I stand in the shower for an hour and fifteen minutes, the water as hot as I can possibly stand it. I want to burn off the top layer of my skin.
Day 56
Elizabeth and Michaela both burst into giggles when I pass them in the employee hallway on my way into work the next morning, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I get to my locker and find a Post-it with a drawing of a stick-figure girl I’m assuming is me giving blow jobs to a gaggle of stick-figure guys. Right away, I feel that tightness in my face.
It’s the same garden-variety nastiness they’ve been flinging my way all summer, I remind myself—there’s no way they could possibly know what happened with me and Patrick—but still I bolt upstairs and hide in the office for as long as my shift lasts, realphabetizing the files in Penn’s cabinets and watchingThe Blue Planeton the computer. Every time I hear someone coming down the hallway, I flinch.
Day 57
I’m worried I’m going to run into Patrick if I go my usual route down by the lakefront, so instead I do a couple of laps around the track at the high school, everything closed up tight and empty for the summer like something out of the zombie apocalypse. It’s strange to be back here, this place I didn’t graduate from, where everything finished up without me while I hid out on the other side of the country.
Still, the track is warm and solid under my feet, and my legs feel strong and easy: My mind rests calm and quiet and blank. I’m jogging back up through the parking lot when I stop so fast I almost trip.
There’s Julia, parked in the Donnelly Bronco, her raven hair up in a knot on top of her head: She’s got her hands on either side of Elizabeth Reese’s pretty, angular face, their mouths pressed together like there’s literally nobody else in the world.
I stare for a minute. I blink. It feels like the twist at the end of one of my mom’s books or that movie where it turns out the guy was dead the whole time, a million throwaway half clues clicking together all at once: how Julia and Elizabeth are always together, just like Patrick and I used to be. How surprised Gabe looked at the beginning of the summer when I asked him if he and Elizabeth were dating. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that you can never really know what anybody’s got hidden in the back of her secret heart.
I mean to escape before anyone sees me: I wonder who, if anyone, knows. I want to slip away and leave her to it, to whatever she’s figuring out or already understands, but I’m too slow and too stupid just like always, and a second later she pulls back and blinks alert.
Fuck.I see Julia’s mouth move more than I hear it; there’s my answer, then, about who knows or might not. I feel myself blush, caught staring like a creep. I want to promise her I won’t tell anyone—that I understand things being private, and I’m not the kind of girl who would blab. I never get the chance, though, because Julia’s throwing the truck into drive and peeling off toward the exit, her cold gaze locked on mine.
Day 58
The doorbell rings twice and insistent as I’m changing the water in Oscar’s doggie bowl. I’m thinking it’s Alex coming to let me know he’s here to fix the loose shutter my mom’s been complaining about, but there’s Julia standing on the other side of the screen door, tank top and a floaty scarf and dark hair in a complicated set of braids pinned on top of her head, like Heidi.
I stand there. I gape at her. She’s got her jaw set, hands clenched into tight little fists at her sides: She might as well have them raised like an old-fashioned boxer—Put ’em up.
“I’m not going to say anything,” I tell her, not bothering to open the door and let her in here. The last thing in the world I have the energy for is a fight. “If that’s why you came.”
“I—” For a second Julia looks totally confused, like she showed up to a war with tanks and cannons and found me watching soap operas and filing my nails. “You’re not?”
“No,”I say immediately, feeling a surge of irritation—like that was ever even a question. Sheknowsme. She knows I’m not the kind of person who’d go yelling all over creation about something that’s none of my business to begin with, especially something as loaded as this is. “I’m not.”
Julia blinks, still with that startled expression on her face like I’ve thrown her off entirely. She thinks so little of me. “Okay,” she says after a moment. “Thank you. Elizabeth told me about the Post-it the other day; she says she’s sorry.” Then: “Nobody else knows about us except Gabe.”
She stays still on the porch for a moment, looking at me through the old screen door. I remember how much pleasure she’s taken in ripping me to ribbons for the better part of the last year and a half. I remember Chuck strapping her into a life jacket on theSally Forth.“You know your mom wouldn’t care, right?” I say, not entirely sure why I’m sticking my nose in. Maybe because her family was my family, once upon a time. “I mean. Not that I’m a person you want to take advice from, probably. But she’d be happy that you were happy, that’s all. Patrick, too.”
Julia crosses her arms, shifts her weight a bit. Her nail polish is a screaming neon red. “I know that,” she says, sounding a little defensive. “Of course Patrick wouldn’t care that me and Elizabeth are—whatever. He just doesn’tlikeher. He thinks she’s vapid, and that I’m vapid for hanging out with her, and I just—you know how Patrick is.”
That surprises me—Ido; of course I do. I know how talking to Patrick requires a certain kind of courage, how it can make you feel stubborn and shy. That’s what got me where I am in the first place after all. It was so much easier to tell a secret to Gabe.
I want to explain that to Julia all of a sudden, want to tell her how everything happened to begin with, but I know it’s a lost cause before I even open my mouth. “Yeah” is all I tell her. “I know how Patrick is.” Then, as a kind of offering: “Elizabeth’s pretty.”
“Oh, God,enough.” Julia rolls her eyes at me, shaking her head. “We’re not friends anymore, okay? You don’t have to, like, try and bond with me over liking girls. I came here to make sure your freaking mom wasn’t going to write a book about the lesbian down the road, that’s all. We good?”
Julia Donnelly, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know why I expected anything else.
“Yeah,” I promise, shaking my head a little. It’s all I can do not to grin. “We’re good.”
Day 59
I’ve been pretty much entirely off the grid since Crow Bar—sincePatrick—hiding in the office at work to avoid running into Tess, and coming straight home at night to work my way through documentaries about girl boxers and the Louisiana Purchase.how’re your lady parts???Imogen inquires on a group message, and Tess chimes in with an emoji face that’s got twoXs for eyes:Did you die of cramps?
The fact that I’ve got friends who care enough to check in on my imaginary period makes me hate myself even more than I already do, both for the lie and for what happened after I told it. Julia’s right: I don’t deserve anything good.
I’m alive, I text them back, the only truth I seem to be able to manage, then turn my phone off and hide from the world for one more day.
Day 60
