And I feel…jealous?

I put my napkin around my throat and experimentally pull. It would be a great noose. Feeling jealous of love? Since when did that happen? When did I even care about it at all? I don’t. It’s a false promise, a fool’s gold tale, something that doesn’t happen to people like me. And yet here I am, jealous. Not of Jack, no. Of Kayla. I’m jealous of the sweet love that shines in her eyes. She can still feel love. She still thinks it’s some wonderful, ascendant, pure thing. Even if it’s naïve, it’s still a better way to look at it than the poisonous, to-be-avoided-at-all-costs bog I see love as.

I’m not fourteen anymore. I can’t go back to that pure love vision. It’s gone. Forever.

I’m jealous of Kayla, and how she’s never been hurt.

Sure, Jackass has insulted her a few times with his extreme, tell-it-like-it-is rationality. Maybe Avery told her he’s got a sick girlfriend in the hospital, and that hurt her. But she hasn’t been torn apart from the inside out. She hasn’t been laughed at, pulled at, pushed into.

She’s still pure.

I let the napkin drop from my neck and slap my hand over my mouth to stop the sudden rise of vomit in my throat. It hurts. The wound is open and it’s hurting again, and I have to get home. I have to find a dark room and curl up there and try to forget. I stagger out of the door, the bell over it tinkling behind me. I only hear it faintly. Everything is blurry and I can’t breathe. I try to inhale but fire bursts in my lungs, rips through my body. I’m shivering. Maybe I’m dying. That’d kinda suck to die over nothing at all. To die over something as stupid and idiotic as love. Here Lies A Stupid Little Girl, Who Collapsed Into A Casual Ball Of Panic And Pitiful Sobs At The Idea Of Love. P.S. Cupid Won This Round, Sucka. That would be my gravestone, and pigeons would poop on it and teenagers would have sex on it, and when the world floods from global warming it’ll flood and my pathetic fetal-position bones will float up and I’ll wander as a ghost and wail in couples’ ears -

“ - You,” A voice cuts through my nausea. “Are you alright?”

I look up. A blurry Jack hovers over me.

I gracefully vomit on his shoes.

***

It takes me a casual ten minutes of puking in front of my mortal enemy to realize he’s helped me into his car and actually what I’m puking off of isn’t a curb but the passenger side of his black sedan. He sits in the driver’s seat and taps on his phone the entire time. When there’s a brief pause in my retching, he looks up.

“Are you done?” He asks.

I immediately try to bolt out of the car and run to my own so I can shove my head into the exhaust pipe and mercifully die, but he pulls my shirt and yanks me back in.

“Just let me die!” I wail.

“Not quite yet. I have uses for you.”

“You’re so creepy! You’re so creepy and I’m so vomity and I mildly hate everything in this conceivable universe!”

“Kayla included?”

I stop wailing to glower at him. “Since I just paid you two hundred moolah to make her happy, obviously no, she is the one thing I do not hate. Her and like, pastries. And small kittens. But everything else can roast in Satan’s left armpit!” I whip my head around wildly. “Speaking of, where is she?”

“Went home.”

“You…you should go home too.” I inch my foot slowly out of the car door. “I’ll just –”

I lunge to run away and drown myself in the nearby puddle of homeless person piss, but Jack yanks me back again, reaches over me, and slams the door shut. I pull on the handle.

“You child-locked it!” I gasp.

“Stay here until you feel better,” He grunts.

“I feel fine! I’m at least sixteen fines,” I assure him. “Look! I can breathe! I can use my legs!” I do bicycle motions in the seat. “I can headbang!”

I bang my head twice and Jack has the fortuitous intuition to roll down the window seconds before I vomit out of it. When I empty my stomach of the last remnants of my noodles, I gasp and pull my head back inside.

“What? Do you get off on watching my fantastic gastrointestinal fireworks? Is that why you’re keeping me against my will?”

“You aren’t well,” He insists stonily. “Sit and relax until you do.”

“Relax! Please, tell me, how the hell I can relax when the world’s biggest snowman is sitting next to me, talking like he has a heart? It’s out of character! It’s….it’s disgusting! You aren’t Jack! You’re some fucked-up alien from Zabadoo here to take his body back for your beautiful specimen collection, aren’t you?”

Jack starts the car. I yank at the door handle twice as hard.

“C’mon, you piece of baby-proof shit! I’m sure babies have actually shit themselves trying to open you, but I won’t! I just puked the next twenty-four hours worth of shit out! I’ll get you open, I swear I will, or I won’t and then I’ll be captured by extraterrestrials and, well, it was nice knowing you but really I think whoever invented you made a huge error in judgment since they didn’t take Zabadoobians trapping a fabulous teenage girl in their car into consideration -”

Jack takes a sharp left turn and the momentum squashes my face against the window. I quickly put my seatbelt on.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“I’m taking you on a date.”

I immediately regret ever hiring him for tonight. And also living. Jack must see my panic, because he sighs.

“It’s your first date, right?”

“Uh, yes? But, you don’t really have to do that? Considering it’s not something you want to do? And I don’t really need one, or like, even really want one? Dates are for people in love and that’s never going to happen for me again so I really don’t think it’s necessary –”

“It’s an apology. For how I acted yesterday. Nothing personal, and nothing romantic.”

“Oh.” I brighten, but some buried part of me sinks. I punt the feeling out of this universe along with the last of Zabadoobians. “Right. An apology. Okay.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I don’t want you to be alarmed, but I think you might be crazy. I am the opposite of disappointed. I am oppopointed. Disaposite. There is nothing I would like more than to go on a not-date with my worst enemy who just went on a date with my friend, which, by the way, I paid him to do -”

“You’re also babbling.”

“And I’m babbling! How cool is that! Just drive so we can get this over with, you alien!”

He smirks and steps on the gas.

-12-

3 Years

17 Weeks

5 Days

We drive forever. Fiveever. Sixever. Sevenhundredever. We wind past decrepit buildings skinned with age and scabbed with graffiti. A murder of crows fight over a loaf of bread a homeless person scatters about. Huge neon signs in Korean and Chinese blare in all colors of the rainbow, the smell of fried chicken and sesame seeds pouring in. It’s the exact opposite of the clean, fancy area of town I was vomiting all over.

“Are you taking me to a black-market butcher to sell me for body parts?” I politely inquire. Jack pulls into a parking space and takes the keys from the ignition.

“Get out. It’s a bit of a walk.”

He gets out and I follow his stride down the dark sidewalk.

“You know, if you wanted my liver, all you’d have to do is ask nicely. I’m sure we could work something out. With my fist in your face.”

“Body parts aren’t on the menu with you. Tonight, or any night in the future.”

“Oho! Was that a double-entendre? Thanks, but when you’re as fantastic as I am you can’t afford to sleep with nerds.”

He suddenly veers right, into a tiny alleyway. So this is where I meet my end – in an alley of Chinatown, chopped up into little pieces and shipped to China to replace some old businessman’s cirrhosis-infested liver. My eyes widen when he pushes open a tiny door and walks three or so steps down into a restaurant. A counter sits in the middle, glass cases holding gleaming ruby slabs of tuna and pale swathes of yellowtail. Sushi chefs expertly slice and dice and mash rice. Only a few people are at the bar, and the hostess, a short Japanese woman with a dimpled face, quickly darts to us.