a good time to engage those sensitivity controls again, Jonah.”
“Got it.”
Victoria climbed into the backseat with me and we sat facing each other. “So do I kill myself now, or do I wait and do it in front of Evan so he feels really, really, really bad?”
“You’re not going to kill yourself. Remember in health class, when they talked about how adolescents drink to mask pain? That’s what you’re gonna do.”
“Did they talk about dismembering ex-boyfriends, too?”
“I don’t think we’ll get to that until anatomy next year.”
I laughed as the car lurched forward into traffic. Everyone was looking into our windows and then turning to each other in their cars. I could practically hear what they were saying: “There’s the girl who broke up with Evan! Her, right there!”
“Look,” Jonah said from the front seat. “Don’t worry about this, Aud. It’s just some song. It’s not like those people weren’t gonna find out you broke up, anyway.”
“Listen to the man,” Victoria agreed. “He speaks the truth.”
“Damn straight,” Jonah said. “He’s gonna be so high later that he probably won’t remember the lyrics, anyway.”
“Amen,” Victoria added. “You wanna go to In-N-Out?”
I rested my head against her shoulder and nodded. She knows me so well it’s scary. “Yes. But I have no cash.”
“Neither do I. Jonah, Audrey and I have no cash.”
“Why aren’t I surprised?” he muttered while merging into the intersection.