Page 546 of Lessons in Cruelty

I don’t know what Kai did or didn’t do, because the first promise he ever broke, long before my sixteenth birthday, was the one he made when he left Riverside.

So, yeah, none of this should make me jealous, but it does.

Guess I’m as petty as I am pathetic.

Me and Kai, we were the same. We both had shitty families who forced us to grow up in shitty mobile homes in a shitty trailer park.

It’s not fair that he got out. That he got this.

But I guess I just have to accept it, same as I’ve had to accept every other injustice thrown my way since my mother squeezed me out of her womb.

“Yay,” I say dryly, clinking his glass a little too hard with mine before taking a big swallow of my wine.

Yuck.

It tastes like turpentine mixed with vinegar. But I down another big mouthful and put the glass down before slipping around Kai to check the pasta.

“Yay?” Kai repeats warily.

I don’t turn around because I don’t trust my face right now.

“Oh, sorry.” I pump a fist in the air. “Woo hoo! Yeah!”

I hear him set his glass down. “The fuck’s up with you?”

“Nothing.” I poke the spaghetti to make sure it’s not sticking together. “I’m having a ton of fun. Aren’t you having a ton of fun?”

“Haven—”

He cuts off when I spin around to face him. I have to grab the counter to steady myself as the world takes longer than me to stop spinning.

“No, really. I’m loving it.” I push away, grabbing my glass and taking it with me as I limp over to the closest glass window. Kai’s beach house is lousy with them. This one offers a gorgeous view of the deck, the white sandy beach, the frothy waves.

My stomach churns.

While I was sleeping in my car, counting quarters for gas money, he was vacationing in a fucking palace by the ocean. My green-eyed boy has become a stranger with money, and I’m simply the embarrassing reminder of where he came from.

No wonder he never replied to my letters.

His hand is warm and large and heavy when he lays it on my shoulder. “Are you angry with me, or something?”

“Why’d you think that?” I huff out a quiet laugh. “It’s not like you forgot about me the moment you moved out of Riverside or anything.”

He tries to turn me to face him, but I lock my knees and refuse to shift. Wine sloshes up the side of my glass, but thank heavens it doesn’t spill on the exquisite hardwood floors.

“Forgot you?” His voice is a few octaves too high. Way too defiant. “I—that—you can’t say that.”

“You’d prefer abandoned? Rejected?” I shake my head, swallowing down another mouthful of the awful wine. In its defense, it doesn’t really taste that awful anymore. Guess my taste buds have shut down in self-defense.

I throw him a sidelong glance when he doesn’t reply straight away.

Like me, he’s staring at the ocean. “I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the woods. And even if I was, I didn’t have the time. My parents forced me to take extra classes to get my grades up. Put me on the football team.”

“You could have invited me to one of your games. Could have invited me to your house. Think I didn’t want to see your fancy mansion in the hills?” I turn to him, my hand on the cool windowpane. “The moment you got money, everything changed. You changed, Kai. Soon as you moved to Hillside, I might as well have been living on a different planet. And I guess you didn’t like the idea of inviting E.T. over to your house.”

He drops his head, staring at his still-full glass of wine. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Yeah? So you weren’t ashamed of me?”