"Come on man, just do it."

Chris sat on the edge of the countertop in my bathroom beside the sink, turning over that god damn little orange pill bottle in his hands.

I leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom and sighed. "You do it."

Chris shook his head. "No. Wouldn't be the same. You have to do it."

When we'd gotten back from Nantucket that Sunday early afternoon, I knew what I had to do. I didn't know how much I believed in all that salt air cleansing your soul kind of thing, but through all of that cleansing came some striking clarity, like a window of a neglected house cleaned of cobwebs and dirt for the first time in years.

Chandler England and her crass, knives-out way of caring may have contributed to that, and ultimately what pushed me to murder my pride with those knives and text Chris.

When he got to my house, he didn't say anything, just pulled me into that same, abrupt hug Chandler gave me, and it said more to me than words ever could. I wanted to collapse there. Somehow we made it up in my bathroom, and he stood over my shoulder, gently nudging me on while I flushed the rest of my benzos and my sanity down the toilet.

"I really am sorry," I said to him as we sat in my empty bathtub, sharing a bottle of Pinot that I snagged from the wine cooler in the kitchen. My parents probably wouldn't miss it. "I suck. I'm like the worst fucking friend."

"You know, I never stopped being your best friend, Dallas. I just..." Chris sighed and raked a hand through his hair. "I didn't know what to do."

"Well I really don't know what to do now." The vulnerability scratched and clawed at my throat when I spoke. "I can't even get myself to school without feeling like I'm gonna be sick, and we just flushed any semblance I had of feeling normal down the drain. Literally."

"You need to talk to someone, Dallas," he urged. "This can't be healthy."

"I can't," I groaned and then took a long swig of wine from the bottle. "It's bad enough my parents are ready to put me in a plastic bubble...but if other people found out? Forget it. I...I can't handle it."

I kept asking myself when I'd become this person - so exhaustively anxious and miserable. But maybe I was this person all along, and the person I thought I was - the person everyone saw - was nothing more than a trick of the light. A shapeshifter who changed his face to fool everyone, including himself.

"Dallas..." Chris's gaze dropped to the marble base of the bathtub. "People are already talking."

"Exactly," I sighed. "I just need to make it to the end of the school year without any more rumors or drama. Two months. That's it."

I passed the bottle back to Chris, who sighed and shook his head. "I guess this includes whatever vaguely elusive thing you've got going on with Kaia Greene."

I picked at a frayed string at the hem of my sweatshirt. "Yeah, it does."

"You don't sound too happy about that. Are you...I mean..." Wine-induced hiccups punctuated Chris's words. "You've caught feelings, haven't you? Like actual legit real feelings."

"Sounds like I've also caught the plague, apparently," I rolled my eyes at him.

"No, it's not that," Chris shook his head again. "I just...I've never seen you like this."

"Seen me like what?"

"All hung up over a girl," he shrugged.

"I know, you're not a big fan of this, but-"

"No, I'm sorry I said all of that before," Chris cut me off. "I just don't want to see you get hurt, that's all."

"Honestly?" I let out a sigh and ran my hands down the sides of my face. "I feel the most normal when I'm with her. I mean for fucks sake she let me sleep in her bed all day and didn't bother me or ask me questions. She was there and she was present but she also just...let me be."

"Awww," Chris cooed and pinched my cheek. "That's so sweet it's actually gross."

"Yeah well, I was actually thinking of asking her to prom," I admitted in a breathy sigh. "But it's just better if we don't. For everyone's sake."

Chris huffed out a breath and leaned his head back against the edge of the tub. "I'll go to prom with you. Ask me."

I let out a chuckle. "Christopher Thompson, will you go to prom with me?"

Chris clapped his hands to his chest and sighed dramatically. "I would be honored. But I don't want a corsage. I'm allergic."

"Duly noted," I replied with a grin.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and my heart clenched as Kaia's name appeared on the screen. Speak of the devil and she doth appear. But as I had pointedly reminded her over the summer, the devil was once an angel.

KAIA GREENE: you want to come over?

KAIA GREENE: Krista's idea, not mine. I think she misses you.

"It's like she knows I'm talking about her," I grumbled, slipping my phone back into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. "She wants me to come over."

Chris hiccuped again. "You're drunk."

"So are you." I kept drinking as I typed up a response.

DALLAS GUNTHER: i can't.

"Woah woah, what are you doing?" Chris took the phone from my hands. "That doesn't mean she can't come over here."

Before I could process it, he was clacking away. I made a move to snatch my phone back, but by the time I had, the sound of the whoosh as the message sent echoed in my bathroom.

DALLAS GUNTHER: you could come over here though.

"Dude, no," I groaned at him. "She doesn't need to be here. Her seeing my room is too personal. Too intimate. Too..."

