And the rest of me hurts even more now.
If I had something sharp, I don’t know how deep I would cut. Maybe all the way to the bone. Maybe right through to the marrow, like one of those people I read about, the people I thought were so much sicker than I’d ever be.
Maybe I’m just as sick as they are. Or anyway, maybe I could become that sick, given enough time. The fact that I cut as deep as I did on Valentine’s Day proves that I was getting worse, not better, in the months since I made my very first cut.
Suddenly, there’s a tentative hand on my elbow. Someone gently guiding me away from the crowd. Someone leading me to the grass beyond the track on the way to the parking lot. Someone lowering me to the ground, telling me to put my head between my knees. Someone reaching into my pockets, taking my hands in hers and holding them steady.
A voice saying, “Breathe, Junie. Just breathe.”
Maya.
“You can do it.”
Why is she helping me? I was so mean. But she lied to me.
A lie’s a lie’s a lie. That’s what Dad says.
Maybe Dad’s wrong. Maybe Dad has no idea what he’s talking about.
“You can do it, Junie,” Maya repeats.
I shake my head because I can’t do it. Can’t stop crying. Can’t stop my heart from racing. Can’t stop my lungs from refusing to take in any air.
“I’m sorry,” I manage. Sorry for what? For what I said last night? For how the protest got so ridiculously out of control? For not being nearly as strong as she is—strong enough to hold it together, strong enough to speak up? Sorry that I’m such a mess.
“Just breathe, Junie,” Maya says again. “In, out. In, out.” She puts my hand on her chest so I can feel her breaths. I try to match my movements to hers.
“In, out. In, out.”
I nod along time with her words. My heartbeat slows. I’m able to catch my breath. Maya wipes the tears from my cheeks.
“You okay?” she asks.
I nod, though my breaths are still ragged. At least I can breathe. “I’ve never felt like that before,” I say.
“I think you were having a panic attack.”
I nod again. I don’t know much about panic attacks, but I can’t think of two better words to describe how I felt.
“We could go to the hospital—” Maya offers, but I shake my head.
“It’s getting better.”
“If you’re sure.” Maya looks so concerned. Even after what happened last night, she still cares about me. She’s still my friend. I take a deep breath.
“I shouldn’t have left you at Kyle’s last night. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. I should have told you about Hiram.”
“I haven’t told you everything either.” I open my mouth to tell her about the pills, but before I can get the words out, another voice joins us.
“What are you guys doing over here?”
Tess. The boys always run first. She has time before she has to race.
“You were amazing up there, Maya,” Tess adds.
Maya pulls me up to stand. I feel her shrug. “I just told the truth.”
“They’re starting the meet,” Tess explains.
“Are they seriously going to let Mike run after all this?” I ask.
Tess shakes her head. “I’m not sure. If they do, we could try to stop it. I’ve got the girls’ team on standby.”
I meet my ex-girlfriend’s gaze. Her hair is knotted into a tight bun as it always is on race day, the only time she tries to tame it. She’s wearing a pink sweatshirt, but I can tell she has her uniform on underneath. When she got dressed this morning, she still planned to be ready to run. After all, she’s a competitor. She can simultaneously want to march in a protest and want to win a race.
I watch Tess take in my face. I don’t need a mirror to know I look terrible. My cheeks are streaked with tears, my skin is surely red and blotchy, my eyes bloodshot, my nose crusted with snot. I’m still breathing heavily, as though I was the one who’d been running.
“We were just leaving,” I say finally.
Tess blinks. She knows something’s wrong, but she’s never seen me like this—I’ve never seen me like this—so she can’t possibly understand what’s wrong. “It’s not like you to leave,” she says finally.
I shake my head. “Actually, you don’t know what I’m really like.” It sounds harsher than I want it to (always the wrong thing), though it’s almost exactly what Tess said when she dumped me last week, almost exactly what I thought as I stumbled out of her car last night.
Maybe Tess never loved me. Maybe she couldn’t.
Tess opens her mouth to respond, but I speak before she can.
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “It’s mine.”
Seventeen
Maya
I lead Junie to Mom’s car. “Okay if I drive?” I ask. “You still seem kind of…” I pause. I don’t want to say something that might hurt her feelings. “Shaky.”
Junie surprises me by laughing. “That’s the perfect word.” She holds up her hands so I can see them trembling. “Definitely shaky.”
Junie and I get into the car, but I don’t start it. I read somewhere that you’re not supposed to touch someone who’s in the midst of a panic attack without their permission, but I didn’t know what else to do but take her hands and beg her to breathe. Now, even though she’s still shaking, my best friend seems better than she did a few minutes ago.
Junie nods in the direction of the track. “I couldn’t hear what you said back there.”
“I said I wanted Mike expelled.” Even inside the car, with the doors and windows closed, I hear the crowd applaud when the runners take their marks. The sound makes me cringe. It hurts to think that some of the people sitting in the bleachers around the track still don’t believe me. Or even worse—they do believe me, but it’s not enough to stop them from cheering for their star.
