Chapter 499 | Eat Regular Food

Chapter 499: 499 | Eat Regular Food

Jordan broke every speed suggestion the California highway system had ever posted between Iron Coast and Balboa Peninsula.

Kyle had asked one question when Jordan grabbed his bag mid-set. Jordan said "Alexis" and Kyle said "Go," and that was the entire conversation, which qualified as the most emotionally intelligent exchange Kyle had produced in four years of friendship. Jordan’s phone sat dark in the cupholder. He didn’t need a golden notification to tell him that a girl who had never asked anyone for anything in eighteen years had just used the word help.

Fourteen minutes. Not fifteen. He came into the Maison lot from the service alley, because the front faced the street and every Newport socialite with a phone could photograph a Van Der Berg standing alone behind a café.

No Mercedes. Just an oil stain in the third spot from the entrance.

Alexis stood against the stucco wall with her arms wrapped around her own ribs. The champagne silk should have looked expensive and instead looked like tissue paper holding a person together. Her posture was gone. The spine her mother had built through Pilates and boarding school had collapsed forward, like someone had removed a load-bearing wall from inside her chest.

Jordan got out of the car.

He made it three steps before she crossed the rest of the distance and hit his chest hard enough to knock the air out of him. Her arms locked around his torso and her fingers dug into the back of his shirt until he heard the cotton stretch. She was shaking. Not the shivers of someone performing distress, but the small, involuntary vibration of a body that had held itself rigid for hours and finally found something solid to fall against.

Jordan did not ask what happened.

He put one hand between her shoulder blades and the other on the back of her head, and held her while she broke apart in a parking lot behind a café that charged nine dollars for oat milk.

She cried without sound, because Catherine Van Der Berg had trained the noise out of her before middle school, and the silence was worse than anything Kumiko had ever produced at full volume. Kumiko screamed when she cried. Alexis just leaked.

"Okay," Jordan said. One word. Flat and present.

She pulled back and wiped her face with the silk cuff instead of the henley, protecting his shirt over her eleven-hundred-dollar pajama set. Her eyes were red and furious. Her chin wobbled once before she bit it still.

He opened the passenger door. She looked at the seat, then at the empty spot where her car used to live, and got in without asking where they were going.

The Civic pulled out of the Maison lot at 3:07 PM and merged onto PCH heading south.

Jordan did not speak. He didn’t turn on the radio. He didn’t reach for his phone, which held messages from Chloe and Kumiko and probably something gold, all of them wanting data about a girl who had just soaked his collarbone. The four-cylinder hum was the whole soundtrack.

This was what he’d learned about silence, from Chloe, then Maya, then five weeks of sitting on folding chairs while women figured out what they needed. Silence wasn’t the absence of conversation. It was a container. You gave someone a quiet space and let them pour whatever they carried into it.

Past Crystal Cove. Past Laguna’s galleries, which sold abstract paintings for more than his tuition. Past the Heisler Park overlook, where Alexis’s head turned for one second before she faced forward again. Through Dana Point and into San Clemente, where the houses got smaller and the restaurants switched from farm-to-table to fish tacos.

Driving fixed nothing. It just kept the broken pieces from rattling.

Forty minutes. Her breathing had gone from shallow bursts to something deep and regular. Her fingers had uncurled in her lap. The cord in her neck still stood out, but the muscles around it had softened enough that she no longer looked braced for impact.

She had not spoken one word.

The gas light blinked on as they passed San Onofre.

He’d been running the tank low since yesterday, and Chloe would have a spreadsheet column about it, probably titled "Preventable Jordan Stupidities." He pulled off at a Shell station wedged between a self-storage facility and a fruit stand selling strawberries by the flat.

Inside, a rotating hot dog machine turned four hot dogs that had been there since approximately the fall of Rome. Jordan grabbed two blue raspberry Slurpees and two hot dogs, mustard on one and ketchup on the other because he didn’t know her condiment position. He added Funyuns, because the human body required salt after crying, and a Twix, because Kumiko had once told him chocolate was a medical intervention recognized by every therapist worth their copay.

Eighteen dollars and forty-three cents. Somewhere in its golden guts, the System processed the transaction. He didn’t check the rebate.

Alexis hadn’t moved. She had her knees up on the seat and was staring through the windshield at the strawberries. Jordan opened her door with his elbow and held out a Slurpee and a hot dog.

She stared at the hot dog.

The hot dog stared back. It glistened with the sheen of processed meat that has accepted its fate, and the bun had absorbed the mustard in a yellow stripe that looked like a crime scene.

"Eat regular food," Jordan said.

Her face went through five expressions in two seconds. Recognition. Disbelief. Horror. Offense. And under all of them, a twitch at the corner of her mouth that wanted to become something else.

"I am not eating a gas station hot dog."

Her voice was raw and scratchy, the first words she’d spoken in over an hour. The disgust, however, was crisp and fully operational. Alexis Van Der Berg could lose her car, her cards, her friends and her posture, but not her opinions about food.

"It’s got protein. Bread group. Condiment from the yellow family. Three out of four food groups."

"There are not four food groups, and the yellow family is not one of them."

"Mustard has turmeric. Turmeric is anti-inflammatory. You’ve been inflammatory all day."

"That is not how inflammation works."

"Shell station hot dogs are FDA approved."

"Absolutely nothing about what you just said is true."

"Alright." He pulled it back. "I’ll have it."

Her hand shot out and grabbed the cardboard tray before it crossed the door frame.

"No!"

It came out louder than anything since the parking lot, and it surprised both of them. She held the tray against her chest like he had threatened a family heirloom. Her cheeks went pink above the silk.

Jordan handed her the Slurpee and bit into his own hot dog.

Alexis bit hers. First contact produced a grimace so violent her left eye closed entirely. The bun, which had the consistency of a stress ball that had given up on life, compressed under her teeth. She chewed. She swallowed. She went through the five stages of grief in four seconds.

She took another bite.

"Don’t look at me," she said with her mouth full, the most un-Van Der Berg sentence Jordan had ever heard her produce. Mustard sat at the corner of her lip. She did not wipe it. In the history of Newport Beach dining, this was a seismic event.

Her shoulders came down. Not all the way. But the place between her shoulder blades, where he had felt eighteen years of architecture the first time he put his hands on her, had let go enough that she sat against the seat back instead of three inches in front of it.

"My mother froze my cards," Alexis said to the windshield, in the flat voice of someone reading facts she’d already processed into something she could carry. "Both of them. The Black Card and the Amex. She had my car towed from the lot while I was inside. She left a business card from the estate office. Call when you’re ready."

Jordan crumpled his tray.

"Three of my friends left when the card declined. Ivy invented a study group. Bree and Sienna did the thing where they look at each other and decide you’re a liability. Charlotte stayed long enough to post a story that cropped me out of the frame."

He drank his Slurpee. Gas station Slurpees operated on a different scale than anything Newport could produce.

"I paid for the table in cash. That was everything I had. I now have thirty-three dollars." She examined the blue liquid like it held answers to questions she hadn’t learned to ask. "Every card, every account, runs through my father’s trust, which my mother controls. My car is registered to the estate. My phone plan is on the family account. If she decides I’m not ready, she can take everything except the clothes I’m wearing and the degree I haven’t finished."

She sucked on the straw. Her lips turned blue.

"I told my mother no, and she deleted me in fourteen hours."