“Look,” I said, trying to sound confident. Trying to sound as if it really was no big deal. Trying to warm up the air around me. “I said I was sorry. I don’t know…”
“You’re sorry?” he said, his voice a boom in the quiet house. “You blew me off for another guy, Alex. Again. Same guy. Why don’t you admit you want him, huh? He wants you. Why don’t the two of you go off and be very happy together? I don’t give a shit. Just go do it.”
“I don’t want him,” I said, taking a step forward. “And he doesn’t want me. I want you, Cole, in case you didn’t notice.”
“You know? I didn’t notice. Because I was too busy noticing that my supposed girlfriend is a slut who can’t seem to pry herself away from her next-door neighbor to come to my practice like she said she would. Oh, I mean best friend. Neighbor makes her sound like a total whore. Best friend is more just… slut.”
I stiffened. “I’m not a slut, and I’m not doing anything with him. And he is my best friend,” I said, my voice going high and shrieky. “It’s not totally unheard of for a boy and a girl to be best friends without anything going on, you know.”
He nodded his head sarcastically, looking as if he was barely holding in laughter. “Whatever, slut,” he said. “Did you and Bethany give him a nice little congratulations gift for getting the big part in the play?”
Suddenly all those feelings of worry were gone, replaced with anger. He was going too far. What kind of boyfriend calls his girlfriend a slut to her face? Who acts like that? I loved Cole, but sometimes loving him just felt like I was on a roller coaster and I couldn’t catch my breath between dips and turns. And sometimes I just wanted off.
“Stop calling me that, Cole. If you’re too dense to see that…”
“Dense?” Anger flashed in his eyes and I saw the muscles in his stomach go taut, but I didn’t care. I was pissed.
“Yeah, it’s how you’re acting. Dense and jealous and stupid and rude.”
“Shut up, slut,” he breathed, but I kept going.
“And if you weren’t so stubborn and you actually tried to get along—”
But before I could so much as wrap my mouth around the next syllable, he was off the amp and across the room, one hand on my neck. I made a surprised little noise in the back of my throat, but he was squeezing too tightly for me to say anything. My hand reached up to his, but before I could pry his fingers off my neck, his other hand, curled in a tight fist, came down high on my cheek, twice, hard. I saw flashes of light with each blow, and pain flared through my face. I cried out for real this time.
“Don’t ever tell me what to do,” Cole said, so full of fury that foamy pieces of spit were gathering in the corners of his mouth. “Don’t ever tell me what to do. I swear to God, Alex. Don’t. Do. It.” He shook me by my neck with every word, my head snapping back and forth like the floppy head of a rag doll.
Just like that, my anger was shaken right out of me. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a huge deal to be called a slut. Suddenly all that mattered was the ringing in my ears and the fact that my eye felt like jelly and my knees wanted to buckle right out from underneath me.
“Okay,” I cried, my voice rasping past his tight grip on my throat. I brought my hand up to my face, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do other than cover and agree to whatever he said. Whatever it would take to make him stop. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, I’m sorry,” I cried, tears pouring out of my eye in rivers, even though I had it squeezed shut. My stomach lurched, and I had to clench my teeth to keep the vomit back.
He let go of my neck and I crumpled to the floor, holding my face and sobbing. Too afraid to run. Too surprised to stand. Too hurt to be brave or indignant or anything other than broken. “I’m sorry,” I whimpered, curling up over my knees and pressing my forehead into the carpet, willing my eye to stop watering. Willing my face and neck to stop hurting. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry…”
I heard Cole breathing hard and pacing. Heard a clang as his guitar met with something hard. Heard the bedsprings twang as he sat on it, heard them groan again a few seconds later as he got up. He was muttering things, how it was my own fault and that I should keep my promises and how nobody talks to him like that. “Why don’t you write about it in one of your stupid little poems?” he said at one point, but I didn’t answer. I was too afraid to lift my face, to look at him head-on.
