Page 23

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

“You have a lovely home,” Theo told Sundance as she slid a tray of fish sticks onto the kitchen table.

Kade snorted, twirling a fork in his hand. It was hard not to feel defensive as rich kid Theo looked around their tiny kitchen: ratty tea towels, plastic countertops, old burns above the stove from Kade leaving a pot of pasta so long it dried out and caught fire. Everything smelled faintly of ketchup for reasons Kade had never been able to identify.

“What?” Theo gave Kade a pointed look. “It’s homey.”

Kade surveyed him for signs of sarcasm. There were none. He’d forgotten about Theo’s polite, almost bashful act he could put up around certain adults. He usually only saw it around Mr. Hawthorn in history class .

Sundance sat heavily in her seat. They’d had to drag an extra one out from the laundry room, a plastic chair that Sundance had insisted on taking.

“Dig in,” she said.

Kade speared the crispiest stick. “I thought you had to pull more shifts.”

“I do.” She eyed his bruised knuckles. “I took off when I heard my kid was in the hospital.”

“Sorry,” Kade muttered. Sundance reached over and cupped his face. Kade rolled his eyes, but leaned into it. It wasn’t long before he pulled away, shooting a nervous look over at Theo. Theo’s gaze instantly darted back to his glass of water, pressing the rim to his mouth and faking a sip.

“Theo,” Sundance said. “You said your last name was Fairgood?”

“That’s me, ma’am.” He gave her a winning smile. Kade rolled his eyes.

Sundance reached for another fish stick. “Dropped my shopping bags in the parking lot once. Your daddy helped me pick it up. Nice fella, for a lawyer.”

“He is,” Theo agreed. “He’s great. They’re both great. My mom plays tennis, do you ever play?”

Kade sniggered.

“I don’t have a lot of time for that sort of thing,” Sundance said blandly, instead of laughing in his face. “And I do enough running around at work. You hang out with my kid often, Fairgood? ”

Kade traded a panicked look with Theo. They couldn’t go with the drugs cover story to his aunt . She knew he didn’t sell drugs.

“Not until recently,” Theo said.

“He just found me in the woods,” Kade said over him. “We don’t…”

He trailed off. Theo’s answer had shot his own in the foot.

“We only started hanging out last week,” Theo tried. “We don’t share the same friend groups, but we, uh…bonded. At the Founder’s Day party. We talked about…”

He looked beseechingly at Kade.

“Fashion,” Kade supplied. “He wants to experiment with his aesthetic. Jock isn’t really cutting it anymore.”

“My aesthetic isn’t just jock ,” Theo argued.

“You’re literally wearing your letterman jacket right now!”

Sundance interrupted them. “Why don’t you show him that shirt you’re working on, Kade? Broaden those fashion horizons.”

The kitchen went silent. Theo paused in the middle of pretending to take a sip of juice. It pooled at his lips, spilling over the glass.

“God,” he said, wiping his face. “Sorry?—”

“Theo doesn’t want to see my shirt.” Kade smiled, sharp and warning.

Sundance ignored it and arched a dark brow, looking expectantly at Theo .

Theo opened his mouth.

Don’t , Kade thought.

“Kade’s working on a shirt?”

Kade groaned.

Sundance nodded. “Gonna be a world famous designer one day.”

“Okay, shut up.” Kade fended off her gentle nudge with a fish stick, scattering crumbs down both of them. Theo watched them scatter to the floor with a weirdly nervous expression, like he was waiting for Sundance to start yelling about the carpet. He looked surprised when she turned to him and continued, “He’s a genius. He has to be, with all the practice he’s got under his belt. Last summer he made one piece of clothing a day .”

“Nothing else to do,” Kade muttered, slouching back in his seat. “It was that or start joyriding. And I don’t have a car.”

“Carjacking,” Theo suggested

Sundance smiled reluctantly, leaning over to Kade. “What was that one I liked? The one with the tassels, what was it?”

“Tassels,” Theo repeated. “Goths can wear tassels? Can I see the tassels?”

“Boy wants to see the tassels,” Sundance said flatly.

Kade gave her a seething look. She stared steadily back, munching her fish stick.

“You’re not being a very good host,” Theo told him.

“Oh my god ,” Kade said, and stood up so fast the chair screeched .

Kade forced himself not to check Theo’s reaction to his room—well-loved posters, piles of dirty laundry, fashion books, stray mugs, mouthwash on the nightstand—as he got on his knees in front of a dresser. The lowest drawer was full of fabric scraps. The next one was jeans in various forms of tatter, ties, hats, and yarn. The next was full-length shirts, a pincushion, jackets, and loose stencils. Nothing was folded.

“This is stressing me out,” Theo told him, frowning down at his phone. “You don’t have a better organizing system? This is it?”

“It is organized,” Kade said. He nodded at Theo’s phone. “Trouble?”

“What?” Theo’s expression cleared. He shoved his phone back into his pocket. “Just Liss. I’ll talk to her later.”

Kade was half tempted to ask what the hell was going on with Felicity these past few weeks—rumors were flying about an abusive mom, abusive boyfriend, fight clubs, money trouble that only gymnastic competitions would solve, as if her teen modeling career wasn’t going perfectly fine—but something had caught his eye. A pair of knitted gloves sat at the bottom of the accessories drawer, partially obscured by some truly unfortunate belts. He tugged the gloves out. They were dark yellow and wonky, stitches missing every few rows. He hadn’t seen them in years .

