“Dillan doesn’t actually know what’s going on,” I explained to Jessica, but I could tell that any hope of a rational conversation had died long before I’d even entered the room.
“Don’t try and get yourself out of this,” Jessica said, as she stood up from my bed and walked over to me. She poked her sharp, pink nail into my chest in an accusing way. “Did you really think you’d get away with cheating on me?”
“Jessica, I haven’t cheated on you,”
Her nail in my chest was starting to sting. I put my hands on her shoulders firmly and moved her back, so that she couldn’t reach me any more. “I’m not going to argue with you about this. It’s stupid. Sophie is a friend. She’s going through a hard time and I’m helping her.”
“I don’t believe you,” Jessica said to me flatly. Her hands had settled on her hips, as if she was about to draw her six-guns. Her whole body was pointing my way. She was tiny compared to Dillan and myself, but she was somehow filling the room in a way that we didn’t.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You can believe what you want. I can’t stop you from doing that, but I haven’t cheated on you and that’s the truth.”
“Then tell me why you’re helping her,” Jessica challenged me. “You keep saying she’s going through a bad time. What made her such a victim?”
“It’s not my story to tell,” I said quickly.
Jessica laughed shrilly. “See, you’re lying,” she said in a matter of fact way. “You’ve been cheating on me and you’re too much of a coward to admit it.”
“Believe what you want,” I told her, because I was done with it. I was done with the argument and I was done with the relationship. Jessica had seemed so sweet when I’d met her. She’d seemed like a girl who I could take home to meet my mom, but just like her eyes, her good qualities were only surface deep.
Her face screwed up in anger. I could see her fists balling up, as though she might pull one back and smack me with it. “You don’t even care, do you?”
“I don’t,” I said honestly, because there wasn’t any point in pretending any more. “I really don’t.”
“So...what?” she demanded. “Is that it? Are you saying that it’s over? Are you throwing us away because you couldn’t keep it in your pants?” She looked upset. Her eyes were starting to brim with tears. Her voice had gained a shaky quality. “You’re not even going to fight for us?” she asked weakly.
“There’s nothing left to fight for,” I said firmly. “You know, when we met I really thought that you were, like, this perfect girl. It’s all I saw for a while, but then it kind of slipped away. At first, I thought that it might come back, but it hasn’t. This isn’t right and it hasn’t been for a long time. I haven’t cheated on you. I wouldn’t do that, but I don’t want to be with you either. You’ve made this relationship too much work. I’m tired, Jessica.”
She opened her mouth and then she closed it again. She stepped forward and grabbed her hoody off the chair behind me. “I’ll get my stuff and go,” she said with hopeful eyes, which told me that she thought I might ask her to stay.
“That’s probably for the best.”
It took her longer than it should have done to pack up and leave. I watched the clock beside my bed. The buses into town had stopped an hour before she set off. I was sure that she was still hoping that I might change my mind, but I didn’t. I just told her about a hotel that was close to town, so that she could get a cab over.
I closed the door behind her with relief. Dillan’s betrayal was far from my mind, even though I knew that it would need addressing sooner, rather than later.
“That was brutal, man,” Dillan said, as I sat down on my bed and ran my hands through my hair and over my head. “You were cold.”
“I had to be.”
“The girl was only upset because you spent the night with Crazy Sophie,” Dillan said with his head shaking in disapproval. “I know I’m not Jessica’s biggest fan, but I don’t think she deserved that.”
“What was I supposed to do?” I asked. “Should I have continued fighting with her? Should I have given you the show that you were hoping for?” the anger in my body was starting to push against the surface.
I stood back up from my bed and walked over to him. My eyes held firmly onto him. I wanted him to know what he had done. I wanted him to know what his stunt had just cost me. “Should I have begged her to stay? Should I have promised never to see Sophie again?” I slammed my fist down onto his bedside table and his body jumped in place.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly. “I just meant there are nicer ways of breaking up with a person.”
“She made it that way,” I pulled my fist away from his bedside table and brought it back to my side rather than pushing through his face. “What was I supposed to do?”
Dillan didn’t say anything at first. He just dropped my gaze and looked down at the scratched wooden flooring that had been marked in a thousand places from the broken glass. “I guess,” he said. “I’m sorry man,” he added. “She was tripping about you being gone. She was getting all up in my face about where you were, so I told her. As soon as I mentioned Sophie’s name to her, she got ten times worse. She wanted to know everything. I didn’t tell her that I thought you were cheating, though. I didn’t say anything like that. I told her what you said. I told her that she was your friend and that you were helping her out.”
I believed him. I didn’t want to believe him. I wanted someone to blame for the still bubbling anger inside of me, but I did. He was telling the truth and I knew that. It was undeniable. It was written across his face and woven into his voice. I felt very tired.
“It’s cool,” I told him, because it had to be cool. “Don’t worry about it. Jessica and I should have probably broken up with her a while ago. I think it was just easier to stay with her, you know?”
CHAPTER 6
Jessica was gone. I spent the night relishing in relief from knowing that I wouldn’t have to deal with her bullshit any more.
I slept easily that night. My dreams were soft glowing balls of hope about what the future had in store for me. I woke up the next morning feeling fresh. I rolled out of bed and found a spring in my step. I felt good. I felt like I’d finally gotten around to doing that chore that I’d been putting off for months. I didn’t have a trouble in the world.
I got dressed and left my dorm before Dillan had even woken up. The sun was glistening against the early morning dew on the grass, which covered the quad. The trees were lazily waving at the sky above them. It was a good day. I was heading to the dining hall. My stomach was growling because I hadn’t bothered to eat anything after Jessica had gone.
I stopped outside Sophie’s dorm, though. A group of people were all standing outside the door in a small semicircle, as if something important was about to happen. None of them were talking. I could hear the silence of the crowd, as I walked over to see what it was that had drawn them there.
I reached the group with a cold feeling in my stomach. I don’t know why the cold feeling was there. I just know that it dripped down like tiny droplets of frozen water, until I was shivering from the inside out. I guess, though, it was intuition. I guess it was because the day had seemed too perfect and something had to break that pattern.
A stretcher was being brought out. There was a body underneath a pea-green blanket. I leaned forward, so that I could see over the heads of those in front of me.
The blanket had been pulled all the way up. Whoever it was underneath wasn’t being taken away because they were poorly.
I searched the scene in front of me with my eyes, as I tried to figure out who it might be. The panic was already setting in. The cruel whispering voice in the back of my head was telling me that it could be Sophie underneath the blanket.
“We all thought she was crazy,” I heard a blond haired girl in front of me saying to the guy next to her.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I spat at her angril
y and she turned to me with surprise.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, as I registered her face too. It was the blonde haired girl who’d refused to help me, when I’d been looking for Sophie only two days before. “I guess you didn’t manage to help your friend, then,” she smirked.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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ISBN: 9781683681120
Something Wicked Page 3