“Mike’s still out there,” I say, “still running. They’re still rooting for him.” I swallow, but the lump in my throat doesn’t go away.
“You don’t know that for sure,” Junie offers. “They might not let him run.”
Our school’s best chance at beating our archrival? Not likely.
“Or maybe he decided not to run after what you said,” Junie adds hopefully, though she doesn’t quite sound like she believes it. We both know Mike would never miss a chance to compete. A chance to win.
“Even if he does run,” Junie decides finally, “there are a lot of people who won’t cheer for him.”
I shrug. “They still want North Bay to win.”
“No one wants to win like this.” Junie pauses. “Okay, I mean, maybe not no one, but plenty of people. I believe that. Really. It matters that you stood up there. It matters that you said what you did.”
I nod, but I still feel like crying. I used to think that when Mike won, I won too. We were a team. I thought that when the crowd cheered him on, they were cheering for me too. Now, the opposite feels true.
My anger let me stand up there, in front of everyone, and say what I wanted. It helped me know what I wanted. But now—my heart isn’t pounding anymore. Everything I felt when I took the bullhorn from Principal Scott—the fury, the adrenaline—has faded. It’s like I had a limited amount of energy and I used it all up. Like a balloon that’s been popped. I’m suddenly very, very tired.
“What’s wrong with me?” I feel desperate as tears stream down my face. “Why am I crying?”
I don’t want Mike. I don’t want to watch him run. And yet—I still feel like I lost something.
“What’s wrong with me?” Junie counters. “Why was I the one panicking back there? You kept it together while I was falling apart, even though you were the one who’d been hurt.” Junie leans her head back and closes her eyes. “I w
ish I could be that strong.”
“Strong?” I echo incredulously. “Are you kidding? Like you said, I kept quiet about Mike for months.”
“No,” Junie says firmly. “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, of course I wish you’d said something sooner, because I hate to think that he had more time to hurt you. But still—you came forward and told Principal Scott. You stood up for yourself the minute you went into her office on Monday.”
I shake my head. “Only because it’s too hard to hide a black eye.”
“Give yourself more credit than that!”
“I can’t,” I explain. “I honestly don’t know if I would’ve said anything if I could’ve hid it.”
“But you could have hid it,” Junie insists. “You could’ve faked the flu and stayed home, or slathered on concealer, or made up some kind of story about walking into a doorknob in the middle of the night.”
I laugh, because I thought of the same ridiculous excuse just a few days ago. “Not all of us are small enough that doorknobs are eye level.”
“Are you calling me short?” Junie feigns offense, then turns serious again. “You could’ve kept on protecting him if you wanted to, but you didn’t. For whatever reason, that black eye was the last straw for you.”
I circle my left wrist with the fingers of my right hand the way Mike’s bracelet used to. “Why did it take me so long to reach the last straw?”
Junie considers my question. “I don’t know. Maybe because—despite everything—you loved him?”
My tears finally overflow. Did I love him? Could I love someone who hurt me, someone who frightened me?
From our very first date, I wanted to be with him, and maybe that’s part of the reason why it felt like everything that happened was my fault. I liked knowing that he chose me, when he could have had anyone. I liked the way it felt, when people looked at us, walking through the halls hand in hand. That felt like love to me.
“I should’ve hated him from the very first time. Why didn’t I hate him?” It’s hard to talk through my tears.
“I don’t know,” Junie answers. “I hid it for months when someone was hurting me. I mean, when I was hurting me. I was scared of what people would think. I was scared of disappointing them.”
I nod, wiping my tears. The lump in my throat feels a little bit smaller. “I was scared too.”
“Are you still?” Junie asks.
I rest my hands on the steering wheel in front of me, considering. “I know Mike could still hurt me,” I begin slowly. If he doesn’t get expelled—even if he never hits me again, even if we’re never alone together again—he could probably turn half the student body against me. And that’s not counting the kids who already hate me for what I said today.
Or he could bang down my door when I’m home alone some night. I used to think he’d never do something like that.
But I used to think he’d never hit me hard enough to give me a black eye.
“If he hurts me again, I’m not scared to speak up anymore.”
“I’m still scared,” Junie says. “Can you imagine what my dad would say if he knew how I lost it today?”
“He’d understand,” I begin, but Junie shakes her head.
“He wouldn’t.”
“I don’t even remember walking toward Principal Scott, taking the bullhorn.”
“But you did it anyway,” Junie says. “Doing something when you’re scared is braver than doing something when you’re not.”
“Which means you were brave to come here today too.” I reach across the car and take her hand. “There are lots of different ways to be brave. And if your dad can’t understand that, then he doesn’t understand you.”
Junie’s eyes are very bright. “Can I ask you something?” she says finally.
“Anything.” I’m done keeping secrets.
“What made you decide that you wanted Mike expelled? On Friday, you said you weren’t sure.”
