Complete Nothing (14 page)

“You too. Honestly. You have no idea how much this means to me,” she gushed. “I don’t know why either of you are doing it, but I’m
so
glad you are! I’ll see you tomorrow!”

I lifted my hand in a wave, and Claudia practically floated back out to the street. Hephaestus opened his mouth to say something, but Torin chose that moment to save me.

“Hey, True? Little help?” he asked.

“I’ll see you back at home,” I told Hephaestus. Although I had every intention of avoiding him until I could figure out what his motives actually were for becoming my right-hand man. I wanted to believe that he was truly here out of the goodness of his heart, because he cared for my sister and she cared for me. But with each passing hour, my father’s suspicions sank deeper into my mind.

No one did anything without an ulterior motive. Just look at me and Claudia. She was right. She had no clue why I was doing this. And as much as it was my job to help people find true love, as much as I truly wanted her and Peter to be happy, even I had a selfish purpose.

“Can I help you?” I asked the next customer in line.

Before the woman could even answer, the door opened again and in walked Peter, holding the door open for—as Claudia had called her—the balloon-lipped girl. He held her tiny waist between both of his enormous hands as he steered her toward the line, and the girl leaned back into him, clearly as comfortable as could be with the PDA.

“Two chocolate mint, please?” my customer requested.

I filled her order quickly and shoved her money into the register, never taking my eyes off Peter. He nuzzled the girl’s neck. He looked at her with hungry eyes. And she was loving every minute of it.

I was going to have to put a stop to this. Like, now.

Four more customers came and went with Torin and I working in tandem. When Peter and his placeholder girl were up, it was Torin’s turn, but I knocked him out of the way with my hip.

“What can I get you?” I asked.

“I’ll just have water,” the girl said, looking me up and down. “With lemon.”

“That’s it? Then why did we come to the cupcake place?” Peter asked her.

“I wasn’t ready to go home yet,” she said, resting her chin briefly against his chest as she batted her eyelashes up at him. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. Try to get a window seat.”

Then she twiddled her fingers and sauntered off. Her butt seemed to hang on its own hinge as it bounced back and forth on her way to the door. Peter couldn’t take his eyes off it.

I couldn’t help noticing she hadn’t said please or thank you. To either of us.

Peter gave me this sort of suspicious look. “So. It’s True, right?”

“Yep! True Olympia. That’s me.”

“You and Claudia seem like you’re friends now,” he said, squaring his sizable shoulders. “What’s up with that?”

“Is that so strange?” I asked, leaning my hands into the counter.

“You tell me.” He looked like he was on the verge of saying something else—my guess was he wanted to ask me about what he’d heard me saying at the pep rally practice—but then bit his tongue. “Can I get one Oreo cupcake, please? And water with lemon.”

“Sure.” I slowly took a cupcake from the case and went to get a plate. This was a great opportunity, getting Peter alone, but I wasn’t sure what I should do with it. Should I stick to the plan and try to make him jealous of Claudia’s new beau? Or should I try to find out what was going on with big-lips? When I turned around, Peter was staring down at his phone, checking the messages. “So . . . you’ve moved on pretty quickly.”

“And Claudia hasn’t?” he snapped.

I placed the plate on the counter, trying not to smile. So the jealousy plan
was
working.

“What do you see in that girl?” I asked, pulling a bottle of water from the fridge. “She’s nothing like Claudia.”

“No she’s not,” he mused, staring off toward the bathroom. Then he blinked. “Wait. What do you mean? How do you know?”

I shrugged and poured the water into a cup filled with ice. “Just Claudia’s very mature. Very polite. Cares a lot about people. I don’t exactly get that vibe from . . . what’s her name?”

“Josie,” he said, looking a bit green around the gills. But then his eyes flashed. “Not like it’s any of your business.”

“No. I guess it’s not.” I placed a lemon wedge on the edge of the cup just as Josie emerged from the bathroom. Peter tossed a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

“If you see Claudia, you can tell her I’m doing great,” Peter said, jerking the plate and cup toward him. “And I hope she is too.”

