Three's A Crowd

I suppressed the annoyed look on my face as I moved out of the way, letting Jez and Junior into the house. Though I hadn’t met Junior before, it was pretty obvious that he was related to Jez. They had the same face structure, the same eye color, and the same cocky looks on their faces. At the moment, that cocky smirk on Jez’s face just about made me want to kill her, but I controlled myself.

“Junior, I’ll show you to the guest room,” I told him, leading the way down the hallway for him.

Once I showed him where things were, like the bathroom and stuff, I went back to the kitchen, where Jez was sitting. She was leaning back in one of the wooden chairs, putting her feet on the table. That made my parents crazy, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

“Want tea?” were my only words to her.

“Sure,” she shrugged. I expected her to start telling me why, exactly, she knocked on my door at two in the morning, but she kept her mouth shut. It made me unbearably curious, since I knew that it must have been bad if she came to me, but I didn’t want to prod.

Soon enough, the tea was ready, and I settled down on the opposite side of the table from Jez, looking around the room to keep from making eye contact with her. Though I could still feel the simmering of anger in the pit of my stomach, I was really too tired to argue with her. Plus, if I woke my parents, they would flip.

Finally, Jez must have gotten antsy with the long period of silence and sang out, “Well, this is awkward.”

“What do you want me to say?” I replied, keeping my cool. “I’m not exactly thrilled with you at the moment.”

“I’m not the one that betrayed you. Remember?”

“I wasn’t betraying anyone. I was doing what you wanted me to do, wasn’t I?” I knew deep down that rebelling was the last thing on Jez’s list for me, but I figured that since she always held the fact that I depended on her so much over me, it was time to end it. “I don’t need you by my side all the time.”

Jez twisted up her face like she was getting ready to scream, but a look at the clock made her let out all her breath in a harsh sigh. “That’s not what I wanted. We need to stick together. That’s how we got through-”

“I know,” I interrupted, rubbing my temples. “I remember. It wasn’t that long ago.” Then, I looked up at her and smiled. “Plus, I let you in the house, didn’t I?”

Jez laughed, and I knew that our fight was over. “Yeah, because of Junior! You looked like you were going to smash that door in my face. Wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“I wanted to,” I admitted. “We should probably get to sleep.”

Taking both my mug and Jez’s, I started over to the sink and rinsed them out. I heard Jez say something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. “What?” I questioned, turning off the running water.

“He’s back,” she repeated. Though her voice was seemingly nonchalant, I could hear the strain underneath, along with a hint of fear, which was something I never thought I’d hear from her.

My heart just about stopped as I turned around and faced Jez. “And by ‘he’, you mean…?”

“Yeah.”

“How the hell did he find you?”

“I don’t know. He just did. So…it's okay if Junior and I stay here for a while?”

“Of course it is!” Behind my eyes was stinging, and I thought I was going to start crying. There was no way that this whole thing could be happening again. We had left that whole life behind us, never to look back.

But the past, I guessed, just had a way of catching up with people, one way or another.

“We should still go to sleep,” I insisted, seeing that it was three in the morning. “We have to get up for school, soon, and you should get at least a little sleep.”

Jez nodded and soundlessly followed me to my room. I inflated the air mattress and put the sheets on it, and Jez flopped down on it, downright exhausted.

“’Night, Eva,” Jez said as I turned out the light.

“Goodnight.”

* * *

In the morning, Junior was at the kitchen table with Jez, eating breakfast. My mother was standing behind the island in the middle of the kitchen, staring at Junior like she was horrified and terrified at the same time.

“Mom,” I started, rubbing my eye a little bit, “this is Junior, Jez’s little brother.”

He turned around and gave the slightest of waves before returning to his food.

When I went to get some milk for my cereal out of the fridge, Mom grabbed my arm and whispered, “Why did you let a strange boy in the house?”

“He’s not strange,” I responded. “Just because you don’t know him. He and Jez needed a place to crash last night.”

