Page 260 of Mad Girl

I couldn’t look at you.

In a quiet voice, my dad said, “Lib, I’ll be right over.” He dropped the call and pinned me with a look so furious and scathing that I began to squirm on the sofa. “Did you do this to get back at me? Or to get back at her? For the way she talked to you the other day?”

I didn’t answer.

“Answer me!” Nic yelled, causing us both to flinch.

“She talked you into sending me to Arizona over the summer,” I said. “She wanted me gone.”

“She wanted you to get help. She loves you, and this is how you treat her? Hurting me wasn’t enough? You had to hurt her, too?”

“That’s not⁠—”

“Stop,” said Nic, holding up his hands, his eyes squeezed shut. “Just stop. I don’t want to hear any more of your excuses.”

My dad left the room.

That’s when I noticed Michael standing off to the side. He walked closer, glaring at me. “I thought that was you in the video,” he said, head shaking. “You realize what you did was illegal, right? If you’d gotten caught, you would’ve been looking at a misdemeanor, Elliot. Possible jail time. No Harvard.”

“I didn’t get caught.”

“Yet,” Michael said. “What if someone identifies you?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Risks aside, I can’t believe you would do something like this to my mom the day before the election. She’s over there crying. Do you even care?”

“She manipulated my dad. She tried to have me sent away,” I reminded him. “She’s not the person she claims to be. She is a liar.”

Michael said, “Yeah, well, I’m starting to think she might’ve been right about Nic needing to get you some help. Because you can’t stop doing stuff like this, can you? She’s the closest thing you’ve ever had to a mom, and she did not deserve the very public way you chose to humiliate her, Elliot. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“You don’t want her to win, anyway!” I accused. “You want your own mother to lose!”

Michael laughed. “You’ve got me there. I’m an asshole. But at least I’m not the asshole who thinks up cruel and unusual ways to hurt every person who ever dares to piss her off.” His gaze washed over us, eyes slightly narrowed, before he cast one final blistering look at me and left the room.

We continued to sit in perfect silence long after we heard the back door slam. Then, in a voice so quiet it made my stomach clench, you said, “Why won’t you look at me?”

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

“I think it’s because you’ve been caught—and you didn’t anticipate getting caught, did you? You did that horrible thing, then you walked in here talking about what a shitty time you were having, and I completely let my guard down for once. I told you something—told you a few somethings, actually—I’ve never told anyone. And you let me do that. You let me carry on, knowing how guilty you were.”

You were right. You had no idea how very right you were. On many counts.

“I’d like to chalk this up to the rough time you’ve been having lately—to the time of year,” you said, “but there is no excuse for what you’ve done to Libby.”

I forced my gaze to meet yours. All that acceptance and softness from the night before, was gone, replaced by something so much worse than disappointment: a cold hardness that couldn’t be cracked. It crushed me. In a small voice, I said, “She wanted me out of the way during her campaign.”

“Says who?”

“Says Bree.”

“Did Bree actually hear Libby say that?”

“Well”—I scrambled to think, to recall our conversation that day in my room—“I’m not exactly sure.”

“So you did this based on hearsay,” you said.

“She’s sleeping with my dad.”