There are the obvious reasons: That it’s simply fair for Mike to suffer the consequences of his actions, that the school rules should protect girls (and guys) like me. Or because I don’t want to have to see him every day going from one class to the next.
And all of those are good reasons, but there’s something more too. “I think it’s because I finally understood that this really happened, that Mike really hurt me, that it was really wrong. I think—I don’t know—I think for months, I was living in a kind of gray area, where I believed he could hit me and it was okay because he loved me so much.”
“What do you think now?”
Before, I thought the only thing about our relationship that wasn’t okay was when he hurt me.
Now, I know I was wrong.
With Mike, I was quieter, smaller. I literally tried to take up less space.
With Mike, being loved meant being hurt. Not just physically.
“I think it was bad love,” I answer finally, remembering what Hiram said on Monday. “And bad love is no better than not being loved at all. In fact, I think it might be worse.”
Maybe I did love him back. But maybe that was bad love too. I don’t mean that loving him back was something I did wrong, something I should’ve been too smart to feel—but it was loving someone who hurt me. It was a love that made me confuse fear with excitement, control with devotion.
And that’s not good love either.
Junie nods and squeezes my hand back. “Just so you know, I love you. I love you for standing up there today, but I would love you just as much even if you hadn’t.”
I smile. “I love you for coming here today even though you were scared. And I’d love you even if you’d had to stay home.”
“You would?” Junie asks.
I nod. “Absolutely.”
I know, without turning to look, that Hiram is still standing beside his car in the back of the parking lot. I know that he’ll be my friend even if I never want to kiss him again, just like he was all those days when I showed up at his car during lunch and we sat side by side in silence, not touching.
Maybe he suspected what was going on with Mike and me back then, but he understood I wasn’t ready to admit it. Maybe he thought the best way to support me was to sit beside me and wait, showing me he’d be there whenever I was ready.
I look at my best friend and say, “That’s good love. The kind of love that’s there even when you’re a mess, even when you’re so disappointed in yourself that you can’t imagine you’re worth loving.”
Eighteen
Junie
“Juniper Serra Mesa-Stern!”
Uh-oh. Mom using my full name is never a good sign.
No matter what Maya says about good love, I still believe it’s harder to love someone you’re disappointed in, or at least you can’t love someone you’re disappointed in as much as you can love someone who never lets you down. And however disappointed Mom and Dad are now (for whatever it is that made Mom use my full name the instant I walked in the door), they’re not half as disappointed as they would be if they knew what happened at the track today. Not that I would ever tell them.
“Now, Fee, let’s give her a chance to explain—” Dad begins, but Mom cuts him off.
“To explain?” Mom echoes incredulously. “There’s no acceptable explanation for this.” She slams a Ziploc bag onto the kitchen table. It takes me a second to see what’s inside.
Hiram’s pills. The red diet pills with the bonus side effect. The blue pills to put you to sleep.
My pills.
Why did I throw them in the trash? How stupid could I be? I mean, everyone knows you’re supposed to flush drugs down the toilet if you don’t want to get caught. But I read an article that said flushing pills was really bad for the environment, and I thought it would have been hypocritical of me to flush them for my own protection if it meant endangering the planet.
<
br /> “What do you have to say for yourself?” Mom asks. I know I don’t need to answer. She’s going to keep talking.
It was like this at the hospital on Valentine’s Day. Mom spoke, Dad defended, and I was mostly silent. Now, I sink into my chair at the kitchen table, the same chair where I eat dinner most nights, breakfast most mornings, right across from Mom. Though Mom never really sits, she usually sort of perches, because she’s always bouncing up to get more food from the stove, to bring a dirty dish or glass or knife to the sink.
“I’ve already called Dr. Kreiter,” Mom continues. “You have an emergency appointment scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.” She doesn’t ask what the pills are or why I’m taking them. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Or maybe she’s already guessed. For a second, she turns her anger toward Dad. “I should never have let you convince me to let her go today.”
“Today was important,” Dad insists.
“More important than this?” Mom asks, waving the Ziploc like a flag so the pills slide around inside. “This time, we’re doing whatever the doctor recommends. If she says group therapy, you’re going to group therapy. If she says family sessions, we’re participating in family sessions.”
“She wanted us to do family sessions?” I interject, but Mom keeps going.
“If she says medication—proper medication, supervised by a doctor—you’re going to take it. No more deals, no more goals, no more work-arounds.”
“Fee, let’s not be unreasonable. This doctor isn’t the be all and end all—”
“She said Junie wasn’t progressing in their sessions together.”
“And I said that was ridiculous—”
“Ridiculous?” Mom echoes. My gaze shifts from one parent to the other like I’m watching a tennis match.
Mom continues, “The doctor said that in nearly every single session, Junie sits on her hands or stuffs them in her pockets to hide the way they’re shaking.”
She did?
“And she said that when she so much as broached the subject of group therapy—bringing up that she’d worked with other patients who struggled like Junie—Junie completely refused to engage.”
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