Chapter 146: 146 | Welcome to Micro Center, Population: My Anxiety
Jordan kept both hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead at the road because looking anywhere else felt dangerous right now.
Something had happened in the car while he was buying snacks. He didn’t know what. He didn’t know how. He’d been gone for maybe four minutes, tops. Four minutes of comparing Arizona flavors and debating whether Kumiko wanted the strawberry Pocky or the matcha kind and checking the expiration date on Chloe’s sparkling water because he’d learned the hard way that gas station beverages could not be trusted. Four minutes of being a normal human male performing the sacred ritual of the snack run.
And he came back to silence.
Not the good kind. Not the kind that meant everyone was tired and comfortable and just vibing with the hum of the engine. This was the kind of silence that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The kind that made his stomach drop three inches and settle somewhere around his kneecaps. The kind that, in his extremely limited experience with women, preceded either a very difficult conversation or a very long period of being ignored for reasons he would never fully understand.
Jordan’s eyes slid sideways. Chloe sat in the passenger seat with her sparkling water balanced on her thigh, watching the strip malls and palm trees scroll by through her window. Her expression showed absolutely nothing. Not angry. Not happy. Not sad. Just nothing. Which was somehow worse than all three combined.
His gaze moved to the rearview mirror. Kumiko occupied the backseat center position, Pocky box still pressed flat against her sternum like a bulletproof vest. Her twin tails framed her face. Her brown eyes, usually enormous and expressive enough to project emotions visible from across a lecture hall, were aimed at the back of Chloe’s headrest with an intensity that suggested she was either communing telepathically with the Honda Civic or experiencing a catastrophic internal event.
Jordan looked back at the road.
What the hell did he miss?
He replayed the last ten minutes in his head frame by frame. He’d pumped gas. That part went fine. He’d walked into Circle K. Nothing exploded. He’d stood in front of the coolers. Made his selections. Grabbed snacks. Paid the guy at the register who definitely didn’t care about Jordan’s life. Came back to the car. The entire sequence contained nothing remarkable, nothing inflammatory, nothing capable of producing the kind of silence currently filling his Honda Civic like invisible concrete setting in real-time.
Unless something happened while he was inside.
A conversation.
A girls’ conversation.
Jordan’s grip on the steering wheel tightened a fraction. Girls’ talks were uncharted territory. He knew they happened, the same way he knew continental drift happened or that the moon affected tides. He knew they were important. He knew they contained information that could fundamentally reshape the trajectory of entire friend groups, relationships, and small nations if analyzed correctly.
But the actual content of these conversations remained as mysterious to Jordan McKnight as advanced calculus had been before Kyle started tutoring him. More mysterious, actually. At least calculus had rules you could write down. At least there were textbooks. You could study calculus.
You could not study whatever the hell girls talked about when guys weren’t present. That information lived in a locked vault somewhere and nobody gave him the combination.
The GPS chimed. Turn right in 400 feet.
Jordan signaled. Checked his mirrors even though traffic was light because his dad had drilled that into him during driver’s ed and old habits died hard. He turned onto Barranca Parkway. The Micro Center sign appeared at the end of the block. Big blue letters against a white building. Sunday afternoon crowd filled the parking lot because apparently every tech enthusiast in Orange County decided today was the day to upgrade their rigs or buy cables they didn’t need or browse graphics cards they couldn’t afford.
He found a spot near the back of the lot and killed the engine. The sudden absence of road noise made the silence worse. Now it had texture. Now it had weight. It pressed down on the interior of the car like atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
"So," Jordan said.
Both girls looked at him.
"We’re here."
Chloe unbuckled her seatbelt. "Yep."
Kumiko made a sound that could have been agreement or could have been her respiratory system rebooting.
Jordan opened his door and stepped out into the Southern California afternoon. February heat, the kind that wasn’t quite summer but still made you regret wearing black. He walked around to open Chloe’s door because his grandmother had literally threatened to haunt him from beyond the grave if he ever stopped doing that, and Chloe accepted the gesture the way she always did, with a small smile that told him she found it charming despite her independence.
Kumiko extracted herself from the backseat on her own. She still held the Pocky. Unopened.
The three of them walked across the parking lot toward the entrance. Jordan between the two girls. Not because he’d planned it that way. That was just where the geometry put him. Chloe walked half a step ahead on his left, her stride fast and focused in that way she got when she had a shopping list and a budget and exactly zero patience for anything that slowed her down. Kumiko walked half a step behind on his right, her platform sneakers giving her just enough height that the top of her head reached Jordan’s shoulder.
Nobody held hands. Nobody touched. The three of them existed in their separate orbits, and Jordan felt the distance between each one like gaps in a bridge he couldn’t see the bottom of.
The automatic doors whooshed open. Cold air hit them first, that specific electronics store blast that smelled like new plastic and ozone and someone’s overworked server room. Micro Center on a Sunday hummed with the energy of a hundred different purchase decisions happening at once. Rows of GPUs lined the walls behind glass. Monitors displayed in columns from floor to ceiling. Keyboard samples clicked under testing fingers. Somewhere deep in the store, a guy was having a loud phone conversation about whether 64 gigs of RAM was overkill for a Minecraft server.
Jordan took one step past the entrance sensor.
"Hi! Welcome to Micro Center!"