"Bullshit," Chris scoffed. "You are literally so full of shit. You reek of shit so much that I'm leaving before it makes me ill."

✗✗✗

30 minutes later, I found myself trying to sneak Kaia through my house without my parents being alerted to our presence while still half-drunk, but she didn't seem to mind. In fact, she clutched onto my arm like she was afraid she'd get lost in the dark unknown of a house she'd never been to. A house she probably never imagined she'd be at ever.

"You're really that embarrassed of me?" she chided.

I knew she was joking, but that didn't stop the redness from flaring in my cheeks. "It's not you, it's them," I insisted. "They already do enough prying, I don't need to give them any more cannon fodder."

I'd made as much of a half-assed attempt as possible to straighten up the disaster zone of my room before she'd arrived, but in my wine-induced daze it mostly just consisted of me throwing all of the clothes littering my floor onto the armchair in the corner of my room and covering it with a blanket.

Despite all that, she walked through my room as if it was a garden, touching the corners of my desk and the medals that hung from a rack on the back of my door like they were flowers she'd never seen. She then threw herself onto my bed, as if she'd been there a thousand times before.

"It smells like you," she said as she rested her head onto my pillow.

"Oh yeah?" I chuckled, sitting at the edge of my bed. "And what do I smell like?"

"Boy," she replied with a grin and an eye roll. "And sandalwood, and good wine, and rain."

Unable to hide my smile, I crawled onto the bed next to her, resting my temple against hers. "I don't think you came over to talk to me about the way I smell."

When I glanced over at her, she averted her gaze, looking down at her blue painted nails. "No," she finally sighed out. "I just...I needed to be with someone."

"I'm familiar with the feeling." I reached over and took her hand in mine, and she responded with a squeeze.

"I know you are. That's why I'm here, isn't it?"

She finally looked at me, then leaned over and kissed my cheek, her touch lingering.

"Look at you being all sweet and sensitive." I joked with a coy smirk. I let my fingers gently glide up her arm, feeling goosebumps prickle on her skin. "I like this side of you."

She smiled softly, reaching up and gently tangling her fingers in my hair. "I won't lie, I've also thought about kissing your stupid, infuriatingly good looking face all day."

"And she's back ladies and gentlemen," I chuckled. "But you can still kiss me, ya know."

So she did. She kissed me like I was made of everything good in the world, like she'd seen my truest form and deemed it worthy of all this.

I'd spent months trying to not feel - the anxiety, the dread, the aches and the pains. But in shutting all that down, I realized I'd deprived myself of feeling what maybe I'd felt for her all along.

We'd spent all afternoon holed up in my room, finishing the bottle of wine and watching clouds dance across my walls as dusk turned to night. We talked about everything and nothing. We argued over which sequels of classic books were superior, and why mayonnaise was better than butter on grilled cheese. We drew words on each other's bare backs and made the other drink when they guessed wrong. I'd guess wrong on purpose. I gave her a pair of my sweats, and we napped the wine away, our limbs tangled up under my sheets like a spider's web.

When silence came over the house, I led her to the front door.

"I guess I'll see you tomorrow," I said as she fidgeted with the plastic glittery heart hanging from her keys.

"Actually I won't be in Lit, I have my evaluation with Principal Maddox."

She said it so nonchalantly, as if I already knew that. But I didn't.

"Evaluation for what?" I asked, feeling the hesitancy in my words like part of me didn't even want to know the answer.

"For Valedictorian," she replied, and there must have been panic behind my eyes, because she quickly fumbled to recover. "I mean, I thought you had yours already."

"Well I haven't," I snapped.

"Maybe you're just later this week and she hasn't scheduled you in," she offered. "It's not like she talks about the other candidates with us."

But somehow, I knew that wasn't true. There were no other candidates. It was just us. It was just her. Panic flooded my veins.

"Sure, yeah, okay whatever, it's fine," I said hurriedly, yanking the front door open and motioning her outside.

"Dallas," she sighed. "I swear I didn't know-"

"It's fine. Really. See you tomorrow." I gave her a pinched smile before essentially shutting the door in her face.

My heart threatened to rip itself from my chest as I ran back up the stairs two at a time to my bedroom. As a sickening dread rolled through my stomach, I felt myself shift back into the guy everyone expected me to be - but he was evolving. He felt loose around the edges. He felt dangerous. 

you've watched me shift my shape and fall into this mess
well maybe you could wait for me i'll do my best
to get out of this dreary place

soon / angie mcmahon

✗✗✗

oh...oh you thought things were gonna stay cute? *that's* cute.

so, there's five chapters left (plus an epilogue), so i'm curious as to what you think is left for dallas's story and what your predictions are concerning how the story ends!