Say a Little Prayer(43)
By the time the clock above the oven blinks 1:30 a.m., I’m physically incapable of eating another bite. The refrigerator door still swings open, contents slowly dripping onto the tiles below, and despite our initial efforts, there’s evidence of our midnight picnic all over the kitchen. I groan, pushing myself away from the table.
“We should head back. And we should probably clean, too.”
I grab a roll of paper towels and start wiping down the counters as Julia stuffs everything back into the pantry. It’s not perfect. If anyone looks too closely, they’ll probably find our wrappers buried in the trash, but I’m hoping the counselors on the breakfast shift will be too tired to care.
“Want a hand?”
I look up to find Greer on the other side of the table, bottle of disinfectant spray in hand. She’s watching me warily, like she’s fully prepared to use it as a weapon if she has to, and I wonder why the question feels so much like a truce. I give a noncommittal shrug, and for a minute, we both kind of stand there, scrubbing opposite sides of the same table in awkward, stilted silence.
Last summer, our Student Government Association hosted a car wash to raise money for new football uniforms. And by that I mean incoming senior class president Greer Wilson single-handedly organized the entire event while her VP made out with his girlfriend behind the band hall. The event was a success, obviously. Greer doesn’t do anything halfway, and when she signed me and Hannah up for volunteer shifts, it was with the vaguely threatening air of someone who’d won too many high school debate championships to truly understand the meaning of the word no.
The three of us spent the afternoon elbows deep in soapy water, scrubbing the hoods of other people’s cars and laughing when Mr. Rider ran over three different cones on his way out of the lot. Greer had traded her usual clothes for a frayed pair of shorts and faded tie-dye, and when we finally packed up at the end of the day, I remember thinking that there weren’t many people who could pull off an event like that.
Now the memory sits like a shard of glass in my throat. Impossible to swallow around, impossible to ignore. Maybe it’s the bonding experience of creeping through the woods tonight or maybe it’s the fact that I’m finally content for the first time all day, but as my fingers curl around the wad of paper towels, all I want is to cut it out completely.
“I…” I stop, clear my throat, and take a deep breath before trying again. “I’m sorry I called you a bitch the other day.”
Greer’s eyes narrow on me across the table, and I get the distinct impression she can’t tell if I’m being genuine or not. I can’t even tell myself. “Okayyyy,” she says, suspicion dripping from every drawn-out syllable. “I’m going to forgive you, but only because it’s, like, one in the morning and I’m too tired to think of a good reason not to.” She hesitates and then, like it physically pains her, adds, “And I’m sorry for what I said about you, too. It’s not…completely true.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “It was, but I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”
“That’s not fair.” Greer steps toward me, cleaning supplies momentarily forgotten. “I’ve never said a bad word about Hannah, Riley. Seriously. She’s my friend.”
I choke back a laugh. “That’s bullshit. You’ve been ghosting her all semester. You’ve stopped coming over. You’ve listened to everyone say horrible, disgusting things about her for months, so forgive me if I wouldn’t exactly consider you a friend.”
Greer flinches, and I see the exact moment her defenses slide back into place. “That’s not my fault. I can’t control what other people say.”
“You could if you weren’t such a coward.” There’s the anger from this morning, simmering in the air between us. “Maybe you were Hannah’s friend at one point. Maybe it wasn’t your idea to shut her out, but you know how people talk about her and you don’t care.”
“Of course I care! No one shut her out, Riley! She’s the one who stopped talking to us.”
“Because you’re all—!” I stop, voice echoing around the kitchen. Delaney gives us a curious look on her way to the sink, and I squeeze my eyes shut before trying again. “Because you’re all still friends with Collin,” I whisper. “You know he’s the one who asked her to get an abortion, right? Before she’d even decided? He didn’t seem particularly worried about the ‘sanctity of life’ when he thought it would affect his Clemson scholarship.”
Greer’s hands still on the counter. “He did?”
“Of course he did.”
I’d never been Collin’s biggest fan, mostly because I thought my sister could do better than a guy whose single biggest accomplishment was kicking a twenty-nine-yard field goal once during his junior year, but I’d never thought of him as a bad person. Annoying? Yes. A little manipulative? Maybe. But straight-up evil? I didn’t think he had the brain cells for it. And maybe he hadn’t meant to be malicious when his parents caught him snooping through their wallets last December. Maybe he hadn’t meant for it to go as far as it did, but he still had a choice, and he sold Hannah out the second he could.
Greer shakes her head, gaze dropping to the freshly swept tile. “You’d never guess, you know,” she says. “The way he talks about it is…It’s like he was really hurt.”