Right Where You Left Me

moby dick is cool, but there's so much shit about the whale

Back at the house, Nancy begins cooking downstairs. She points at Nate and narrows her eyes. "You," she starts. "Wait upstairs. Don't even try to sneak out the window." She turns to me. "You, keep an eye on him."

I begin to follow her into the kitchen when Nate grabs me by my arm.

"You have to keep an eye on me," he tells me.

I tug my arm away from him and take another step towards the kitchen. "I think she was joking, Nate. And I really think I should help her -"

He yanks me back by my waist, my back colliding with his chest. "Believe me, she was not joking."

I furrow my brows and tip my head back, staring up at Nate. He tilts his head down to look at me, grinning a little. "Are you sure?" I ask.

He lets go of me. "I'm sure, Adya."

Nate's bedroom is one of my favorite places.

It sounds suggestive, I know - but if you really see what it's like, you'd understand why.

His walls are adorned with posters. Fleetwood Mac, Lana Del Ray, Nirvana, Chase Atlantic. His walls are also covered in his art. Sketches of skulls with brains and ominous-looking liquid oozing out of them, or silhouettes of people struggling and fighting and swimming and dying. It's disturbing, but it's impossible to look away.

Once we're inside, he shuts the door behind us. I flop onto his "bed" (a mattress on the floor) and he takes a seat in his desk chair, leaning back and crossing his lean arms over his chest.

"Stop looking at me," I say, reaching over to examine a book on the floor next to his mattress.

"I'm trying to figure you out," he says. "You ignore me all summer, but suddenly you're showing up with my grandma to bail me outta jail? It doesn't make any sense."

"Me?" I ask incredulously. "Ignoring you?" I almost burst out laughing. "Nate, you've barely spoken to me once since you came back. You can't just show up and expect us to be like how we were before. Things changed. I changed."

I flip open his book and begin examining the pages. I'm still very aware of his gaze on me, and I'm not taking in a single piece of information in the book, but I have to do something to escape his piercing blue eyes.

"Adya." His voice is teasing.

"Stop bothering me."

"How's the book?" He leans back in his chair again. Tips his head back. Chews his stupid mint gum.

"It's great."

"Yeah?"

"Mhm."

"What's it about?"

Shit. I scan the page and blurt out the first word I see. "Windows."

"That's where you're wrong."

His voice is a lot closer. He pulls down the book with his hand and suddenly his face is inches from mine.

I suck in a breath, waiting for him to make a move. While I'm angry that he dismissed my confrontation, I'm still under his strange spell. He could ask me to kiss him and I'd do it in a heartbeat. It scared me a little.

But he doesn't move forward. He simply flops back against the wall next to me, legs stretched out on the mattress, and plucks the book from my hand.

"It's Charlotte Perkins Gilman," he tells me. "The Yellow Wallpaper. It's about a woman who spirals into insanity because she's confined to a room. She believes there's someone in her wallpaper, a woman who's plotting to kill her and her family. It's quick and short but really, really good. You know, I find classics written by women are so much more intriguing and better than classics written by men."