Holy shit, he’s really going to play dumb here. He’sgaslightingme. A strong word, but that’s what it is. I feel sick all over again, because the Ellie I knew—the Ellie I left behind the night I died—would never have done that.
Would he?
“Oh, bullshit. Garrett isme. You even gave her a fucking boy’s name. The things she says—the way she looks. We’re identical.”
“She has brown skin and brown hair. You hardly have a monopoly on those features—”
Specifically, she’s described as havingcaramelskin andchocolatehair—by far the worst writing in his entire story.
“She usesmy words. Youstolemy words and put them in your fucking homework assignment.”
“I may haveborrowedsome stuff,” he finally concedes. “That’s notstealing.”
“You can’t just take real life, change the names, and call it fiction,” I exclaim, ignoring the hypocrisy of my own plagiarism—I don’t fucking care right now.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ellie tells me, his voice hushed.
“I want you to apologize for taking an intimate shared experience and turning it into fodder for our classmates’ analysis.”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie mutters, not sounding sorry at all, “but no one will know it’s you.”
Helen knew it was me. “Unless they find out we slept together,” I say, “in which case it might be obvious by the fact that she has afucking boy’s name.”
“That’s fine, because no one’s going to find out.”
“Is this your way of silencing me? You want to make sure no one finds out we slept together, so you write it into a little story so I’m too ashamed to admit it because if I do, people will realize exactly what you thought of the experience?”
His eyes widen, and he stares at me with alarm. Wariness. A cautious distance in his eyes.
Like I’m a stranger.
It hurts because those eyes once looked at me the way a guy looks at his best friend.
And the irony of the whole fucking thing is that Ithoughtit was painful to be looked at as only a friend by the person I was in love with. Now I know how much worse it can get.
This is not my Ellie, I realize. This boy is a stranger to me.
“I’m not trying tosilenceyou.” Ellie sighs. “I didn’t know she’d send this to the class.”
“Well, she did.”
“And I’m sorry for that. But I already told you—my story isn’t about us. The characters might be… inspired by real life. But it’s completely different.”
“Let’s see. Two people meet at a party—check. They bond over their names—check. They sleep together, and it’s awful—check. The girl switches into one of the boy’s classes—which, news flash, is a pretty fucking identifiable detail. Our classmates wouldn’t have to know we slept together to put two and two together.
“The only thing that differs from reality is that your story assumes I switched classes because ofyou. Because you think you’re a fucking main character, but the reality is that you’re nothing more than a little boy who hasn’t read enough cautionary tales to know that stories likethis”—I shake my cell phone—“get writers sued all the fucking time. It’s called libel and defamation and an invasion of fucking privacy—”
I’m on a roll, no intention of stopping, when Ellie interrupts me. “You’re threatening tosueme?”
I roll my eyes, tempted to let Ellie stew in fear—but he looks like he might cry, and now I remember that he’ssoyoung, a detail that has never been more apparent.
“I’m not going to sue you. I just want—”
But I never do get to tell him what I want, because the door behind him swings open, and a familiar voice asks, “Is everything okay out here? You’re starting to get loud—Joey?”
“Madison?”
I glance from her to him and back, frowning.