None of this made sense. I still had the faint lines of bruises on the inside of my wrist. I’d been proud of myself for forgiving him that time. I’d convinced myself that it was a one-time thing. How could this have happened again?
He’d promised—stood there in the parking lot of The Bread Bowl, pressing up against me and kissing me, and promised—that he’d never touch me again. And this time he’d done more than grab my wrist. He’d hit me. Actually hit me. My whole head felt split open, like a hot, gaping cavern, and throbbed like it was alive. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t breathe, I was crying so hard.
I cried so long that I almost forgot all about Cole. I definitely lost track of time. And when I felt his arms slide around my shoulders from behind, I jumped. Panic rocked me as I wondered what he would do to me this time. Would it be possible that he’d just kill me right here in his bedroom with his mom downstairs humming and stirring soup?
But it was the warm Cole who wrapped around me. The tension in his body was gone. The fury in his voice all drained out.
“My Alex,” he breathed into the back of my neck. “Oh my God, my Alex.” Just like before. “Forgive me. You have to forgive me. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to have to… I just get so jealous… Jesus, I don’t want to lose you… please… please don’t leave me… don’t go… I’ll make it better… God, I swear to you…”
I said nothing. Just cried harder, unsure how to move after something like this had happened. Did I just get up and walk away as though my whole world hadn’t just been destroyed? How? How did legs and feet and arms and lungs work after something like this? Was it even possible?
We stayed like that for a long time. He whispered things. Apologies. Excuses. Promises. They bounced off me, impossible to absorb. I believed him and I didn’t. I hated him and I didn’t. I loved him and I didn’t. I hated me and I felt sorry for me. Words had no meaning. There was no past and no future. It was as if all I had to do was live through this moment and everything would be all right.
I kept my face down in the dark for so long that what had just happened began to feel like a dream. Like I was about to wake up into something better. Like I’d open my eyes and things would be bright and pretty.
Instead, when he finally turned me around and I blinked the real world in again, all I saw was blurriness in my right eye, and I felt an all-encompassing numbness.
My nose was running down into my mouth, and I was squinting against the light, my hair stuck to my face. And Cole looked pretty much the same. We were grieving together, and in some way that felt right. Felt better. At least if I was going to be miserable, I wasn’t going to be alone. At least he’d hurt himself, too.
I watched his face contort and his mouth move as he apologized, but I didn’t really hear his words. I watched him lean forward to kiss my cheeks, my hair, my eyes, which hurt, but there was such a disconnect between the hurt and my brain that I barely noticed. It was like the pain belonged to somebody else. Alex was there, but she wasn’t me. She was someone else, shutting down, piece by piece.
I stopped crying.
I just watched.
Numb.
I watched myself slowly get up to leave. I watched myself start walking. I watched myself thump down the stairs and turn the handle of the front door, wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands. I watched myself get into my car and turn it on and back out of Cole’s driveway and drive home. And I watched myself come home and go up to my bedroom and shut the door. I watched myself pull off my clothes and step into pajamas, all in the dark, and curl up in bed and stare at the ceiling, the tears leaking
into my ears, the scene replaying on the blades of my ceiling fan.
But it was like watching myself from the end of a long, black tunnel. The poor girl on the other end—she was bruised and confused and beaten and I felt sorry for her. Whoever she was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
All it took was one look in the bathroom mirror the next morning to convince me that there was no way I could go anywhere.
My eye had a smudgy-looking purple line underneath it—probably something I could cover up with makeup pretty easily—but my cheekbone was a mess. It was puffy and bruised, and it hurt to look at, much less touch.
Walk out of this house looking like this, I told myself, and you’re going to have questions to answer. And are you prepared to answer them? No? I didn’t think so.
I tried washing my face in the coldest water that would come out of the sink, but it didn’t help, except to soothe my eye, which felt like it had sandpaper under the top lid. It was still hard to open my eye fully, and it watered from the sunlight.
