But it doesn’t.
Because they’ve got my letters.
Just then a gap opens up in the huddle and I see Miller. I see her with an orange envelope, and I see her retrieving a folded page before reading, out loud, “My Darling Arrow…”
And then, the envelope in my hand, his belief in me, slips out and falls to the floor and I’m running again.
I’m running down the hallway and I realize that the thump of my feet is the loudest in this space of chaos, even louder than Miller’s nasally voice, reading out my letter.
The letter that belongs to me. The letter I wrote for him. And I need to get it back.
That’s the only thought in my mind. Get that letter back.
I realize that girls have started to turn away from Miller and focus on me. They’re gawking at me.
Gawking at the crazy girl who not only wrote these letters but was also missing. Who’s now dashing toward a teacher with red eyes, screaming, “Stop. It’s mine. It’s mine. Mine. Mine.”
But I don’t care.
I need that letter back.
It’s mine. It’s fucking mine.
I’m so close to it. So close to that piece of paper, the only thing that I can see right now, but something jars my body.
Something binds itself around my stomach and stops me in my tracks and that gets me so enraged, so angry, so devastated that I kick my feet.
I claw at the band around my waist, all the while screaming and staring at that letter, clutched within foreign fingers. “Let me go. Let me go.”
But they don’t.
They don’t let me go and that’s when the explosion hits me, the explosion that happened two days ago and the one that occurred just now.
It all hits me like an earthquake and everything goes black.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Broken Arrow
I’m not leaving.
I can’t. Ican’tleave.
Because I have to tell her.
I have to tell her that the guy she was talking about, the guy who can be angry and mean and fucking sweet, the guy who inspired her, that guy didn’t exist.
Not before her.
Not before seeing her at the bar, looking so luminous and stunning. Not before she marched up to me and changed my whole fucking life.
Shebrought him into existence.
Her.
She built that guy. She created his wildness, his temper, his needs, his wants.
She created his longing.
