Rage: A Love Story by Julie Anne Peters Page B

pinches my arm.
    Ow
. “What is this place?” I ask as she brushes by, hip-checking me into the railing.
    “Robbie calls it the pit of Acheron,” Reeve says.
    God, she’s fast; I have to run to keep up. She has on this really short skirt and platforms, the pink crop top. Such a beautiful blur.
    “Robbie found this place, like, the first week of school and we’ve been coming here.” Reeve’s voice echoes. “Nobody knows.”
    A burst of excitement jets up my spine.
    Reeve flips on a light switch and an underworld labyrinth illuminates. Fluorescent bulbs flicker and buzz; metal glints. Tubes and aluminum boxes and vertical poles; horizontal vents snake and maze across a mile of concrete flooring. It’s the school’s heating and cooling system.
    “Here!” Reeve calls. Her voice bounces. She ducks behind a floor-to-ceiling steel column, and when I circle it, she’s gone.
    “Over here.” Reverberation. I twist.
    “No, this way.”
    I spin around.
    She laughs.
    “Reeve.”
    I hear her plats clopping.
    “Back here.”
    I suck at hide-and-seek.
    Between two coffin-like units I come out at a drainage pit. Reeve jumps off a pipe and lands behind me.
    I yelp.
    She clasps her hands around my waist and turns me around.
    Don’t let go
. I grab her hands and hold them there. We hook eyes.
    “Come. This way.” She breaks free and we navigate through a sea of aluminum poles, boxes, vents. At the farthest end is a door. “It was locked,” Reeve says, “but Robbie fixed that.”
    He fixed it by bashing in the door until it splintered and the latch broke loose.
    Reeve palms the door open and steps inside. She curls her index finger at me. As I move up next to her, her finger touches the tip of my chin. I think she might pull me in and kiss me, but instead she flips on the light.
    I squint at the sudden brightness.
    There’s a short sofa, like a loveseat, with the foam popping out. A couple of plastic tubs shoved together for a table. Reeve’s eye-shadow kits and eyeliner pencils, mascara, brushes, paintbrushes in all different widths and textures, glitter and beads and sequins.
    Reeve says, “It’s awesome, isn’t it?”
    With her here, yeah. But basically it’s a pit.
    She takes my hand and twirls me around under her arm. I have to duck to make it. She pushes me onto the loveseat,then hovers over me. “You’re the only one I’ve ever brought here,” she says.
    Thank you, God or whoever
.
    She lowers herself to sit next to me. “I don’t bring my girls down here.”
    “So … I’m your first?”
    A smile tugs her lips. “You wish.” Her head angles up at me and we hold eyes so long it almost becomes a contest.
    I blink first.
    “What did you want to talk about?” she asks.
    I hate to break the communion, or whatever this is. “Robbie.”
    She drops her eyes. “What about him?”
    I want her focus back on me—us. “I just need to ask you … to show you …” My backpack traveled with me through the labyrinth, it’s such an appendage. I fish out the spiral with Robbie’s essay in it and pass the folded pages to Reeve.
    “I’m sorry you got stuck with him,” she says, taking the essay. “He needs to graduate.”
    “No, it’s all right. He’s…”
    Her eyes slit.
    “Funny,” I finish.
    “In the head,” she mutters. She shifts on the loveseat to pull one leg underneath her. “He almost died when he was a baby.”
    “Really?”
    “No, I’m lying. You can’t believe a word I say.” Her one plat clunks to the floor and she pulls off the other. The pagesrustle in her lap. She reads aloud: “‘May 23 I kill my mother. May 24 I killed my father.’”
    Reeve stops. “Nice.”
    “That’s only the beginning.” I remove the first sheet.
    She reads the second page to herself, and the third. Her eyes dance across and down the pages and she doesn’t breathe. She bends at the waist and her hair falls across her face so I can’t see her reaction. When she gets to the end, she says, “You