In the end, I crawled back into bed, flopped onto my side, pressing my cheek into the pillow to hide it, and called Celia into the room.
“What’s with you? Sick or something?” she asked, leaning in the doorway.
I nodded, gritting my teeth against the pain in my cheek, pushing up against the pillow like that. “Can you have Dad call school? I’m supposed to work tonight, too, so have him call both.”
“Is it cramps?”
“No,” I said. Why couldn’t Celia make anything easy? “I think it’s the flu.”
She frowned. “You don’t look like you have the flu.”
I grunted exasperatedly. “Just… Celia, can you just do this one thing for me, please?”
“Whatever. But if you’re lying so you can hang out and have sex with Cole all day, don’t expect me to cover for you. Gross.”
If I could have, I would have thrown something at her at that moment. But I couldn’t let my cheek leave the pillow. Instead, I pasted on my best pathetic, miserable fever face and batted away thoughts of killing her.
She left the room, yelling for Dad, and not for the first time I wondered how my sisters and I had grown so far apart. When we were little and Dad was desperate and failing, we’d hung on to one another like lifelines. The sting of not having a mom fresh and raw, we became one another’s mommy.
But after a while, it seemed like Shannin and Celia just… forgot the sting. And because I didn’t fit into their world, perfect despite everything that was missing, they started doing the stinging instead.
I knew Celia didn’t really hate me. But most days it felt like she did.
After a few minutes I heard Dad’s heavy boots scuffing down the hallway, and I checked my hair and pillows for maximum black-eye coverage. I pulled the quilt up to my good cheek and curled into a ball, grabbing my knees and trying to shiver without being obvious.
“Celia says you’re sick,” Dad said, standing in the doorway, hands hanging at his sides awkwardly.
I nodded. Gave a weak cough.
“I called school and work,” he said.
“Thanks,” I croaked.
“I can’t stay,” he said uncertainly. Not like I ever expected him to. Not since Shannin got old enough to babysit, anyway.
“ ’S okay,” I said, keeping my voice weak.
“Okay,” he said, squinting at me. I pushed my face harder into the pillow, just in case in my theatrics I’d started to show some cheek. “Well, if you need anything…” But his voice trailed off, and I wasn’t sure if that was a question or a statement. He knocked twice on the doorframe with one knuckle and then started to leave but seemed to think better of it and turned back. “When I called… that lady you work with,” he said. “She said I needed to look after you real close. Said she thought you might be in some trouble.”
I almost forgot that I was trying to hide my cheek and sat up. Georgia! She’d talked to my dad behind my back? How could she?
I shook my head slightly. “She must have meant that we’re all in trouble with the owner right now, that’s all. I’m not in any trouble.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“I’m not pregnant. I’ve just got a bug, Dad.”
He shuffled his boot against the hardwood floor, thankfully giving my face a rest. At least now the shivering I was doing wasn’t an act. I was furious with Georgia for getting into my business. So mad I was shaking. If it wasn’t for my face, I’d go up to The Bread Bowl and confront her right now. She had no right.
“You know what your mother would say about trouble,” he said, and I nodded, even though I never knew what my mother would have said about anything. If she’d ever said anything to me, I didn’t remember it. Just once I wished he would stop insisting that I knew what my mother would have said or done about something and acknowledge that I, truly, had no clue.
He tramped back down the hallway. A few minutes later I heard him and Celia talking as they headed out the front door, and at last I could relax.
I took a shower, and the warm water felt like heaven on my eye. Then I got dressed and grabbed a bag of frozen peas. For the rest of the day, I leaned back against my headboard as mindless talk shows and soap operas droned away on my TV, and held the peas against my cheek. My mind was racing, trying to understand what had happened the night before. Trying to understand what I’d done to set Cole off this time.
