Varian stared down to the bottom of the water bottle. He watched the distorted refraction of his finger move across the plastic. His eyes were glazed over, following the movement while Padriac and Mary were whispering to each other. He was distracted for a moment by their murmurs, furrowing his brow while still trying to focus on his finger. The blue tint of the bottle colored his hand blue and he was lost in the color for just a second before he lost the connection.
He closed his eyes and gave out a lengthy sigh. He pushed the bottle away. He’d been trying to keep his mind off—other things that he didn’t want to speak of.
“Maybe…”
Varian opened his eyes. Padriac and Mary were both looking at him.
He raised a brow. “What?”
They looked at one another.
It was Mary who cleared her throat and leaned over the lunch table so that she could look at him better. “We have something to tell you.”
He looked at Padriac, but he was avoiding eye contact. He wasn’t sure what this was all about. The way they were looking at him was reminding me of the way his parents had looked at him when he came back home. The pity was unbearable. Though he couldn’t really tell if it was pity or something else. It was becoming hard to make out the slight differences in emotions. They were blurring into one big jumble of a mess and he was too tired to untangle them.
The small smile that stretched over Mary’s mouth made him scared that he wasn’t going to like what he was about to hear.
“Me and Padriac are dating.”
The room went eerily quiet. It must have been in his head because no one had actually stopped to look at them. The room was buzzing as ever, kids screaming across the room, laughing, and being teenagers. They hadn’t stopped talking over one another—hadn’t stopped being the normal human husks that they were. It was only Varian that was not normal. It was only him that had failed to notice that he was losing his mind.
Mary and Padriac shouldn’t have been a big deal. It wasn’t. Really.
He just didn’t understand why they were telling him.
He blinked a couple times as if that would make things clearer or the situation would just disappear all together. The awkward silence that had fallen over the three had carried on for too long. Padriac had turned his head to look at Varian now. Their eyes met.
“Okay…” He looked over at Mary.
She must have seen how confused he was.
“We just wanted to tell you. We don’t want any secrets between us.”
Us meaning him and them. Maybe they felt like there were already too many secrets going on. Not that it could be helped. There were things that he would never let them know. Things that made the nightmares more ravenous. Things that made him feel more like the monster than the victim.
He clenched his hands into fists under the table. They were still looking at him—Mary more so. He couldn’t think in that one moment. She was staring at him, inspecting him like she was waiting for him to explode. He might. He didn’t understand the feeling that was flaring up inside his gut. He didn’t understand anything most of these days.
He unclenched his hands and let out the breath that he’d been holding.
Somehow, he managed to put on the fakest smile he’d ever worn.
“Sorry. I’m surprised is all. You never—“ He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
They never seemed close? Was that what he was trying to get out? The one person that he thought Mary would end up with would be Kacey. They hung out the most and they looked as if they were the perfect people to fall in love. They were so alike to one another that it was hard to think that they would ever end up with anyone else.
It was only then, when Padriac and Mary announce weirdly to him that they were dating, that he saw how good Kacey and Mary seemed to be for each other.
But maybe he’d read all the signs wrong. He wasn’t a love expert. It was a surprise that he managed to end up with Hazel. She saw something in him that he didn’t see. That no one else had seen.
Guilt fell over him as he thought about his girlfriend. He still hadn’t spoken to her. She’d texted him a few times, called him every night, and he still hadn’t spoken to her.
They’d run across each other in the halls. They didn’t have any classes together thankfully. It was hard seeing her a couple of times a day at school. It would be a lot harder if he had to sit in class and know that she knew he was still ignoring her.
He was glad that she was giving him space. And that she was letting him go at his own pace. He still couldn’t stomach talking to her after what had happened to him. It was irrational. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But she would want something from him that he couldn’t give. He couldn’t pay attention and he couldn’t stand touching anyone anymore. Just thinking about it made his skin crawl.
He didn’t want her to think that he was disgusted by her. Or that he didn’t love her anymore.
Because even after all that he’d gone through, he knew that he wanted to be with Hazel. It was just that he didn’t know how he could do that with him being so broken. He felt like less than a man—less than a human. He felt like nothing.
He felt like trash that wasn’t worth anyone’s time.
Mary threw her arm around Padriac’s shoulder. His cheeks blushed pink. He slowly wrapped his arm around her waist.
“We didn’t know this was going to happen either,” Padriac said. His voice was monotone. He was staring right at Varian this time. His grayish blue eyes were unnerving for some reason.
Varian frowned, furrowing his brows so hard that it hurt. Something was egging him in the back of his mind. He couldn’t quite catch what it wanted to tell him.
“Hm. That’s usually how it happens.”
It was small talk that he was pulling right out of his ass. He tried to pay attention as Mary started talking about other couples that didn’t seem to go together but were more than happy. His heart once against wasn’t in it. He used to love hearing his friends talk non-stop. He used to love how vapid and unconcerned they could be about life.
But now, it did nothing for him. It was all meaningless.
Because in the end, death didn’t care about any of that.
And they were all going to die eventually.
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