Mom shot another look at the two of them, probably thinking that they were some sort of demon spawn who should not be eating her food, before hurrying off into another room. However, not before she demanded, “Jess, you better clean up that syrup before you leave.”

“UGH!” Jez exclaimed, hitting her fist against the table once my mom was out of earshot. “My name is JEZ. I don’t understand why that’s so fucking hard for your mom to remember.”

“She only does that to piss you off,” I reminded her. Part of me thought that she did that partially to irritate me, as well. Maybe to irritate me so much that I no longer let Jez come over.

Like that was likely. Especially with the current situation.

“Well, Eva darling, we had better get to school,” Jez announced, getting up and grabbing my arm. As she was dragging me away, I realized that she left her breakfast mess on the table, and kept a little chuckle from escaping.

As we walked to school, Jez filled me in on the details of what had happened the night before. “I felt so bad, you know? Junior just about had the shit scared out of him.”

“I don’t blame him,” I muttered. “God, that was so long ago. How could he have found you again?”

“I don’t know, Eves. I just…I don’t know.”

When the two of us got to the school, everyone stopped and stared. They weren’t even the slightest bit subtle, either.

“Ah, this is good to see,” some football player joked as he walked by, “you two fixed your problems.”

“Hey,” Jez sneered, “Want to see what the inside of your throat looks like?”

The guy laughed, but there was a slightly frightened edge in it. It was all I could muster to keep from chuckling at him.

The two of us got to my locker, and I started getting out my materials for my first few classes. Part of me expected Karofsky to come up behind me and throw a slushie on me…but it never happened.

“Weird,” I mumbled.

“What?” Jez asked, turning to me with a raised eyebrow.

“I just…I kind of figured that Karofsky would come over and give us a hard time. Or, um, me a hard time. You’d just kind of beat him until he was crying.”

She laughed a little and looked around. “Nah. There’s probably only so many hits the guy can take in a short period of time.”

“There’s a good point,” I mused as we walked into our first period class. Again, kids were whispering as they got an eyeful, but I did my best to ignore them.

“Oh, so are you really not going to try out for Glee Club?” I whispered to Jez, even though I didn’t technically have to be quiet yet. After all, class had started or anything yet.

Jez shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not so sure that I’m wanted there.”

It took me a second to realize that she wasn’t talking about anyone not wanting her there but me. “C’mon.” I rolled my eyes. “You know that’s not true. I was pissed at you. Can you blame me?”

“Not really. But don’t tell anyone I said that.” She looked off into the distance for a second to ponder. “I’ll think about it.”

I let out a huff and sat back in my chair as the bell sounded. Biting my lip, I wondered what would happen if I went to Glee Club all alone. I mean, sure, I had a civil conversation with Finn the day before, but we weren’t friends or anything. Plus, he was going out with that girl with the big nose, so he’d sit with her. Rachel? “I really should learn that,” I mumbled to myself.

“Someone’s going crazy!” Jez announced. “And I swear, it’s not me.”

Just to show how little people actually cared about Jez and me when we weren’t fighting, no one turned around to see what the hell she was talking about. I laughed for a second before straightening up in my chair and facing the front.

The more class went on, the more I wanted to get down on my knees and beg Jez to try out for Glee Club. If I was all alone, I would probably die. It was good that the two of us had made up, because if we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had any other choice than to have been lonely. A lonely outcast, to be more accurate.

“This class sucks,” Jez groaned out of nowhere, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms behind her head.

I realized then that I was making absolutely no effort to listen to what our teacher was saying. Quickly, I tried to take down all the notes on the board but only got down half of them before they were erased.

Muttering something incoherent, I glanced at the clock, wondering how much more of the class I could take before I went crazy.

Then, the bell rang that signaled there was going to be an announcement. It scared me so much that I almost fell out of my seat.

“Jezebel Kerrigan to Principal Figgins’ office. Jezebel Kerrigan to the office,” the secretary read in a bored voice.

Everyone turned toward Jez, snickering and making wild assumptions about what she was in trouble for.

As for me, I was just having a heart attack as Jez put on her stony, cold face and made her way out to the hallway.