But I just couldn’t understand any of it. I didn’t understand why basketball was such a big deal in Cole’s world. I didn’t understand how his parents made him so tense. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t get over the Zack thing, and I didn’t understand his mood swings or why he had to call me names and make me feel small. I didn’t understand what made him snap.
I didn’t understand how he could hit me. Not just a shove or a wrist-grab, but an actual hit. And I didn’t understand how he could be punching my face one minute and telling me he loved me the next.
And I didn’t understand how I could let him.
On the drive home the previous night, I’d thought about Shannin’s story about the night Mom left. Shannin made Mom sound like a bad guy—like someone who could beat the person she loved one minute and hold him the next. Shannin made Mom sound like someone who could understand who Cole was.
Did that make me like Dad?
The thought made me sick to my stomach, and I started to wonder if maybe my lie about being sick hadn’t had a little bit of truth in it. Sorry, Dad, I lied about having a bug. Turns out, the illness I have is the same one you have: forever walking around like a whipped puppy, pining after someone who’s as crazy as goosehouse shit.
Twice during the day, I picked up the phone and started to dial The Bread Bowl—not to bawl Georgia out for going to my dad, but to tell her. Tell her everything. Stop this craziness and all this stuff I was living without understanding from seeping into my brain too far. Help me, Georgia, I would say. Help me get out of this.
But every time I started to punch in the numbers, I thought about what it would be like to be “the abused girl.” I thought about people whispering at school. About Celia’s smug look. About Bethany and Zack sadly shaking their heads and saying they tried to tell me. About counselors and “talking it out” and everyone saying it was shocking because Cole and I looked as though we had a perfect relationship.
And, yeah, as pissed as I was… I couldn’t help thinking of Cole. The hell he would go through. The way he’d feel that I had betrayed him. I would miss him. As crazy as that sounds, I would miss him. The kisses. The little romantic gifts and calling me Emily Dickinson. The guitar lessons. The inside jokes. The spillway. They would all be gone, and I would miss him.
I texted Bethany and told her I was sick. She didn’t answer. I texted Zack; he responded: “Gt wl sn.”
With all that was going on between me and Cole and with Georgia and now Dad, too, I couldn’t really deal with those two.
“Gt wl sn.” Not best-friend wishes, really. Whi
ch hurt. But it didn’t surprise me in the least.
Cole never called.
Before Celia came home, I put the bag of peas back in the freezer and sneaked another look in the bathroom mirror. The swelling was a lot better, but there was still a bruise. I was going to need another day before I’d be able to cover that with makeup.
By the time I heard Celia’s key in the front door, I’d already gotten back in bed, bad cheek down, and adopted my sick look again. A few minutes later she appeared in my doorway.
“Better?” she asked, munching on a granola bar.
“Puked twice,” I groaned, closing my eyes like she was interrupting my sleep.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “I saw loverboy today. He didn’t look very happy. Maybe he’s getting sick, too.”
“Well, at least you know he wasn’t here all day,” I said.
She chewed contemplatively, then rewrapped the granola bar and placed it on the edge of my dresser. She walked over to me and crossed her arms. Then, with a sigh, uncrossed them and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Something seems different about you,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
I was so taken aback by Celia’s sudden interest in someone other than herself, I almost gasped. But if I made a list of people I’d never be able to tell about what was going on with me, Celia would be at the top of the list. She had a big mouth, and she almost never liked me. She’d use it against me for sure. “I’m just sick,” I said. “That’s all.”
She cocked her head to one side and squinted at me. I held her gaze. “It’s just,” she said. “It’s just that your boss told Dad there might be something going on with you. Zack and Bethany were talking this morning about how your boyfriend is a total jerk, and on the same day you’re sick he looks like shit. I just… well, if you needed to talk or something.”
I closed my eyes. “I actually need to sleep. Don’t listen to Zack and Bethany. They’re just mad because I’m not spending every waking second with them. They’ll get over it,” I mumbled.
Bitter End Page 18