Page 45 of Mad Girl

And then I broke it.

Just before I left school one day, I texted you to say I planned on staying late at the library, then texted Michael to ask what he was doing. He replied: In class. Why?

He’d been spending most of his free time with you and Sienna, so for weeks, I’d only seen him on Sundays at brunch. I texted back some bullshit about missing him, which wasn’t exactly a lie, but mainly I just needed to check where he was. I had this fear I’d walk in on him and Sienna having sex, and I didn’t think I could stomach that.

And why should I even fear such a thing, you ask?

Well, because I’d stolen the key to his apartment from Bree’s purse the previous Sunday, and an undeniable thrill had been zipping through me ever since at the prospect of using it. As I walked the ten minutes to his apartment with that very key tucked safely inside my coat, my heartbeat sped up, soaring high enough to set off an alert on my watch as I pushed the key in his lock. I gently nudged the door open and paused to listen. When nothing but the hiss of Michael’s refrigerator greeted me, I sighed with relief.

Inside, I dropped my backpack on his couch, then unwound my scarf and peeled off my coat. After a quick scan of the living room, I headed to the bedroom. Michael’s striped blue sheets were a tangled mess. A heap of his clothes tottered precariously on top of a chair. A lacy red bra hung from the bathroom door handle. Fancy. Floral. Tiny red bow in the center.

Cute in theory. But on her? Gross.

The snooping. This was a point of contention between us, too, Casey, and I never explained my reasons for doing it. Like Michael, most people would say I didn’t respect boundaries.

But what are boundaries, really, when boundaries are all you know? When you learn to test your limits within the confines of a cage? When the only way to experience liberty is to take it? Because you’re greedy for answers and everyone in your life withholds them from you?

When it came to snooping in Michael’s room, however, I did it for all the same reasons I snooped in yours.

Curiosity.

Jealousy.

But mainly I did it to hurt myself.

The rumpled sheets, the bra on the door, the drawer full of condoms—it all symbolized freedom.

The kind that belonged to people like him. Never to girls like me.

The freedom to be close to someone. To crawl inside them. To fill them whole.

And it didn’t break anyone to let him do that. It didn’t break him, either. He could feel wanted—loved, even—without the crippling fear he didn’t deserve it.

To me, there seemed no greater freedom than that.

But I ached for the other type of freedom, too, as I eyed Sienna’s bra, garishly red against the creamy white of Michael’s door.

What did it feel like to be her? To come and go as she pleased? To dress the way she wanted? To be someone’s girlfriend? To make choices about her own body?

Standing there, I could almost imagine it. Almost taste it. Liberation.

On the nightstand, a framed picture of Michael and Sienna caught my eye. They were at some formal thing—her red dress cut high and tight, his tux tailored to perfection, Michael’s arm locked possessively around her waist. I knocked the picture off the nightstand and stomped hard on the back of the frame, crunching broken glass into the hardwood floor. Out loud, I said, “Oops.”

Thanks to Michael, I still hadn’t gotten her back for embarrassing me the day of Eleanor’s birthday brunch. So maybe I’d come for a little more than the torment it caused me to see their freedom flaunted in Michael’s bedroom.

I turned, scanning the room for anything else of hers, spotting a white blouse hanging on a knob of his dresser. I grabbed it, getting ready to rip the fabric with my bare hands, but stopped. I couldn’t risk something so obvious or Michael would know I’d been there and say something to you. As for the broken frame, I’d play dumb about that. I put the blouse back, then moved on to the bathroom and flipped on the light. At the sink, I found a bottle of eye contact solution—which had to be hers because Michael had never worn glasses—and two toothbrushes. Hers had to be the red electric one. So freaking obvious. I’d just grabbed her toothbrush, planning to scrub the toilet with it, when I heard footsteps behind me.

“What are you doing?”

I froze with the toothbrush and slowly turned around.

Michael stood in the doorway, his arms folded over a blue gingham button-down. “I thought you’d be here,” he said, walking so close I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He plucked Sienna’s toothbrush from my hand. “That text was too random to be innocent, Elliot.”

I shoved past him. “It’s really annoying how you keep sabotaging my attempts to get back at her.”

“But why do you have to get back at her?”

Because she embarrassed me in front of my hot new housemate, I didn’t dare say out loud.