I stood there, wondering what I would possibly do, whatwewould possibly do, without one another. I counted my breaths since he’d gone: one thousand, eight hundred twenty-four.
I slept in the tree house alone, praying each night for the feel of him climbing into my sleeping bag beside me and curling around my body. But he never did. Seven thousand two hundred and sixty-two breaths since he left.
I waited for his call. An email. A text. Anything.
But I got nothing.
And I wanted my breaths to stop.
Breaths turned into hours, then days, and then weeks. At the end of April, a handful of shingles on the roof of the tree house ripped off in a strong thunderstorm, and the rain ran down the wall where Jase once wrote the silly words of my one-time favorite book.Rabbit Holelooked like it had melted and ran down the wood, and the heart next to it looked mangled and broken with its red ink seeping into the grain of the wood.
Then, two weeks after he left, I got a text message on my phone.Jase!
Come over
I’m in my bedroom
In the space between now and then, before and after, there’s alifetime. A lifetime of the choices you could have made, the paths you choose at the forks in the road, and the paths you never took. It’s a lifetime full of wondering who you truly are orwho you could have beenif you had just taken that other path.
Sometimes, I cry so hard. Sometimes I scream so loud, just wishing for that heartbroken seventeen-year-old girl to take a different path.
But, she doesn’t hear me.
Running at almost warp speed, I dashed through his back door straight into the kitchen. His house was eerily empty. That should have stopped me dead, but of course it didn’t. Looking back in hindsight, everything could have been a path to turn back:Why would he text? Why didn’t he just come over? Where was he for two weeks?I should have turned at every question I had. But none of it was the way I went, because all I thought about was Jase and running straight to him.
I would have never thought that he would hurt me.
The door to his room was half open and I busted through it excitedly.
You couldn’t help but take a sweeping look around his bedroom when you first walked inside of it. His walls were painted an eggshell blue, and they were covered with heavy metal band posters: Avenged Sevenfold, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne. His computer was constantly on, playing a looped slide show, featuring pictures of him, Joey, and me—at school, riding dirt bikes, sitting in the sun. Scattered across his desk were a few empty soda bottles, an ashtray that he never hid from his parents, and dozens of books: Stephen King, Douglas Adams, John Green—all my idols. Leather bound notebooks filled with his writing and an empty bag of pretzels covered his bed. The smell that was only Jase filled the room; it was a mix between warm sunshine and his soap. It made my scalp tingle and my skin heat.
God, I’d missed him so much. I just wanted to be in his arms—safe.
A queen-sized bed took up the middle of his room, covered in a dark blue comforter. I had never sat on his bed; in all the years that I had known him, we rarely ever hung out in his room. And we had never been alone in it together.
I spun around in the middle of the empty room, confused. Then, the door clicked closed behind me. The lock snapped loudly into its chamber, and my heart swelled until it almost burst. I leaned in the direction of the door, ready to run to him, and swung my head around to face him. My cheeks burned from the wideness of my smile. I stumbled backward when my eyes discovered who was blocking the door.
It wasn’t Jase.
It was not Jase at all.
Not even close.
Standing before me in his typical ominous and overbearing disposition, was Mr. Delaney, Jase’s womanizing, abusive, controlling father.
I stumbled and flinched back so violently in shock that I slammed into Jase’s computer desk, causing his pile of books to fall and tumble against the wall and floor.
“I…I thought that…I just got a text…from Jase,” I stammered, moving across the length of the desk to further myself from Mr. Delaney. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled, and everything felt wrong.Why was Mr. Delaney in here? Was Jase in the bathroom? Was he going to yell at Jase and me again for what happened? Didn’t he realize that wasn’t my fault? Owen was a disgusting pervert!
Mr. Delaney, dressed in one of his fancy suits, slowly walked closer to me. I leaned away from him, practically bending myself backward against the edge of Jase’s desk. My hands, which were clammy with nervous sweat, slipped and slid over the surface of the desk, hitting into the computer mouse and grabbing onto the ashtray. If he tried to hurt me, then I was going to slam the damn ashtray against his head.
“Put that down, Charlotte. I don't want you to hurt yourself. The only one allowed to hurt you is going beme,” he said, menacingly.
The words didn’t register. They made no sense to me, as Mr. Delaney leaned forward, over my body, and grabbed for the computer mouse, sliding it over the mouse pad. “Turn around, Charlotte. I want you to watch something I found on Jase’s computer.” His free hand came up and pried the ashtray out of my grip. Tossing it onto the carpet, it made a loud thump against the wooden floor underneath, spraying a cloud of ash and cigarette butts across the room.
When I didn’t move, he grabbed my shoulders and forcefully turned me in the direction of the screen. A still shot of me was displayed in an open file, standing in that stupid white bikini that Jase loved so much. Tears stung my eyes. Why did he want me to watch this? Did he want me to feel ashamed?Embarrassed? Dirty? What?
My knees felt weak;allof my bones felt feeble and shaky, like I was a person made of straw and one strong wind would scatter me across the earth. Then, he clicked on the play arrow, and the video of me dancing across the lawn in a very skimpy bikini started.
