Five Flavors of Dumb - Antony John [36]
“Why do you hate me so much?” she cried.
“What are you talking about?”
She didn’t answer. She knew I understood her.
“It’s my job to make sure you stay in Dumb,” I said.
“And what if Tash wanted to leave? Would you treat her the same way?”
I rolled my eyes. It was a stupid question, but I couldn’t exactly deny she had a point.
Kallie leaned against a scraped porcelain sink and ripped a paper towel from the dispenser. She dabbed at her eyes slowly, deliberately, like she needed time to think. “Seriously. Why do you hate me?”
I snorted, considered saying “Why the hell do you think?” Only it occurred to me that Kallie was the one in tears, not me. While I was busily stating my case, she was scrabbling around for a sign that I could tolerate her existence.
“I don’t hate you, Kallie. It’s just . . . look at you. You’re beautiful and popular and . . . you have really nice clothes.” (I couldn’t believe that with four years to prepare, that’s the best I could do, but her crying kind of threw me off my game.)
There were still tears in her eyes, but she looked stronger, more defiant now that she had something to work with. “My mom is a supervisor at Nordstrom Rack,” she explained, her voice steady. “All my clothes were bought with her employee discount, and they were imperfect to begin with. Plus, everything is last season.”
I tried to think of a suitable rebuttal, but failed.
“I also share a one-bedroom condo with my mom because my dad hasn’t paid child support in seven years,” she continued.
I should have been sympathetic, but I just felt defensive, like she’d unfairly withheld evidence from the prosecution. “You’re still popular though,” I said, sounding like an eight-year-old.
“You mean the friends that started walking away when you made me cry? The ones who didn’t follow me in here? The ones who like to remind me that my clothes are so last season?”
“Then why do you still hang out with them?”
“Who else should I hang out with? Tash? Will? You and Ed? You’ve all made it clear how much you want me around.”
I felt exhausted, and it wasn’t just the strain of lip-reading in a room that echoed like a cathedral. Despising Kallie from afar had always been an unwavering constant in my life, like Finn being late, and USS Immovable’s engine turning over twelve times before starting. If I’d been wrong about her, what else had I been wrong about?
“It’s only Tash that doesn’t like you being in the band,” I conceded. “And maybe Will. Why did you even want to join Dumb in the first place?”
“Because I love music. I’ve wanted to be in that band for ages, and I’ve been practicing, honestly. I thought there was a chance I could join last year, but then Josh said the others wouldn’t agree to it. He said he needed one more member in favor of me joining, so he wouldn’t be outvoted. And then you became manager.”
As I processed the remark, I tried to convince myself it was all just a coincidence. Surely Josh wouldn’t go to the trouble of installing me as manager just to get Kallie on board. But then I pictured him with his hands on Kallie’s butt, his come-on as subtle as a sledgehammer. Making me temporary manager had probably seemed like a small price to pay for increasing his chances of hooking up with Kallie. If that had been his plan, he’d have to be disappointed by the early returns on his investment.
“Has Josh asked you out?” I asked finally. I knew it was the million-dollar question, and I didn’t have the energy to broach the subject gently.
“No. Well, he did last year, but I wasn’t really interested.”
“Are you going to date him now?”
Kallie narrowed her eyes. “I like watching him perform. He’s funny, and really smart, and he’s got so much energy, but ...”
I didn’t need to hear what came next. “But” was the only word that mattered.
Kallie had stopped crying now, but the recent waterworks imbued her with a melancholy beauty that was possibly even more striking than her usual sex appeal. I wondered what she was thinking. Was she contemplating the very real possibility that we were both pawns in a chess game that Josh was