Page 31 of Us in Ruins
“He’s kidding,” Margot interjected. She elbowed him in his side, and when he looked at her, she flashed an exaggerated grin.
He reciprocated, forced. “We’ll be there.”
Suki glanced between them, something like hope and hurt dashing across her face. “Okay, meet back here in twenty minutes.”
Van nodded but didn’t budge. He waited until Rex and Suki trailed off to pivot toward Margot, those green eyes smoldering like a forest fire. “You could have warned me I’d be going back to high school.”
Margot barely batted an eye. “If I had, would you have said yes?”
He groaned, an obvious no. “Your friends are buffoons.”
She peered ahead at the girls, Suki leaning her head against Astrid’s shoulder as they walked, arms linked. Topher, Rex, and Calvin laughed, rowdy and chasing each other through the lobby as if they were in a game of flag football. Her fingernails dug into her palms when she remembered how they’d laughed this afternoon—decidedly at her, not with. “I don’t know if they’re really my friends.”
“But you want them to be?” he asked.
His words pressed against a yellowed bruise from their earlier conversation, faded but still painful. She’d been a chameleon for as long as she could remember—trying desperately to become what everyone needed her to be, to find the place she belonged. She shrugged, noncommittal, because she didn’t trust her words to come out evenly.
“They’re still buffoons.” He fiddled with the sleeves of his shirt, cuffing and uncuffing them. “They talked about me like I wasn’t even there.”
“Well, you’re not supposed to be here. Or, at least, you’re supposed to be a million years old.”
His mouth pinched tight. “Do I look a million years old to you?”
“You look cranky.” Margot’s voice softened, then, as they slowed to the back of the pack. She could barely stand to look at him as she said, “Listen, I’m sorry I wrote my essay about you.”
“Don’t be.”
Margot froze. She’d expected an earful about how she didn’t deserve to be here based on the merit of her essay (or lack thereof). At best, some kind of lecture about how she was too busy living in her daydreams and needed to focus on reality. “Don’t be?”
He examined her, his features incomprehensible. She’d grown used to feeling unmoored around him. But when he looked at her, Van’s green-eyed stare pierced right through her, like Margot wasn’t muscle and bone, marrow and blood, but a puzzle he could solve. “It’s an invasion of privacy to read someone’s personal writings without their permission.”
Margot sagged. She remembered the rough edge to his voice when he’d said I don’t need to hear any more. “I know, I really do. And you’re right, I shouldn’t have read your journal, but I—”
“I meant them reading your essay.” Van slowed, stilled. The elevator went up without them. His head tilted, considering. “Although. How much of my journal did you read?”
“Enough,” Margot said, her throat constricting.
Enough to know that he’d been orphaned, that he’d left New York City that summer with no one waiting for him to return, that he hated sharing a tent with Atlas even though he was his best friend because he still didn’t trust him, that he wasn’t really sure he’d ever trusted anyone. Enough to find the temple, to find him. To know him better than anyone ever had.
And that, she wouldn’t apologize for.
11
That night, Margot sat in the window bay with the shutters wide open. The moon had risen high in the velvet sky, but the city hadn’t quieted yet. The breeze carried soprano laughter, the rumble of an engine, the chime of a shop doorbell. Lingering in every sound was a sweetness, steeped in the balmy summer evening.
And tomorrow, she’d have to leave it all behind to board Flight AA 9372.
She leaned her head back, letting the faint scent of salt and citrus wash over her. The day after her parents finalized their divorce, her dad took her to a pier in a tiny seaside town where he bought her a cotton candy spear, three times the size of her head. (She later puked that cotton candy off the side of the carousel, but that was beside the point.)
He spent the whole day distracting her with carnival lights and game booths and the smell of buttered popcorn so thick, she had to wash her cardigan three times to get it out. Every spin down that boardwalk kept the bad feelings at bay, at least in the moment.
Those reprieves never lasted forever. For each heightened feeling of molten joy in the good times, every dark was so much deeper. In the quiet hours of the night, when all she had to keep her mind busy were the spinning blades of a ceiling fan and her own spiraling thoughts, a restlessness thick as a quilt would sometimes blanket her, smothering.
The only thing that ever eased the ache in her chest was running from it. Not in the literal, track team sense. But throwing herself into something new. Ballet or bread making or backpacking through Europe—anything to outrun the weight of not being good enough. Just like she had on the pier when salt water and spun sugar had held back her tears. If she filled her days with sunshine and coastline breezes, maybe she didn’t have to feel anything except the rush of adrenaline, the thrill of an adventure.
But if she found the rest of the Vase of Venus Aurelia, she’d be spared the weight of her dad’s disappointment every time she decided to reinvent herself, trying to find a version of the daughter he’d know what to do with.
Suki wafted in from the bathroom, startling Margot out of her thoughts. The steam was heavy with the scent of the hotel’s rosemary-and-lemon soap. A terry cloth towel bobbled on top of her head as she sank onto the foot of her bed, eyes trained on Margot. “So, tell me everything.”