A breeze swirled icy crystals into the air, and his cheeks reddened in the cold. Suddenly I thought of Anna and Vronsky on that winter evening before their affair began, when their train stopped in the middle of nowhere and they found themselves alone in the snowy dark, staring longingly at each other.
Not that Alex was looking at me.
He stopped suddenly at the bottom of the stairs. I shrank farther out of sight, hunching down until I was practically squatting in the snow. Had he sensed my attention? Or was he thinking about the fact that my house was down the block? Maybe today’s piano playing had been suffused with melan-choly grandeur, a storm of angry notes with an undercurrent of yearning? Holding my breath, I risked another peek. A sign, however small, that he hadn’t forgotten me would mean so much.
Frowning, Alex glanced behind him. Then he looked down, shuffling through the stack of music books in his hand. Near the bottom of the pile, his brow smoothed.
Apparently he’d found what he was looking for.
Nothing happened Thursday. Not a blessed thing—unless you countdwelling on unhappy thoughtsas a pastime.
By evening, the loneliness was suffocating. It shouldn’t have been possible to feel that way in a house full of people, but I wasn’t just at-home Mary anymore. I’d had a taste of another life, and it was this version of me—the one with my own friends, separate from my family—that was starved for contact. Did that Mary still exist, or was I a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear?
After everyone else went to bed, I crept into my parents’ office and booted up the desktop computer. It was hard to say what I hoped to find: a peek at my friends’ lives? That they’d continued the Scoundrel Guide without me—or worse, taken it down, erasing all trace of our shared existence? A shard of ice lodged in my chest.
No, there it was, loading at last. I stared at the screen, questioning the evidence of my eyes. How could there be a new entry, without me? It felt like a betrayal, even though I knew I had no right to complain. Why should they leave it frozen in time like a sad memorial to our past? It was obvious they didn’t need me anymore; they didn’t evenmissmy presence. Their lives had carried on, as if I’d never been part of them.
Even as these thoughts crashed over me in sickening waves, my brain skimmed the text. It was about Miles; I knew that much. It hadn’t been so long that I’d entirely lost track of their affairs.
Another Way to Break a Heart, read the scrolling cursive at the top of the page, superimposed over a black-and-white photo of a girl staring through a rain-streaked window. Off to one side there was another caption, in a different font:
When they decide extracurriculars matter more than you do, because no one is going to give them a trophy for being a good boyfriend.
Ouch. Did Miles know about the Guide—and if so, had he recognized himself? Then again, he might not be sitting at home digging for crumbs of information about what Arden and her friends had been up to lately.
I scrolled down a little farther. There was a picture of a book, lying open on the ground in the middle of a forest. A single black feather had fallen onto the page. Holding my breath, I read the final note:
Maybe there’s a story like that. It’s impossible to know, when the person you trusted to tell you those things is gone, and everything you thought was true turns out to be an illusion.
With shaking hands, I closed the browser and logged off.
On Friday, I found someone else to offend.
Dear Diary,
The thing I hate most aboutPamela(the bookandthe character) is that she’s so helpless. It’s all, “Oh no, I can’t climb over that stack of bricks,” and, “Woe is me, there’s a cow in that field!” If she really wanted to escape Mr. B, she would have done something about it instead of wringing her hands for five hundred pages—and then marrying him!
M.P.M.
Chapter 29
When I walked through the doorof my house at the end of that long, miserable week, my body sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut. For two whole days I could hide from the world. The muscles of my face might finally relax, now that I would no longer be forced to pretend I wasn’t aching on the inside. And if any of my family members asked why I looked so dismal, I had only to blame it on a book—something French. Or Russian. Or German. There were plenty of depressing literary options.
“Hey, Mary,” said Bo’s voice, startling me from this pleasant daydream.
“Oh. Hi.” Pasting on what I hoped was a reasonably normal expression, I started to move toward the stairs.
“Homework?” he asked, arresting my progress.
When I mumbled an affirmative, he nodded as though he’d expected as much. “Must be a busy time. Jasper said you’ve been coming straight back from school every day.”
My hand flattened across my belly; it felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.
“Do you want a snack?” Bo asked, misreading the gesture.
“No thanks.” Our substitute teacher had shown a movie during American history, under cover of which I’d eaten most of my lunch. I tipped my head in the direction of the stairs. “I just need to—”
“How was the dance?”