“Will do,” I replied with a smile.

Together the new couple walked over to a table near the window and sat down across from each other. They made conversation for half an hour, but Peter checked his phone under the table at least four times a minute. Checking for calls, for messages, for tweets. And I knew exactly who he was hoping to hear from. At least I hoped I knew.

But Josie . . . she was completely focused on Peter in a way that was rare for kids these days. She wanted him, and I could tell she was the type of girl who wasn’t going to stop until she got what she wanted.

I had to fix this situation, and I had to do it fast.

I stared at my history notebook, the applications pushed aside. It was now after eleven and I still had to memorize these dates for my quiz tomorrow. A fact I had completely spaced on while making out with Josie at the park outside our grade school after Goddess.

My head hit the desk. What had I been thinking?

But then I remembered her lips, her hands, the glitter, and I knew. I hadn’t been thinking. I’d been doing. For once. I’d done what I’d felt like doing instead of wondering whether it was right.

The door to my room opened. I lifted my head, and the notebook page stuck to it for a second before detaching itself.

“Where did you go?” my mother asked, crossing her arms over her stomach.

My heart thudded. So she’d checked on me while I was gone. She looked tired, the lines around her eyes deeper than usual. But she always looked tired. That’s what being a divorced single mom of two kids did to a person, I guessed. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore a faded Lake Carmody High Football sweatshirt from my freshman year.

“Sorry,” I said. “The guys came by and I just figured . . .”

“You figured you’d go out without telling me?” she asked, raising one palm. “That’s not like you, Peter.”

I felt this irrational stab of anger. “I know it’s not like me,” I snapped. “Maybe that’s the point.”

She blinked. “Don’t yell at me. I’m not the one who did something wrong here.”

I hung my head in my hands and stared down at my notebook, the words and numbers blurring. She was right. I was the one screwing up. I’d never snuck out of the house before. I’d never had to. My mom was the opposite of strict. So why had I done it tonight?

“What is going on with you lately?” she asked, putting her hand on my back. “You’re so . . . tense.”

“I just . . . I have so much to do,” I told her. “Scouts are coming to the game this weekend, I have applications and homework and practice.” I paused, knowing she wasn’t going to like this next part. “And I broke up with Claudia.”

Her mouth dropped open and she sat on the end of my bed. “You did? When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, a crease forming between her eyebrows.

I kind of did, but I knew she had a million things to do. So did I. And I was already so exhausted my eyelids were heavy. “Not really,” I told her. “Maybe later?”

“This weekend,” my mother said, getting up. “I’ll help you with those applications and you can tell me about it. Deal?”

I smiled. “Deal.”

She kissed my head again and whispered into my hair, “I love you, kiddo.”

As lame as it sounds, my heart felt warm. “You too.”

She walked out and closed the door behind her. I stared down at the list of dates and tried to concentrate.

1952: Dwight Eisenhower elected president.

1953: Korean War ends.

1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

1959: Hawaii and Alaska become states.

This sounded somehow familiar, but impossible to remember. Especially when I was dying to put my head down on the desk and pass out.

“Make it into a song,” I heard Claudia say in my ear. “Sing it to the melody of the ABCs. It’ll help you remember, I swear.”

I saw her in the corner of my room, doing a little dance as she sang the periodic table of elements last year. I’d cracked up and grabbed her, unable to resist throwing her down on my bed and kissing her until she stopped singing and started laughing. Back then I’d wanted more than anything to be as close to her as possible. What the hell had happened? When had everything changed?

I looked at the clock again and groaned. This was getting me nowhere. I was not supposed to be thinking about the girl I’d dumped. The girl who had moved on to some lame-ass texter. She didn’t care about me, so why should I care about her?

But still, I saw Claudia. Dancing.

“Focus,” I said to myself, pulling the notebook closer. “You can do this. You don’t need her.”

I started to hum the ABCs and got down to work.

Laughter. I walked into my house that night after eleven p.m., and the first thing I heard was laughter. I froze with my hand on the brass doorknob, and then closed the big creaky door as quietly and slowly as I possibly could. It clicked shut and I held my breath, then turned the lock silently.

