I decided to go after him. Whatever was on Jax's mind, maybe I could cheer him up, or at the very least, calm him down.
"You guys should enjoy the rest of the waterpark. I'll see if I can talk to Jax," I called over my shoulder as I headed out to look for Jax.
Chapter Twenty-Three
TALK
When I finally spotted him, he was walking fast through the parking lot, a couple hundred yards ahead of me. No matter how hard I picked up my pace, it seemed like he was always going faster. I saw him vanish into the bus when I was still only halfway through the huge lot.
When I finally got to the triple-decker at the far edge of the parking lot, I wasted no time in heading for the stairs.
I tiptoed up to Jax’s room, then stood near the door, trying to figure out what was going on inside.
Silence greeted me.
I wondered if he was napping—or fuming. I took a deep breath. Here goes nothing, I thought as my hand lifted to knock.
Just as my knuckles were about to rap against the door, it opened, and Jax emerged. Still dressed in his waterpark clothes, he had a shirt and pants draped over one arm and a towel over the other.
"Jax—" I started.
"Not right now," he said, his voice gruff. "I need a shower."
I sniffed at the air and realized we both still smelled like chlorine. Before I could even answer him, he had already turned away and was walking down the stairs.
My brows furrowed. Well, that wasn’t great. With a sigh, I opened the door to Jax’s room and then gasped at what I saw inside. Torn sheets of paper lay all over the bed, and everything on his shelf had been knocked down onto the floor.
Whatever was wrong with Jax, I knew I couldn’t leave the room the way it was. I started picking up the pieces of paper and setting them in a box on the shelf. I grabbed his guitar, put it back where it belonged, and smoothed the sheets across the bed.
I sat on his bed, waiting for him to finish his shower and come back, hoping a little cool-down time was all he needed to be himself again. When the handle twisted and he pushed the door open, I looked up to see Jax step into the room. He was wearing a fresh set of jeans and a t-shirt. One of his eyes twitched as he saw that the room had been cleaned up.
I wanted to talk but I had no idea what to say. "Did you have a good shower?" I heard the words coming from my mouth, but I felt like I was far away.
"Yeah," Jax said, his face barely moving. "Not enough hot water. But close enough."
We sat in silence, each of us looking at the wall.
Outside the bus, faint cheery music from the water park played. My hands fidgeted on my knees. Jax stared toward the door, looking like he wished he could leave.
"So how are you feel—" I started.
Jax’s voice broke in. "Do you want to watch a movie?"
I turned my head toward him curiously. A movie? "I . . . sure. What movie?"
His hand had moved to a binder full of Blu-Rays before I’d even finished talking. He thumbed through the discs, then pulled one out. I leaned to see if I could read any text on its surface, but he popped it into the player before I could make anything out.
Without a word, he crawled into the bed and sat beside me. The disc played, and a logo appeared, followed by a flurry of black bird wings. Text popped onto the screen:
The Birds
Another Hitchcock movie? It seemed like Jax watched them a lot, maybe he saw them as the film equivalent of comfort food. I felt suddenly hopeful. If Jax wanted to watch something comforting, maybe he’d be willing to talk afterward.
After a few minutes, I had snuggled in against Jax. A woman in the movie was riding on a boat toward a harbor, when out of nowhere, a seagull swooped down and attacked her, making her head bleed. I winced at the gull’s bite—not just because it looked painful, but because the aggression coming out of nowhere reminded me of Jax shoving Kev into the water.
I looked at Jax who was staring at the screen, but his stony face gave away nothing. What was going on in his head? I couldn’t figure it out, and it was driving me a little crazy. Nothing had happened that was out of the ordinary, but he’d snapped at Kev as if Kev had actually meant to knock over his ice cream and then blew it way out of proportion.
My eyes flitted back to the screen nervously. My general feeling of anxiety intensified with every sharp swell of music and every seemingly ordinary dialogue line. Even a scene with a children’s birthday party seemed ominous—and then it happened. Like a flash, a flock of seagulls descended on the children, and the party guests all ran screaming into the house.
I jumped at the sudden attack and quickly felt embarrassed. If this was how I was feeling as the movie started, how was I going to sit through the whole thing?
"Hey, Jax?" I said quietly.
"What?" He sounded annoyed.
"Can we stop the movie for a minute?"
Without a word, he flicked a button on the remote control. Two actresses were suddenly paused on screen, gazing into the sky apprehensively. Jax kept looking straight ahead at the still frame.
I hesitated. He was clearly still in a bad mood, but I didn’t know how to stop it without finding out what was wrong.
"What happened out there?" I asked, trying to stay as neutral as possible.
A smile slid across his face, charming, wide and completely fake. "So I overreacted," he said, his voice a breezy brush-off. "He’ll do something to get me back later. Don’t worry about it."
He reached toward the remote again.
"When I was a kid," I said, fast enough to stop him from pressing the button, "My family had this cat, Gonzo."
He looked at me, puzzled.
"He was my best friend when I was little." I closed my eyes, remembering. "He’d sleep on my bed every day. But then, one day, I laid down in my bed and he bit me. Hard."
Jax tilted his head. "I don’t understand . . ."
"Gonzo kept doing it, more and more. My parents were furious. They yelled at him, tried shutting him away when he bit. Nothing worked. So they decided to put him to sleep."
"Oh." He averted his eyes and his mouth turned down. "I’m sorry."
"When we went to the vet, I was sobbing," I continued. "But the vet said Gonzo wasn’t biting because he’d turned mean. He had an infection, and we were hurting him whenever we tried to pet him."
Jax looked back to the movie screen and his glance fell to the remote. "Okay. So what happened?"
"We gave him some antibiotics, and he was as good as new."