“What’s that?”

“Hmm? Nothing.” Kade clutched them to his chest protectively.

Theo tugged the gloves from him, ignoring Kade’s protests. “I knew you were lying about the defensive knitting needles. Did you make these?”

“They’re the first ones I ever made.” Kade crossed his arms tight over his chest, fighting the urge to grab them back and hiss. “Give them back.”

“Oh.” Theo hesitated. Kade waited for him to hold them over his head and tell him to jump, but Theo just handed them back and scratched his head sheepishly. “Are they, like…special?”

“No.” Kade paused. “Sort of. We had…my mum had this thing. The first time you make something, you give it away.”

“And you still have these because…what, they suck? They’re not that bad. Better than anything I could do.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Kade’s grip tightened around the clumsy yellow wool. “They’re too big for my aunt. And I don’t…”

He trailed off. I don’t have anyone to give them to was too pathetic to say to anyone, let alone to Theo Fairgood. Even if they were stuck together now, a jock was a jock. Even if he was trying to be nice , with his stupid new knitting needles and asking if Kade was okay . Like it didn’t make Kade’s traitorous heart spasm every time.

Theo shrugged. “I’ll take them.”

Kade looked up in surprise .

“What? I’m doing you a favor. You get yours, I get mine, right? Now gimme my gloves.”

Kade handed them over warily. Theo tucked them in his pocket, and Kade waited for Theo to shove him and say psych, or start barking at him, or something equally stupid. But Theo just waited, and Kade stood there dumbly until Theo raised his pale brows and Kade remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

He whirled back, rummaging through the drawers and throwing shirts out at random. Black Dolly Parton shirt, black button-down, black cravat, black shirt with wonky red stitching spelling out I AM SO FUCKING LONELY that Kade didn’t even remember making.

“Whoops,” Kade mumbled, stuffing that shirt back into the drawer, without checking whether Theo had seen it. He made a faint noise of triumph when he grabbed a familiar crop top.

It was black, of course, with a crackle of gold in the middle. Tassels dangled from the hem. There were little white pins on the ends, like shooting stars.

Theo touched one of the pins. “Cool.”

“Yeah. Sure. It’s not very goth.”

“It’s black.”

Kade sneered. “ Black doesn’t automatically mean goth .”

“Right,” Theo said dubiously. “Remind me the difference between goth and emo?”

“After I went on a whole spiel to Felicity last year? You were there. ”

“Yeah, but I didn’t listen . Tell me again.”

Kade narrowed his eyes. Theo kept standing there all weird and half-smiley, like they were friends or something. A big part of Kade wanted to snarl at him and run. Another part of him wanted to take what he could until this was inevitably over. Like that shirt said—he was so fucking lonely. And Theo was surprisingly fun to hang out with, when he got over himself.

“Emos are depressing,” Kade started. “Their fashion sense is too casual to be interesting. They’re broody and they think everything sucks.”

“Goths don’t think everything sucks?”

“No. Goths are…” Kade squirmed. “We’re passionate . The world is a dark place, but there’s beauty in the darkness. You know? We’re all about hope. No hope with emos. They’re all nihilists. It’s boring.”

Kade reached back into the drawer. He picked up a belt with a snake skull on the end, poking the fangs so he had something to look at that wasn’t Theo and his piercing brown eyes.

“Could’ve fooled me,” Theo said.

Kade looked up reluctantly from the snake belt. “What?”

Theo shrugged. “All your partying. Getting into fights. Doing stupid shit that could get you killed. It’s very nihilistic.”

“Um,” said Kade, for once trying to find a way not to take that as an insult. “I guess.”

He twisted the belt in his hands. He desperately wanted to say something else, keep the conversation going, but he couldn’t think of anything.

“We should go find the tree,” Theo blurted. “Cheech’s tree, the one he doodled in his secret room…thingy.”

“Why? You gonna ditch the big game after all?”

Theo snorted, like the idea of ditching a basketball game for something that might decide the fate of the town was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.

“ No . Just—we can check it out. Look for clues, or whatever. After school tomorrow?”

“I’ll see if I can fit that into my busy schedule,” Kade said dryly.

Theo nodded. The conversation dripped to another stop. Kade waited for Theo to make an excuse to leave, but he just stood there, rubbing his own pockets.

“Hey,” Theo said finally. “I always wanted to ask…”

Kade tensed, waiting for a hundred different horrible questions.

“Why’d you cut your hair? I always thought you loved that monster of split ends hanging around your head.”

Kade laughed sharply. “I loved it. ’S why I shaved it off.”

Theo frowned. “You got rid of it…because you loved it? I don’t get it.”

“Yeah,” Kade said. “You wouldn’t.”

He could see the next question forming behind Theo’s mouth .

Don’t ask, Kade thought. If Theo pressed him about it, Kade was guaranteed to ruin their perfectly nice night. And he was sick of ruining things.

Theo took a breath.

Kade braced himself.

“See you tomorrow,” Theo said quietly, and left.