Another laugh. Hephaestus’s laugh. And it was coming from his first-floor bedroom. Thick, black, unctuous dread filled my body from head to toe. The laugh sounded flirtatious. Possibly passionate.

If he was in there with my mother, I was seriously going to set them on fire.

Clenching my fists, I crept through the parlor and down the hallway behind it on my toes, cursing the warped floorboards of this decades-old house. The door to Hephaestus’s room was closed. I leaned my ear toward it, and he laughed again.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that,” he intoned, his voice throaty. “No idea.”

My lips pressed into a tight, angry line. I thought about walking right through the door so I could catch the two of them in flagrante,
but then I imagined what that might look like and I paused. Better to knock. Better to not have that image burned on my brain for eternity. I lifted my fist and pounded on the door.

Silence, followed by a slam. Was it a window? A door? A drawer? I couldn’t tell. Too bad I couldn’t conjure up a hole in the wall so I could see inside. Well, I could have, but I wouldn’t.

“Hephaestus, it’s me.” My voice sounded like it was going to shake apart.

He dropped something. Cursed under his breath. I imagined him trying to get dressed and back in his chair before I opened the door.

Ugh. I had already vomited once since becoming human, and I didn’t want to have to do it again.

“Are you well?” I reached for the doorknob, figuring that if I barged in I could explain it away with my supposed concern.

“I’m fine. Come in.”

I shoved the door open. Hephaestus sat not five feet away at his desk, his cell phone held to his ear. Hung on the wall in front of him was the large mirror he’d brought with him when he’d moved in, about the only personal item he had other than clothing. He’d clearly worked his magic on it. The glass was rimmed by an intricate frame, thousands of thin slivers of various metals woven together to look like a tangle of grass and leaves. I bent forward to check the rest of the room. His queen-size bed was perfectly made, not a throw pillow out of place, but the doors to both the attached bathroom and the closet were closed.

“What’s going on?” I asked, taking a tentative step into the room.

Hephaestus held up one finger to me as he listened to whoever was on the phone. I took the opportunity to edge to the closet. I
opened the door quickly and peeked inside, expecting to see my half-dressed mother standing there, but instead I was greeted by perfectly organized shelves of T-shirts and a low bar hung with a couple of leather jackets and jeans. Hephaestus glanced over his shoulder at me as I closed the door. I tried to look casual.

“Yeah, I understand,” he said into the phone. “Of course. I’ll be there.”

I backed toward the bathroom and shoved that door open too. The light was out, but the room was empty. The glass door on the shower stall was pristine enough to tell me there was no one hiding inside. The window was closed and locked from the inside. Nothing amiss.

Oddly, my spirits sank. I didn’t want to not trust Hephaestus, but I suppose the thrill of the hunt had gotten into my veins.

“What’re you doing?”

Hephaestus had wheeled his way over to the door, and now sat looking at me like I might be in need of a lobotomy.

“Nothing,” I said, sashaying past his chair and back toward his desk at the foot of his bed. “Just making sure everything’s okay in here. You are our guest.”

“Is that what I am?”

I glanced at his cell phone, which rested atop his right thigh. “Who were you talking to?”

“Guy from work,” he replied, lifting one shoulder. “He needs me to cover for him this weekend.”

My brow knit. A guy from work? That wasn’t what it sounded like to me.

“True.” He fixed me with a steady gaze. “What the hell is going on?”

I hesitated, my hand on the footboard of his bed. Part of me
wanted to tell him what I knew and give him a chance to explain, but I talked myself out of it. If he was here to find a way to get back at me or my mom or dad, then he couldn’t know that I didn’t trust him. He would just try even harder to hide whatever it was he might be hiding.

And if he wasn’t hiding anything, I didn’t want him to know I suspected him. Because then I’d just look like a jerk. Gods, I hated my father. If he’d just kept his mouth shut, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.

“I’m fine,” I replied. “I’m sorry about before. There’s just a lot going on.”