already said my name at least twice, trying to rescue me from the depths of my own head.
“Sorry. Zoned into my lenses.” Common enough, easy to believe.
Ania hums skeptically. “Did something happen with Davon? Is he okay? You were staring awfully hard at that package he sent.”
“It’s nothing,” I say.
Her voice takes on a warning tone. “Diz. Be real.”
Without warning, all of it bubbles up inside me, acid eating at my throat, more anger than anything else.
“Fine,” I snap. “Fine. I’ll tell you all after dinner.”
“Oh no,” she says. “Now you have to tell me.”
“After dinner.” I shouldn’t have said anything. She’s pathologically incapable of waiting.
“No, not after dinner,” she snaps, and I wince at the volume.
“Shut up,” I hiss, and pull her fingertips from the chem wash, patting them dry with a microfiber cloth. The second I have the maz reloaded and the access panel closed, she snatches her hand back and props it on her hip.
“Nope,” she says, “no way, you are not going to make me sit through dinner and keep my mouth shut until you decide to tell us.”
“Tell us what?” Jaesin says as he places a giant serving bowl of something garlicky in the center of the living-room floor with a clunk, barely muffled by the cheap, paper-thin carpet. Remi slithers off the couch with as little movement as possible, their head and shoulders melting onto the creaky wood floor until the rest of their body follows. When they finally tumble upright on their knees, their cool gray eyes immediately lock onto mine.
“Yeah, Dizzy, tell us what? Something else happen before Ania caught up with you today?” they ask, shifting their gaze to Ania. “I told you she needed a chaperone. Should have stuck with her after we left the sewers.”
“Hey, I am perfectly responsible!” I protest, then purse my lips. “There is something I should tell you all, though.”
The others look on expectantly.
Turns out those breathing exercises my therapist taught me make a great stalling tactic.
“Can’t we just sit down and have dinner first?”
Jaesin smiles as we all grab our cushions and arrange ourselves around the bowl of . . . whatever it is. He passes me one of our mismatched thrift-store plates and nods, a bit of his straight black hair falling over his forehead, still flecked with sauce.
“Sure, Diz. We can have dinner.”
I sigh. Saved.
“. . . while you talk,” he finishes, and I sag in defeat. Curse Jaesin and his dad maneuvers.
“Can I at least know what we’re eating first?”
“Food,” Jaesin, Remi, and Ania all chorus together, and Remi and Ania burst into giggles at Jaesin’s long-suffering expression. No one should achieve that level of dadness at age eighteen. It should be illegal.
“Okay, fine. Fine.” I serve myself first from the bowl first, to buy a little time to arrange my thoughts. The bowl is divided into six wedges, each piled high with a different thing. I scoop some fluffy grains onto my plate first, then add crisp baby greens, cubes of spicy-smelling tofu with Jaesin’s experimental brown sauce, long threads of thin-sliced root vegetables, and drizzle a milky-white dressing over it all. It actually looks and smells legitimately delicious, and fits into Remi’s immune-support diet. Go, Jaesin.
The others take turns making their plates to their own personal tastes, all in totally unusual silence. Great. Now the whole thing has been built up so much it’s primed to blow up into maximum awkwardness. Ania was right. I should have told them as soon as we got home and confirmed they weren’t dead, gotten it over with. Should have told them last week.
Remi especially is going to lose it. They are militant in their hatred of Maz Management, which confuses me to no end. It seems super straightforward to me. Big earthquake, contaminated maz everywhere, spellplague. MMC cleaned up the contamination and rebuilt the city, helped create programs for all the plague orphans, but has to charge for maz to pay for the systems and people needed for such a huge project. What else were they supposed to do? It sucks, and people have had to learn to live with a lot less maz now that it’s not just freely available everywhere, but what’s the alternative? I’d think Remi, of all people, would understand.
Well, nothing for it. Time to submit myself to the will of the people. My brain helpfully dredges up every single silently rehearsed conversation I’ve come up with over the past few weeks, but none of them are likely