“I shouldn’t complain.” I dig through my bag for my keys. “Mona Stone once performed crazy acrobatics eight months pregnant during one of her shows. A battered knee shouldn’t stop me.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long second. Then: “She was probably hoping to lose the baby.”
My fingers freeze on the plastic doughnut key chain. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”
His face shutters as quickly as falling dominoes. Without another word, he walks down the steps and strides back to the car. I shake my head as he drives away, then let myself in quietly and tiptoe up to my room. I should take a shower, drink a gallon of water, and brush my teeth, but those three tasks require energy. Energy I don’t have. As though I’ve been clocked, I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.
19
A License to Drive People Insane
I wake up feeling like Mona Stone’s band is performing a live concert inside my body. Her drummer is pounding my skull with his sticks, while her guitar player is strumming my intestines with his plastic pick, and her backup dancers are stomping against each one of my bones. To make everything worse, the sun pours through my window like the megawatt spotlights at the Grand Ole Opry.
The evening returns in vivid detail. I cringe and then cringe some more.
Who asks a boy they barely know if he’s a virgin?
I swipe my phone off my nightstand and click on our chat. After rereading our volley of texts, I delete the whole conversation. It won’t erase it from his phone, but at least it’ll no longer be on mine. Out of sight, out of mind.
While I wait for my brain to stop wobbling, I scroll through my Instagram feed and find a picture that has me sitting up in bed so fast my eyesight short-circuits. I wait until the room swims back into focus before calling Rae.
After the third ring, she picks up with a groggy, “Yeah?”
“You hooked up with Harrison?” My voice reverberates between my left and right temples. Is that normal? I’ve never had a hangover before.
I squeeze my forehead between my thumb and middle finger, then swing my legs off the bed and slowly stand. A small ache throbs in theknee Ten patched up, but it’s not debilitating enough to keep me in bed. Holding on to the wall, I plod to the bathroom, then turn on the shower.
“Morning to you too, hon.”
“You hooked up with the quarterback?”
“I did.” There’s a lilt to her voice.
“What about Ten?”
Her sheets rustle as though she’s flipping over in bed. “What about Ten?”
I grimace at the sight of my haggard reflection in the beveled mirror over my sink. “I thought”—I touch the Band-Aid on my chin before slowly peeling it off—“I thought you were into him.”
Isn’t that why you invited him over?I don’t say this out loud, afraid of how petty it’ll make me sound.
“Angie, you do realize Ten’s got it bad foryou, don’t you?”
I want to say no. That it isn’t remotely true. That what happened on the school bleachers was a total fluke… It hits me that I never even told Rae about the bleachers.
“It took Laney knocking some sense into me after the mall,” Rae says. “The second she pointed it out, though, I wondered how I’d missed it. I’m real sorry.”
“About what?”
“That I didn’t see it sooner.”
Steam rises to the mirror and cloaks the glass, blurring my reflection. “Rae, first off, you have nothing to be sorry for. Secondly, nothing’s ever gonna happen between Ten and me.”
I shudder just thinking about my text. I’m tempted to send Ten an apology along with a thank-you, but I’m forbidding myself from further indelible forms of communication.
“Why not?” Rae asks.
Because I’m a lunatic, and he’s secretive. Because when I get into a relationship, I want complete honesty. How can anyone build a future on top of concealed foundations?
