“I don’t get it. If he’s been in love with you this entire time, why would he — why would he treat you like shit?”
I throw my hands.
“He just ignored me, more than anything.”
She thinks about that. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “What are you going to do?”
“I —”
I open my mouth.
I close it.
I don’t have an answer.
My chest is in a thousand knots. My fingers won’t stay still. The breath in my lungs has gone shallow, and I’m breathing through my nose.
I stop and take a deep breath in. It comes out shaky. The kind of shaky that means the tears are right there at the edge.
“I can’t do this.” It comes out of me half a cry. “I can’t do this again, Mila. He’s never wanted me.” I stare straight into her eyes. “You know out of everyone how much he led me on.”
Mila stands. She crosses the bedroom in two steps. She wraps her arms around me, and her chin lands on my shoulder, and the smell of her shampoo and perfume fills my nose.
This is too heavy for my heart to withstand. The gates swing open in my chest, and I start sobbing. “I’m so fucking pathetic.”
“You’re not.”
“I am.” I pull back, wiping my face with the back of my hand, and my mascara is already gone. I have nothing left to ruin, so I let the tears keep coming.
She shakes her head.
“I am,” I argue. “I’ve been in –– I amsopathetic. I’ve been obsessed with him––” and the thought hits me right in the chest, “I can’t let him go.” I point at my heart, my head, my entire body. “I keep trying, and this –– this is fucking me up.”
She pulls me back in. I cry into her shoulder again.
I cry the way I haven’t cried since I was seventeen years old, four days after Blue Golding left me asleep in a bedroom and didn’t text me, when I sat on the floor of my mother’s bathroom with the door locked and cried so hard my mother knocked through the door to ask if I was throwing up. I cry the way I cried then. I haven’t let myself feel this pain since then. When he disappeared for college, I only silently cried. This feels much worse –– to know that I haven’t been crazy this whole time. Somehow, I feel like I’m the same girl, in college now, in a different house, with new friends, crying about the same boy.
Some things, I’m learning, don’t actually change.
The door to my bedroom opens.
I look up.
Penelope peeks her head in. My heart stops when I see her sympathetic face. I don’t know how much she heard, but shestays quiet as the door falls open and she crosses the room with her arms open.
She is followed in by Mara. Then Gianna. Then Lucy.
They don’t say anything.
They just come in.
And my heart is in my throat right now. They all see my tears, and I’m mortified.
Penelope wraps her arms around me from the side. Her hand goes flat on the small of my back. Mara hugs me from the other side, her chin on the top of my shoulder, her hair smelling like the floral perfume she sprays in the bathroom in our apartment when she comes over. Gianna leans her forehead against mine and squeezes my upper arm. Lucy folds herself into the edge of the group hug and puts her hand on the back of my hand where it’s hanging onto Mila, and the smallness of the gesture is the part that finally breaks me.
We stand in the middle of my bedroom in a tangled hug of six girls.
I cry harder.
