Free Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff

other and we were all just supposed to pretend along with them.
    Ollie takes the deck from Hez and puts it in front of me. “Your deal. Hey, you want to come over tomorrow? I was thinking—”
    “That whole dinner insanity is such bullshit anyway,” the Captain says, leaning back in his chair like it’s no big deal. “One of these days, you need to just tell Dad to go fuck himself. Shit, tell them both.”
    The air in the sunporch seems electric suddenly, but the feeling in my chest is like nothing at all. I scoot my chair back and push the table out of the way so I can get out.
    The Captain’s still sitting on the other side of the washing machine with his beer in front of him. “Jesus—I’m just saying, you don’t have to keep going along with it if it’s so bad. What is your
problem
?”
    But my problem is that right now, all I want is to be someplace he’s not, and I could blame it on a lot of things, how he’s always taking shots at people, and we never have anything to say to each other that really matters—or even just that I’m still messed up about Friday night, how I spent something miserable like five hours sitting under his picnic table and hallucinating every sick, fucked-up thing you can think of and he just keeps laughing about it, like me living out my grimmest nightmares in real-time was somehow hilarious. I need to get out.
    The Captain’s staring at me, but he doesn’t say anything else. After a long, uncomfortable silence, I throw the cards down and go inside.
    I could keep going, down the back hall and through the living room, out the front door. I’d walk around the neighborhood or maybe head home, or text Heather McIntire, see what she’s doing.
    Or maybe not. The thought of kissing her kind of makes me feel disgusted with myself.
    Behind me, I can hear the Captain telling Ollie that pussy little bitches never get chicks. The house is empty and dark. I sit alone in my brother’s living room and do nothing.

WAVERLY
    My feet hurt.
    They throb with a deep, constant ache that hits as soon as I swing myself out of bed. I get in the shower, and after standing there for fifteen minutes, the pain is better. My head feels numb, like it’s stuffed with cotton.
    All morning, my phone keeps buzzing in the side pocket of my bag.
    Five texts. Count them: five. All of which are from CJ, who I’ve known for two years but do not
know,
not really. Not in any relevant sense. All of the texts are spectacularly content-free.
    “What are you so homicidal for?” Maribeth says, prancing up to my locker after third period and leaning her chin on my shoulder.
    I force myself to stop scowling and hold out the phone, offering:
skipped western civ do you hate tha romans as much as I do?
“CJ texted me this morning. A lot.”
    “So? That’s ideal! I mean, doesn’t it make you feel special?”
    I think of the various ways to interpret that. The answer is no. No, it does not. What’s special about five text messages? He knows my number. He knows how to work his phone. Everything else is incidental.
    “Don’t you like knowing that he’s thinking about you?” Maribeth says, and it’s in this moment that I realize I’ll never be able to answer her in any way that she would understand.
    When I look at my phone and see a message from CJ that says
What up girl,
followed by three question marks and an exclamation point, I can tell we’re not compatible. It’s not that I’m a huge punctuation snob, or even very fascist about grammar. It’s just that we are clearly not relating to each other in even the most fundamental way.
    —
    By the time last period rolls around, the day feels dreamy and bottomless. I think my heart is slowing down.
    The counseling office is empty—its natural Tuesday state—and for the first fifteen minutes, I’m content to wipe down the copier with Lysol and rearrange the add/drop forms. Compulsive cleaning can only tide you over for so long, though. I put up the
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