your position before. Like, in love or whatever.” He actually looks pained at the word love. “But whenever I’m in a shitty-ass mood, I give myself four options.”
“Okay…”
“You ready?”
I laugh once. “Hit me.”
“Option one: PlayStation. Shoot some virtual people?”
“Eh.”
He nods. “Option two: shoot some real guns?”
“Getting closer.”
“Option three,” he says and points to his glove box. I drop the lid, pull out the only thing in there, which is a bag full of gummy bears.
I look over at him. “Sugar high?”
He smiles. “Edibles, my friend.”
“It’s like, nine thirty in the morning…”
“I haven’t slept.” He shrugs. “Ready for option four?”
“I don’t think I am,” I mumble, inspecting the weed gummies.
“Option four is all of the above.”
I crack a smile.
“Option four it is.” He looks toward the house. “My old man’s home, so if he asks, those are just some generic-ass gummy bears. Yo, put them in your pocket, okay?”
I shove them in my pocket and then follow him into the house. Holden’s dad is huge. And it’s obvious where Holden gets his build from. That’s about as much as they have in common, at least that I can see in the two minutes I spend with him. He’s quiet, soft-spoken, and polite. All things Holden is not. He leads me toward his room, and then closes the door after us. It smells like teen boy, sex, and dirty socks. It smells like Logan. Not Logan’s room. Just Logan in general. He must pick up on my reaction because he chuckles, then slides open a window, saying, “Brianna stayed here last night. She was gone when I woke up. Thank God.”
Nodding, I look around the room. There’s a queen bed in one corner and a twin in the other. “That was Mia’s bed,” he tells me. “Don’t bother sniffing the pillows. She hasn’t slept in it in years. “
“Shut up.” And also: how did he know?
We down an edible each, kill some losers on the PlayStation, down another edible, and somehow still have the smarts to decide that maybe touching a real-life gun isn’t the best idea.
“Can I ask you something?” Holden says. He’s lying on the floor, on his back, with his legs up against the wall. I’m in Mia’s old bed hugging her pillow. We are not high. Probably. “Why are you putting yourself through this hell with Mia? Why not just hook up with some random girl and get over it?”
“Uhh, because that’s not how shit works.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve tried.” Minutes of comfortable silence pass, and I say, “How come you only do the hook-up thing?”
Holden sighs, so long it’s almost as if he’s sucked in all the air in this house just for the one sound. Both legs slide against the wall, counterclockwise, until his entire body is turned to me. “My mom, mainly.” In my blazed mental state, the first thing I think is incest, and that’s so fucking wrong on so many levels. “Mia told you about my mom and her dad, right?”
“Yeah, she did.”
“She got burned pretty fucking bad, and my mom—she’s, like, The Best. Literally. But she fell in love too young, and all those emotions that come with love shouldn’t be in the hands of teenagers. That’s why they took away life sentences for minors who are murderers. Our brains, at this age, can’t handle that shit. But here I am, and so is Mia, and now we’re our parents’ life sentence. Don’t get me wrong; my mom loves me. She loves me way more than I deserve, but she’s thirty-four years old, and she’s never really lived. Mia and I—we’ve been her entire life since she was seventeen, and so… the last thing I want is to repeat history.” I wonder if he realizes just how much of himself he’s revealing to me. “It’d be nice though,” he continues, “to have a girl love me… like, look at me the way Mia looks at you.”
I scoff. “Like she wants to poison me in my sleep? Mia hates me, bro.”
“She doesn’t hate you. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. Maybe it’s the same thing, you know? She’s scared of love because her parents fucked with her head so bad. Or maybe it’s the age thing too. I mean, name anyone who meets that young and falls in love and stays together. I bet you can’t.”
“My sister and her husband.”
His eyes widen, just slightly. “Yeah?”
“Yep. They were fifteen. They’d gone to school together pretty much their entire lives, but my sister’s