Only Mostly Devastated: Chapters 16–22

Because coy meant “texting someone all day every day, calling each other to hear their voice, and making out in secret whenever possible, all the while pretending to be acquaintances,” right?

Lara was utterly engrossed in her mac and cheese.

Somewhere inside of me, a dark cloud of wrath, rage, and indignation started twisting my intestines into sailor knots.

“She basically just turned her back on me,” Lara said, purportedly to me, but mostly I think she wanted the opportunity to vent out loud in general.

Because he was self-absorbed, self-interested, and devoid of empathy?

“Hate away. I’ve hated Renee for over a year now, I think. Doesn’t mean I don’t love her.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction?”
“Nope. Apathy is incompatible with hate. Love works okay.”

“We’re playing swapsies with oppressive gender roles tonight. That’s the theme of this stupid dance, right?” she asked.

I was seething.
“I don’t want to see you anymore,” I whispered back.

When the bell rang, I continued to ignore him, and managed to storm off to my next class without Will being able to do much in the way of begging. Made partly more effective by the fact that Will couldn’t say a word where anyone else could hear, and school halls weren’t conducive to privacy.

The bad news was that the rose-gold dagger necklace I had around my neck wasn’t enough to ward off a Lara attack.

Apparently he had no reply. Which only incensed me more.

And everything was fine. You know, not epically great or anything, but fine. Right up until the day Juliette started sobbing into her cheeseburger at lunch, plumb out of nowhere.

“I got a rejection letter yesterday.”
I blanched.

Underneath Lara’s defiant nonchalance, there was a hint of confusion.

If “argument” was really the right word for this situation—in fairness, Lara seemed to almost be goading Renee more than fighting back.

One of them, a girl who wore her mousy blond hair in a ponytail, had on a T-shirt that said CHOCOLATE IS THE ANSWER, BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?

Or if Prince Eric was all like, “Hmm, I could fight the giant octopus sea witch from my nightmares, but then I could also sail home and return to eating fish I now know are sentient, safe in my denial and cognitive goddamn dissonance!?"

Or if Prince Eric was all like, “Hmm, I could fight the giant octopus sea witch from my nightmares, but then I could also sail home and return to eating fish I now know are sentient, safe in my denial and cognitive goddamn dissonance!"?

Two weeks after the Renee disaster—debacle—devastation...whatever-you-wanted-to-call-it, Lara had apparently decided she was ready to move on.

And when I say Lara was flirting, I don’t mean the natural banter that had caused Will and me to give birth to Larmatt.

This was totally out of the blue, without any initiation from me. So sure, I was intrigued.

Like, maybe I was immune to death and pain, and I could theoretically spend the rest of my life killing people who I thought objectively deserved to die, and I’d never be even a little damaged by any of it.

“Here we have the mother covered in what appears to be baby vomit and baby food,” Uncle Roy’s voice said in a terrible David Attenborough impression. “It’s her way of blending into the scenery, which is, incidentally, also covered in baby vomit and baby food, in order to sneak up on her young.”

She was covered in splatters of tomato sauce, had a splodge of gooey cheese in her eyebrow, and one of her sleeves was rolled up haphazardly.

I mean, I knew about death, obviously, but it had always been in the abstract. Now it felt startlingly real. Real people I knew would die.

Will would laugh at me and call me goth if he saw me, because I was probably filling all those existential stereotypes right now, but seriously, what was the point? What was the point? Of any of this? If we were all going to just vanish at a moment’s notice, why bother even trying while we were alive?

No breakdowns, no freak-outs, no terrified contemplations of my own mortality.

A little alone time wouldn’t be amiss.

He took so long to answer, I was gearing up to prod him into speaking when he finally spat it out.

Right, because that’s how I wanted to spend a Friday night—watching guys throw balls at each other’s heads and congratulating each other on their excellence and athletic prowess when they managed to throw the ball in just the right way.

It was hard for me to follow the rules of who was supposed to go where, and what kind of moves were allowed, but at least I had the gist of things. And the gist was, this was probably going to be a close game.

They seemed to do a quick examination to see if anything was hurt, then painstakingly helped him to his feet and walked him off to the sidelines.

Two people who weren’t strangers anymore, and who were now well versed on all the things that could stop them from working out, and who’d maybe figured out a way to fit together anyway.

Darnell’s mouth went into an O shape, but Matt looked affronted.

Because after a year of everything being uprooted again, and again, and again, I was constantly bracing myself for something else to fall apart so I could somehow preempt it.