Hellhole by Gina Damico

leaving?”
    â€œSorry. Need my beauty sleep.”
    â€œAw, no you don’t,” Max said automatically, before realizing the implied flirtation and subsequently panicking. “I mean, I guess we can all be a little
more
attractive, relatively speaking, but it’s not like you’re any
less
attractive than anyone else. Like, you’re not
ugly.
Your face has all the requisite features, and none of them are any larger or smaller than they should be, everything is in proportion, and you don’t have any irregular moles or growths, so—”
    You’re doing it again,
he thought.
Have we learned nothing from the veal incident?
    â€œI like your last name,” he finished weakly.
    Lore blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”
    â€œNedry. Like Dennis Nedry, in
Jurassic Park
? Sorry, I’m sure you get that all the time.”
    â€œNo. This is a first.”
    He shook his head, trying to hit the Restart button. “You can’t leave. What am I supposed to do about . . . him?”
    â€œLook, I think things could be a lot worse,” she said in a breezy tone that, to Max, sounded just a little too breezy, as if she were forcing it. “I mean, he’s just some dude. An asshole, to be sure, but just a dude. He likes snacks. So give him snacks.” Her voice turned bitter. “You got off pretty easy, if you ask me.”
    Max felt that the best response to this was some massive sputtering. “But I’m also supposed to find him a house!”
    She was definitely agitated now. She got up and walked toward him. “I don’t know what to do about that. You’re absolutely right, you shouldn’t have gotten me involved. You made your own mess,
you
clean it up.”
    It wasn’t until Max’s tailbone hit the kitchen counter that he realized he’d been backing up as she spoke. He brought a hand up to his face, and it felt hot, flushed. Lore’s face was red too—he could see this because it was only about a foot away from his.
    Her mouth was trying to form too many different words at once, twitching, trying to escape from her face. Finally, instead of saying anything more, she whipped her head around—brushing Max’s face with her ponytail in the process—and stormed out the kitchen door.
    Max stood there, stunned.
    â€œWhat just happened?” he asked the empty room.
    As if arriving specifically to taunt him, Ruckus sashayed into the room, rubbed his cheek against the cabinet, and let out a meow that sounded suspiciously like
Ha, ha!
    â€œShut up, you,” Max said. He looked out the window and saw Lore struggling to pick up her bike and put on her helmet all at the same time. Finally clicking the helmet strap shut with an angry
snap,
she pushed off and disappeared down the street. Max opted not to chase after her.
    As if you could catch her, noodle legs!
Ruckus implied with a disdainful arch of his back.
    Max gave his head a hard shake.
I really need to stop imagining cat dialogue.
He picked up the tray, vowing to salvage the only good deed he could accomplish on this awful, accursed day. He stood outside his mother’s door for a moment and attempted to compose himself. The trembling in his hands started to go away, but the ill feeling in his stomach remained.
    At least his mother had been watching
Adultery Cove
at full volume, which meant she probably hadn’t heard any of the escapades in the kitchen. “Quiiiiiche!” she cried, hitting the Mute button and clapping, though she stopped once she saw how little of it there was. “Geez, Max. You bulking up for the winter?”
    â€œI . . . guess I got a little carried away,” he said, trying not to let her see his face.
    But mothers always know. “Why are you all red? Hon, look at me.”
    He turned his head. “It’s nothing. I was moving around some stuff in the basement and it was really hot down there.”
    Even Max was