I should leave. I should find a bathroom to throw up in. I should—
“Hey.” Sam throws a straw at me so I look up. His face is soft and serious. “Don’t worry about Andy. I’ll talk to him later. Explain things.”
Explain what, exactly? Nothing’s changed. Nothing will undo what I did. And how am I supposed to ever make that up to Andy? To Noah? To anyone?
Where do I even start?
* * *
Normally I would call it a night and duck and run, but I can’t find an opportunity to make a sly getaway when I keep catching Sam looking at me and when Asha walks by me every few minutes. Besides, I’m Asha’s ride home, and even I know stranding her here would be a shitty thing to do. So I stay, struggling through the first few problems of my geometry homework until I give up the pretense of understanding anything and start sketching out random outfit design ideas instead.
Asha, true to her word, spends her break sitting next to me and explaining how to graph parabolas.
“Since a is positive, it opens upward,” she says. “So you make the chart, then take the interval and plug the numbers into the equation.” She scribbles a few numbers in my notebook. “And all you have to do is solve for y, find the points and draw them in. See?”
This is her third attempt to explain this problem to me, and I’m only just starting to get it. I can’t believe how patient she is with me, considering she’s been running around here like a crazy person all night. When her shift ends, I hang back awkwardly as she goes to say goodbye to Sam, who is closing with Dex and Andy. Andy hasn’t even looked at me since our first interaction. That’s okay with me. It’s not like I have anything to say to him, either.
As we drive toward Asha’s house, she rolls her head back against the headrest and sighs. “Usually that wouldn’t be so rough,” she says. “But we’re pretty understaffed right now—” She stops and looks at me cautiously. “Sorry, I’m not trying to, you know, make you feel—”