Ginaand I split up for an hour. She went back to her dorm to grab her clothes, purse, and wash her face and I needed a few minutes to read through the letter my mom sent.
Not that Gina knew about the letter. But I told her I had some shit to do before she came over and she didn’t ask any more questions.
I climbed the four flights of stairs to the top of the Kristman women’s dorm and ignored how hard I was breathing by the time I reached my room. It was always like this. I tried to pack everything I needed in my backpack before I left for classes during the day.
But if I ever forgot anything, it was a fricking trek back up these steps to get it.
This time was worth it, though!
Only a few more hours until the bangin’ showdown at Graffiti’s. My stomach flipped with anticipation and my heart hammered unsteadily. This was the night to end all nights!
I could feel it buzzing in my blood and deep in my bones. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be Jake Turner’s girlfriend. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t compared every other guy to him.
He had been the one cool thing in my life since I was five years old and tonight he was actually going to be mine.
I pushed the heavy oak door to my room open and flipped on the lights. My reflection in my mirror caught my attention and I realized I was smiling.
I couldn’t remember the last time I looked like this.
My hands fell on my flushed cheeks and I moved over to get a closer look. I’d gotten so pale recently. The days of lying out by the pool had been over since my parents split and now I spent all my free hours trying pointlessly to keep up with classes that I was going to flunk out of anyway.
My hair had darkened, too. The sun-bleached highlights I’d earned over the summer had disappeared and my dark hair was now as black as ink.
Most days I could be confused with a corpse. Like something out ofNight of the Living Dead. Not that I minded. The tan, cheerleading bimbette had disappeared. I rather liked the girl that had replaced her.
Remembering the letter from my mom, I watched the color drain from my face. My backpack hit the ground with a slap against the tile floor and I pulled my toe out from underneath, hardly registering the pain.
My fingers moved numbly through my books as I searched for the letter. It was now or never.
I perched on the edge of my bottom bunk and opened the familiar stationary once again.
The words hadn’t changed. My mom’s handwriting was the same as always. It started out exactly how it had this morning.
Even though I’d willed it to change.
He cheated on me.
A stupid tear leaked out of the corner of my eye as I read the rest of the letter. She caught him cheating on her with our neighbor, Janet Finster. She was ten years younger than my mom and had fake boobs.
She was a divorcee who worked at the beauty salon in town. She smoked Misty’s and drank chardonnay by the gallon.
I hated her.
Well, now I hated her.
Once she’d offer to buy me birth control when my parents weren’t home. She said I could tell her what I didn’t tell my mom. What I didn’t tell her or my mom was that until Jake decided that I was not a little kid anymore, I didn’t need any.
Janet’s house was on the other side of our house than Jake’s. Jake lived with his old man because his mom had split when he was a baby. When I was a little girl, I used to wish that Jake’s dad, Carl, would marry Janet Finster so that Jake would always stay on my street.
Now I wanted Janet Finster to get hit by a bus.
She didn’t deserve Jake’s dad. And she sure as hell didn’t deserve mine.
My mom said the divorce was going to be final soon. They filed the papers, so now she had to wait on the lawyers and paperwork and blah, blah, blah.
I stared at her slanted, precise handwriting in horror. In the pit of my stomach, I’d known that there was no working this out. Before I even knew why they were splitting, I’d seen how determined my mom was. She wanted nothing to do with dad anymore.
She’d probably be happiest if both Janet and dad got hit by a bus.
