slammed her away. “It’s not complicated,” I said to Checker. “In fact, it’s really goddamn simple.”
“No, it is. For me. He has good—I still have—he was my best friend, Cas.”
I’d called Checker that, maybe, in the tentative, insecure recesses of my mind. I was glad now I’d never said it aloud.
“Well, now he’s your worst enemy and probably out to kill you. And we’re going to end his merry little reign of terror over your friends and family and give him a taste of his own fucking medicine.” My guilty fury stabbed deeper, overturning every ugly fungus of emotion, and I hit the words meaning for them to be cruel. “Do you not realize that Arthur almost died? Tabitha and Pilar almost died. I almost died! You picked a murdering sociopath for a friend, and now it’s time to buck up and face the consequences—”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
My face stung like he’d slapped me, and I hit the brake so hard, the Yaris’s tires lost static friction for an instant.
It wasn’t like Checker hadn’t ever made jabs at my tendencies toward amorality. But usually, there was more humor. And usually, he wasn’t equating me with a murderous bomber who had abducted Arthur.
Or maybe he was talking about my friendship with Rio. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. The image of Coach flashed across my mind again too, hurling the driver to the pavement as if in a toddler’s tantrum, and everything I’d been so apprehensive to broach to Checker sat trapped on the back of my tongue.
We should have left him in jail to rot, Valarmathi whispered helpfully. I didn’t push back against her quite so hard this time.
“If that’s the way you feel,” I said to him. “You want to make your own way back? Because I can arrange that.”
“Look, I just mean … people are complicated,” Checker pleaded again. “D.J., you’ve only seen one piece of him. What our friendship meant to me—I can’t deny that, no matter what else he’s done. I won’t deny it. Besides, the person he became—that could have been me.”
“Yeah, because I can really imagine you blowing people up.”
“For God’s sake!” He twisted in the passenger seat to pin me with a hard-eyed stare, and I was glad I had the excuse of driving to keep my eyes determinedly on the road. “Come on, Cas. You don’t think I can effectively ruin people’s lives? Very effectively? You don’t think I could utterly destroy someone’s livelihood and family and reputation if I wanted to, drive them to—to suicide, or worse? We live online now!”
“Could and would are two different—”
“And I’d like to say I’ve never even contemplated going there,” he bulldozed right over me. “But there was a time when—there’s this temptation, when you feel like nobody in the world gives a damn, when the whole system’s been shitting on you, and you think, fuck it, I’m smarter than all of them—when taking that power starts to seem like justice. Like the natural, logical conclusion of the meritocracy everyone tells you life is supposed to be. And part of that whole craptastically messed-up headspace is not seeing other people as fully, equally human, because you can’t do that shit to other people if you think of them as—as having dreams and laughing at jokes and worrying about their families and just trying to muddle through this goddamn life the same way you are.”
My jaw clenched. I’d never heard Checker voice any of this.
“It’s so easy to live there, in that simple-minded place, and deny that real life is actually really fucking complicated,” he went on. “And D.J. and I … I think we reinforced it in each other. Mock the stupid people, you know? Show them who’s boss.”
“So, what happened to you?” I said.
“Arthur,” Checker said simply. “And Diego. I’d be a completely different person if not for them. I’d be—I don’t want to know what I’d be.”
“And what, you want to do that for D.J.?” I bit my tongue hard before I voiced my opinion that D.J. was beyond help. “I’ve never believed in redemption,” I said instead.
“Well, you’re goddamn lucky your friends do.”
He’d definitely been talking about me earlier. We finished the drive in tense silence.
twenty-three
WE MADE it to the hospital—after what felt like an eternity—and I immediately tagged out Rio, who’d been standing sentry outside Arthur’s room.
“I have another apartment with an intact door about a twenty-minute drive from the old one,” I told him. “You can