Even Death Won't Do Us Part

Chapter 16

Peter's hair is damp from the shower, and the chemical tang of chlorine still clings to his skin. I can smell him from his bed, where I sit, cross-legged, watching his naked back. It's hours later. After Abigail left, I left Delilah. I needed to be alone. I spent the rest of the day just driving and thinking, running everything over and over in my head.

And now here I am, trying to pretend like everything is normal, like anything is.

"You sure you're up for going?" Peter asks. He opens his closet and takes out a shirt---forest green with PANTS printed on the front. His favourite. He slips it on over his head--the way guys do. And then, just like I knew he would, he takes out a green button-up shirt to wear over it. A couple of days ago, before any of this happened, I would have felt oddly satisfied to notice this. There's a sweet comfort in knowing these kinds of things about a person.

He turns back as he does the buttons up.

"It's only that usually . . ." He trails off. "Jeremy's parties have never really seemed like your thing." He is putting it mildly, being polite.

Jeremiah Winters is part of the popular sports crowd, which is one of the ones Peter is a part of. He's tall and rich, with a chiseled, toned jaw. Auburn once said, "He looks like a serial dater, but one who'd only stop dating you because he doesn't think you're pretty anymore." She said things like that, and I'd laugh in spite of myself. Because of her, whenever I see Jeremiah, that's the only thing I could think of.

He has an enormous house with a pool, and his parents are always going out of town and either are oblivious or just don't care that whenever they go away, he has more than fifty people over to drain their liquor cabinet. We've met dozens of times outside of school, but every time we meet, he acts like he's never seen me before in his life.

As I said, I'm unnoticeable.

Peter comes over to the bed. He leans down and kisses me lightly on the lips.

And I feel a stab of guilt. Because the truth, which I can't tell him, is that I only want to go to this party because of Jack Avery. And his text from a half hour ago.

Auburn's creepy boyfriend :

Found something. Need to show u tonight

This was all he wrote. It's not like I'm so scared of Jack now. Since this morning, nothing has even changed, really . . . but I have the feeling in my gut that it's better not to meet him alone. So for now, I'll trust that.

So this is what I say to Peter. "It'll be good to get my mind off things."

When he leaves his room and goes to the bathroom to put the tiny touch of gel into his hair that he thinks I don't know he uses, I take out my phone and write back.

Me :

Jerry is having a party, meet there at 9?

Jack is part of that big group of guys too. A second later he writes back.

Auburn's creepy boyfriend :

K. See u then.

"Geez, he's so dismissive," I huff under my breath and look back up at Peter, who's back in the room now. "So we're going then?" he asks. It scares me how easy it is to break a promise.

"Yeah." I say. "Sounds fun."

xx

Jerry's parties are not fun. I know I'm only seeing the very surface when I look at the people. Everyone has their own issues, but when I walk into Jeremiah Winters' big living room full of people laughing in unison, their big white smiles glowing under Jerry's parents' customizable mood lighting, it's easy to imagine that no one here has ever been lonely or sad or scared for a single second of their entire lives.