Someone Else

by Rebecca Phillips

  “He has nothing to do with this.”

  “Bullshit.” He stood up, listing a little to the right. “No matter how hard I try, I’ll never measure up to him. Your first love. Your first everything. And what the hell am I? Your second choice, that’s what. I never stood a chance with you.”

  I was standing up, facing him, before I even realized I’d moved. “No? What have we been doing for the past three months, then? I gave you all kinds of chances and you managed to screw up every one of them. If you felt like second choice, that’s your issue, not mine.”

  “Right. Nothing is your fault. You’re just as perfect as your ex-boyfriend. I’m amazed you even looked twice at a loser like me.”

  “I never said I was innocent in all this.” I was vaguely aware that we were yelling, but was too fired up to care. “I never said you were a loser either. It’s just really hard to be someone’s only source of happiness. I can’t be that person for you anymore, Dylan. It’s too much pressure.”

  He shook his head. “You’re all the same. The first sign of trouble and you leave.”

  “First sign?” I choked out a laugh. “Hardly. And look, I’m not your mother, okay, so don’t compare me to her.”

  Before the words had fully evacuated my mouth, his face was two inches from mine. “Shut up,” he said through clenched teeth. “That…is no one’s business but mine. I wish I’d never told you.”

  My heart hammered in my chest as he slowly backed away from me, his eyes locked on mine. We stayed like that for a minute, staring holes through each other, while Jess’s fish tank gurgled beside us and voices mingled with music outside the door. Then, in a particularly impressive display of bad timing, my cell phone buzzed with a brand new text.

  “Who’s that?” Dylan asked when I made no move to answer it.

  “I don’t know,” I said, willing the damn phone to shut up. The only people who regularly texted me were Jessica, Dylan, and Michael, and only one of those people were not in this house with me right now.

  “Don’t you want to look at it?”

  “It can wait.”

  I turned and pretended to study the fish tank, slipping my hands into my sweatshirt pockets as nonchalantly as possible. With my right hand I felt for my phone, my thumb blindly pushing buttons in an effort to silence the thing. But of course it kept buzzing, bound and determined to alert me of this new message. I felt Dylan come up behind me.

  “Let me see.”

  “Why?” I said, watching one of the fish, a rainbow one, as it chased another, bigger fish around the tank.

  “Let me see,” Dylan said, this time with a sharpness that quickened my pulse. “Or do you have something to hide?”

  I spun around to face him, hands still in my pockets. “It’s my phone. My private phone. I’m not showing it to you.”

  His hand found mine through the material of my sweatshirt. When I pulled away, he retaliated by grabbing my wrist. His fingers dug into my skin as he forced my hand out of its protective compartment. The phone came with it, and I clutched it even tighter in my palm. It hummed again, oblivious.

  “Let go of me,” I demanded.

  Surprise turned to pain when he squeezed my wrist even harder. With his other hand, he got a solid grip on my phone and wiggled it out of my grasp. Then, still holding my wrist so I couldn’t stop him, he looked at my phone and read the text. Right away, his skin darkened to the same shade of red I’d seen in the Dungeon earlier.

  “Jesus, Dylan, that hurts,” I said, partly in an attempt to distract him from what was obviously a text from Michael, and partly because it did hurt, a lot. For the first time ever, I was scared he might hit me.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he dropped my wrist and squinted at my phone. “You lied to me,” he said, sounding vaguely surprised. My stomach plummeted when he started browsing through the saved texts. He had the same phone as me, so he knew exactly which buttons to press. “You lied to me a lot,” he added after reading all seventeen—well, eighteen now—of Michael’s texts.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  It was like I hadn’t even spoken. “How long have you been cheating on me with him?”

  “I haven’t cheated on you at all,” I said, and then I went into the whole story about Josh going missing and Michael calling to tell me, which evolved into him texting me daily for the past week. “I didn’t even text him back.”

  Dylan moved away from me and plunked down on the bed, my phone still in his hand. “I knew it. I knew this would happen.”

  “Nothing happened. I’m not breaking up with you because of him.”

  His fist came down on the bed. “Stop lying to me! Do you think I’m stupid?”

  I held still, not wanting him to see me flinch. We weren’t together anymore. This was the last time he’d ever get to yell at me.

  “Just go,” he said, disgusted with me.

  My wrist burned like crazy and my ears rang and the entire room echoed with the force of his voice, but in spite of all this I stayed put, watching him, wondering if he was going to be okay. Maybe I was the stupid one.

  “I need my phone,” I said softly, and he tossed it in my general direction. It made landfall on the carpet before skidding toward my feet. I bent over and picked it up. “Dylan…”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” He rested his elbows on his knees as if he could no longer hold himself up. “Just go. Now.”

  So I went. And as soon as I stepped out of Jessica’s room, the ten or so people in the living room and kitchen all turned to stare at me. Ignoring them, I started walking. I heard Jessica calling to me, but I ignored that too. I kept on walking, across the house and through the front door and up the driveway, not stopping until I opened the door to my car. There, under the muted dome light, I finally examined my wrist.

