Chapters (38)
I started to wonder if maybe I could bring Paul into this whole thing. If Katie and Leo could believe what was happening, shouldn’t I be able to convince Paul as well? And didn’t he have a right to know?
He glanced over at me, reading me. His ability to do that is one of the things that drew me to him. But right now it was a liability.
“Something’s up with you, and it’s not just the reporters,” he said, and waited for me to give him an explanation. But how could I even begin to tell him? The proximity effect should have left him sensing bits and pieces of it, but he showed no signs. Paul was analytical—if he was getting inklings, he was probably suppressing them as irrational.
“Something’s up? After this week, what isn’t up?” I said.
“Is that a dick joke?”
“Actually, no,” I told him. “It’s been a rough week, and I’m fried, that’s all. Aren’t you?”
He sighed, and nodded. “Yeah, so am I.” He reached over and gently squeezed my knee, accidentally knocking the transmission into neutral for a second. Was that the multiverse trying to tell me that Paul and I weren’t going anywhere? Well, the multiverse could go screw itself in an infinite number of ways.
We drove on in silence. I didn’t like silence between us. So I tried, in the smallest of ways, to let him in.
“Somewhere,” I said, “there’s a world where Black and white kids go to the same school. Where your family’s got more money than mine, and I didn’t get beaten up in the back of an alley.”
Paul looked over at me, wondering where this was coming from, and where it might be going. “And in this shining world of unicorns and marshmallows,” he said, “are you and I the king and king of homecoming?”
And I realized, right then and there, that the truth was something I couldn’t share with him. Because if I did, it would break his heart. It would break mine, too. So I lied to Paul, and that hurt more than anything.
“Of course we are,” I told him. “And we look damn good in those crowns.”