“Well, I don’t. I haven’t been this freaked out since the last time my school went on lockdown for an active shooter.” In search of something to eat, I crossed the room to the table where Dean had gotten me the water earlier. There were individual containers of Greek yogurt and bowls of fresh fruit and granola. “Where’re the actual snacks?”
“My mother prefers healthy foods.”
I ate a handful of granola, but as soon as it hit my stomach, I wished I hadn’t. “This isn’t food.”
“Then why are you stuffing so much of it in your mouth?”
Granola crumbs tumbled down the front of my suit as I rounded on Dean. “Because my parents are out there and I don’t know what’s happening to them! They could be in a room with a bomb that someone with no experience is going to have to disarm at the last second by cutting the red wire or the blue wire, or there might be a gun-toting psycho roaming the halls looking for someone to kill, and I want to do something—I have to do something!—but I can’t because I’m locked in this fucking room with you. And the only thing I can do that doesn’t involve digging a tunnel out of here is eating food I don’t even want! All right? Is that okay with you?”
Ugh. Talking to Dean was like trying to have a meaningful conversation with one of the Secret Service agents.
“I don’t actually like guns,” Dean said. “My uncle tried to take me hunting when I was eleven, but I couldn’t justify killing something I had no intention of eating. Also, when my uncle took down a deer, I cried until I vomited.”
“Right, you’re a vegetarian. I remember reading that about you.” I filled a bowl with strawberries, unsure whether I was going to eat them or throw them at Dean, and resumed pacing around the room while trying not to wonder whether my parents were being held in a room like this or if they were squeezed into a closet along with a dozen other people. “How does your mom feel about having a gun-hating animal lover for a son?”
Dean shrugged. “Just because I don’t like guns doesn’t mean I don’t support the right of others to own them.”
I rolled my eyes. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere. “Of course you do.”
“I suppose you believe we should collect all the guns in the world and shoot them into the sun?”
“It’s a lot harder to commit mass murder with a knife.” I stopped and flashed Dean a cold look. “Anyway, how can you sit and argue about this shit when our parents’ lives might be in danger?!”
Dean held my eyes for a moment before looking away. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought if you were fighting with me, you wouldn’t worry about your parents as much as I’m worrying about mine.”
I opened my mouth to fire the next insult but stopped short. Dean had been trying to help, albeit in a deeply strange way. Goading him into a fight wouldn’t have been my preferred method for distracting him, but he deserved some credit for the effort.
“Sorry for popping off like that. It’s just that I keep imagining all the things that could be happening and every scenario is worse than the next.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dean said. “It was a bad idea anyway. It’s not as if it would have been a fair fight.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t we already establish this? I’d decimate you.”
“Historically, ‘decimate’ meant to kill one in ten of a group of people, and even in modern usage it doesn’t mean to defeat someone or something but rather to destroy a large portion of it.”
The tiny bit of gratefulness I’d felt toward him before was already evaporating. The last thing I needed from Professor Dean was a vocabulary lesson. “Whatever,” I said. “I’d still kick your ass in a fair fight.”
Dean was smiling when he finally looked up, and he caught my eye and winked. “If you say so.”
“I do!”
“Fine, then.”
“Fine!” He was still smiling, so I scowled back and resumed pacing. “I don’t know what I did to wind up stuck in a room with you, but I’m sorry for it.”
“You’re not stuck in here with me,” Dean said. “We’re stuck in here together, and my mother always says accidents are just opportunities in disguise.”
“Your mom also thinks people like me don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else, so excuse me if I’m not super keen on anything she has to say on anything.”
Dean
“KNOW YOUR ENEMY” is what my mother would have said. “Be kind to strangers” is what my father would have told me. I didn’t know whether Dre was a stranger, my enemy, or both. The only thing I knew for certain was that he hated me, though I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve his ire. He obviously believed the propaganda about my mother—that she was going to attempt to overturn the Supreme Court decision granting marriage rights to same-sex couples—but he didn’t know me at all.
“My dad turned down his Secret Service detail.” Dre had been pacing around the room eating strawberries for a solid five minutes, acting like I didn’t exist.
“I wasn’t aware that was something he could do.”
Dre nodded. “The only person who can’t refuse a Secret Service detail is the sitting president.” He paused and set down the now-empty bowl. “He said he didn’t want to waste the taxpayers’ money.”
“That seems like a poor decision.”
“‘Idiotic’ was the word my mom used,” he said. “She yelled at him for a solid twenty minutes and told him that if anyone hurt him, they’d better kill him because if they didn’t, she would.”
Each time Dre wasn’t looking directly at me, my eyes darted toward the door. “It sounds like your father might need the Secret Service just to protect him from your mother.”
A sharp laugh escaped Dre, and he looked embarrassed by it. “Yeah, he might.” His smile faded, and he threw up his hands. “How are you so calm? I mean, I’m freaking out. Why aren’t you freaking out?”
“Just because I don’t vocalize every fear that scurries through my brain doesn’t mean I’m not absolutely terrified that my mother and father are potentially in a life-threatening situation at the moment. The best I can do is pray that everything turns out all right because otherwise I might pound on the door until someone tells me what’s going on or my knuckles bleed.”
I half expected my tirade would quiet Dre for a while, or at least confuse him into silence, but it seemingly had the opposite effect.
“I was pissed at my dad for making me come here,” he said. “Ever since he started campaigning, he doesn’t have time to hang out with me unless he needs something from me, like being his prop kid at the debate tonight. Only I had plans with Mel that I had to bail on, and I feel like an asshole for being pissed because he might be hurt and all I can think is that I didn’t want to be here in the first place and I was hoping he’d lose so we could go back to our normal lives. I don’t want my dad to die thinking I was mad at him.”
I wasn’t sure if Dre had meant to say all of those things, or what I should respond to. He obviously had some unresolved feelings surrounding his father’s run for president, which I could relate to.