  It was slightly swollen, the skin mottled and tender to the touch. Now, after the fact, I couldn’t believe it had really happened. That Dylan had done this to me, the girl he’d professed to love. The pangs of guilt and blame I had felt in Jessica’s room seemed foolish now in the safety of my car. Yes, I’d lied to him, by omission at least. And no, I hadn’t been an exemplary girlfriend. But I didn’t deserve the assortment of bruises that these blotches would surely become overnight.

  “Asshole,” I muttered, and then I backed out of the driveway as fast as Stella would allow.

  It wasn’t until I was home and in bed that I remembered the eighteenth text from Michael. I checked my read messages, certain that Dylan had deleted it out of anger and spite. But it was still there.

  I was flipping through the channels and came across that movie we saw on our first date, the one about the zombie apocalypse. Reminded me of you.

  This time, before I could think too much about it, I typed back a quick response: The movie or the zombies?

  His answer came less than a minute later. The movie. You don’t look anything like a zombie.

  You should see me on Friday morning after a late shift at work, I replied.

  We went back and forth like this for over an hour. I thought holding the phone for so long would aggravate my wrist even further, but after a while I stopped noticing the pain.

  Chapter 21

  I considered faking an illness to get out of school on Monday, but my mother could pick a phony cough out of a lineup. Unless we were delirious with fever or projectile vomiting or both, we were going to school.

  “You’re quiet this morning,” Mom said at breakfast.

  “I’m thinking,” I said, though dreading would have been a more suitable word. Going to school for the first time after a break-up isn’t high up on anyone’s list of fun things to do.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  Mom and I weren’t the type of mother and daughter who had long, revealing chats over tea and cookies. In fact, when it came to personal matters, I tended to edit about half of what I told her. But these days, I had no one else. Ashley still wasn’t talking to me and Brooke had followed suit. J
essica hadn’t called all weekend, and whenever I tried to get a hold of Robin she was either on her way out, already out, or too distracted to follow a conversation. Sadly enough, my mother was my only option.

  “I broke up with Dylan on Friday.”

  She glanced up from the folders she was organizing. “Oh?”

  I finished my piece of toast and went to the sink to rinse my hands, careful—as I’d been all weekend—not to push up my sleeve too far and expose the fingertip-shaped bruises that had formed on my wrist. There were some things I’d never tell her. “It wasn’t working out,” I said, drying my hands on a towel.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. He seemed like a nice boy.”

  Only sometimes, I felt like saying. “I’ve been talking to Michael a little bit lately.”

  “Oh Taylor.” Her mouth turned down into a disappointed frown. “Why do you have to start that up again? You were miserable when he went away to college.”

  “I wasn’t miserable. It was just harder than we thought it would be.”

  “Well, it’s not going to get any easier. The same problems you had back then still exist now. Getting back together with him won’t make them all magically disappear.” She paused for a swallow of coffee. “Why don’t you try single life for a while? You really get to know yourself when you’re on your own.”

  I figured my mother must have been best friends with herself by now, seeing as she’d rarely dated since the divorce. “I didn’t say we were getting back together. We’re just talking.” Frustrated, I gathered my backpack and car keys and prepared to leave ten minutes early. May as well get it over with. “Do I have to drop Emma off or is she going with you?”

  “She’s still putting the finishing touches on her diorama project. I’ll take her.”

  I mumbled a good-bye and headed outside. It was pouring, of course, the kind of rain that made you feel sticky and gross for hours. Fitting for today. Because I’d left early, the Dungeon was vacant when I got to school. I grabbed the books I’d need for the morning and took off for the library, a guaranteed sanctuary at any time of day. No one ever went to the school library. I stayed there, huddled in a chair behind the stacks and pretending to read, until the bell rang for first period.

  Luckily chem lab was cancelled this week, so at least I didn’t have to contemplate sitting at a table with Jessica and Dylan in a room filled with dangerous chemicals and fire. It was awkward enough walking into chemistry class, knowing I’d have to coexist with them for the next hour. Or at least one of them. Dylan wasn’t in class but Jessica was, and she was looking right at me. No, make that glaring right at me. I tried to ignore her as I walked to my seat, but it’s hard to ignore someone shooting daggers at you. She didn’t let up during class, either. Every time the hair bristled on the back of my neck, I knew she was watching me.

  At the bell, I shot out of my desk and went directly to my next class, art. Somehow I managed to get there without running into anyone from Jess’s crowd. But then, just as I was congratulating myself on my extraordinary evasion tactics and thinking I might have a decent last two months of eleventh grade after all, I collided with Jill Holloway right outside the art room.

  “Taylor,” she said when she realized the person who’d accidentally bulldozed her was me. She balanced herself, seemingly uninjured. Today she was wearing skin-tight capris, a low-cut blouse, and high-heeled sandals. As the weather turned warmer, her outfits got more and more outrageous. By June she’d probably be down to a bikini. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said, eager to escape to the shelter of the classroom.

  She leaned in closer. “I heard about you and Dylan.”

  Of course. The entire school had probably heard about me and Dylan, about how I’d broken the heart of the quiet, mysterious soccer-playing jock who sat in back of the class and never smiled. Poor guy.

  “You did the right thing,” Jill said, echoing my stepsister’s words from Friday night. “Dylan is…well, I guess you know exactly what he’s like.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. She was being so kind, even after I’d acted like a defensive jerk to her in the washroom that day. At least there was someone in this school who didn’t hate me, even if that someone was Jill Holloway, aka Attention Whore.

  “Want to sit with me today?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, hoping she hadn’t noticed my eyes glistening. If she had, she didn’t let on. She just smiled and led me over to the best table in the art room, the one right by the window that overlooked the pretty wooded area at the back of the school.

  “Don’t let Jessica and her lackeys get to you, okay?” Jill said after we sat down. “Most mean girls are all bark and no bite.”

  “You said they tortured your friend Anna until she changed schools.”

  “I love Anna to death, but she can be kind of a pushover. You’re a lot tougher than she is.”

  “How do you know?”

  She grinned at me again. “I can just tell.”

  For the rest of class, I wondered why I’d never stopped to realize that Jill was a nice person. Had I hated her for the same reasons Jessica and Lia and Mallory did? Because she dressed provocatively and liked to flirt? Because she refused to cower whenever they unleashed their fury on her? Jill Holloway was tougher than any of us, and I think that bothered them most of all.

  The confrontation I’d been dreading all weekend came right after the lunch bell. I was almost relieved when I walked into the Dungeon to see the three girls standing by my locker, Jess at the forefront with Lia and Mallory slightly behind her. This was the formation they always used when they were about to lay into someone. My turn had finally arrived.

  “Hi,” I said, going straight to my locker as if everything was normal. My goal was to act cool and indifferent, a preemptive strike against what was sure to come.

  “What happened Friday night?” Jessica asked, delving right into the heart of it, as usual.

  “Dylan and I broke up.”

  “More like you dumped him,” Mallory said.

  I looked at her. Jessica’s wing girl. God, that wave of hair was annoying.

  “He’s a mess over this, you know,” Jess told me. “He stayed home today because he didn’t want to face you. Can’t say I blame him. I really thought you were a different kind of person, Taylor.”

  The Dungeon was packed with people at this point, and a few of them lurked nearby, having sensed free lunchtime entertainment. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said, opening my locker and retrieving my water bottle and pack of gum, the only things my stomach would tolerate today.

  “I had no idea you were capable of being so cruel.”

  I turned to face them. Jessica and Mallory wore matching expressions of disbelief while Lia looked like she’d rather be anywhere else but here. Out of all of them she knew me the best, knew I didn’t have a cruel bone in my body, but sticking up for me now was too much of a risk for her. She’d gone against them once for me already, when she was there for me in January after the first break-up. Twice would be social suicide.

  “No offense, Jess,” I said, “but you don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know about the texts. I know you’ve been cheating on him with your ex.”

  Like Dylan, she was so sure that she had the whole story. So quick to paint me as the bad guy. “I did not cheat on him with my ex. I didn’t cheat on him with anyone.”

  Mallory snorted. “Right.”

  I ground my teeth together until pain shot through my jaw. “Look, it’s none of your business, okay?”

  Jessica put one hand on her hip and pointed at me with the other one, a stance I’d seen numerous times. Only until now, it had always been directed at someone else. “It is our business when you screw around on our friend. You knew how much he loved you, Taylor. How could you do that to him?”

  That was it. My limit had been breached. I was sick of being accused of things I didn’t do, sick of being intimidated, sick of Mallory�
�s hair and Jessica’s narrow mind and Lia’s spinelessness. Sick of this whole sham of a friendship. Finally, I had come to my senses.

  “How could he,” I said, shoving up my sleeve, “do this to me?”

  Lia’s eyes bulged at the cluster of angry black marks on my wrist. She looked at Jessica, unsure what to do with this new information. Jessica glanced at the bruises and smirked. “Dylan wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she said. “You probably banged it on a door or something.”

  Her dismissiveness was the last nail in the coffin. I fixed my sleeve and looked her right in the eye. “You know what, Jessica? You’re a bitch.”

  Her nostrils flared and for a second I was sure she was going to haul off and gouge my eyes out with those talons of hers. But before she could respond, violently or otherwise, Lia took her arm and said, “Come on, Jess. Let’s go.” Reluctantly, Jessica allowed Lia to pull her away, all the while glaring at me with the kind of hate she usually reserved for girls like Jill Holloway.

  “I’d rather be a bitch than a slut,” she said before walking away, her two cronies at her heals. Not one of them looked back.

  Once they were out of sight, the rubberneckers dispersed and left me alone. I leaned back against my locker, closed my eyes, and concentrated on my breathing until I felt the rush of adrenaline drain from my body.

  “Are you okay?”

  I opened my eyes to see Brooke’s pretty, concerned face in front of mine. Standing next to her was Ashley. Had they been here the whole time, watching?

  “Yeah,” I said. I opened my water and took a swig. “So I guess you saw.”

  Brooke nodded. Ashley looked past me to our locker, not saying anything. She still wasn’t ready to forgive me, and I could understand why. I’d been so delusional.

  “He did that to you?” Brooke touched my wrist with her pale fingers. “What a dickhead.”

  “Doors don’t make finger marks.”