He swallows. I think I’ve lost him there, finally. “Do I matter to you at all?” I can see the strain on his face as he asks, like it is the worst thing he’s ever had to say.
“I don’t want you to,” I tell him. My voice comes out soft. I don’t have much left to give. “If I let you in, you’ll see me. If you saw all the broken pieces and the unattainable dreams and the stupid things I tell myself, you’d be so humiliated for me. All the pettiness and the lies I’ve told and the people I’ve hurt. You’d hate me, Whit, and you’d be right. Once you hate me again, everything will be back to how it should be. I thought you’d see that.”
He stares like he’s not sure who I am. I could be speaking a different language. Maybe because it’s the first honest thing that’s come out of my mouth in longer than I can remember.
Finally, he says, “I lied.”
What? I tense up.
“I’ve been obsessing about you kissing Ethan ever since you told me about it. You are this completely perfect catastrophe I can’t pull myself out of, and I don’t want to anymore. Okay? I don’t want to.”
I bury my face in my hands. This is what I want, and I can’t have it. I should’ve told him I kissed Ethan and then run in the opposite direction. Why did I wait so long? “Then you’re an idiot,” I mutter.
“Don’t fucking deflect all over me, Olivia. Tell me what you want. For once, tell me what you want.”
I turn to face him again, my cheek resting against the hard wood of the cabinet. A breath separates us, our mouths so close we could kiss. When he looks at me that steady, I can’t do it. I can’t face him. I can’t tell him what I’ve done and lose him like this. Not if it’s not on my own terms. So I look away.
God, it hurts. But what happens then? I tell him I am desperately, outrageously happy with him and we pretend none of this ever happened? Adrienne leaves him alone and he never realizes what I did?
I can’t trust myself to do the right thing. And I can’t trust myself with him. He could never care about the other side of me anyway. I can’t ask him to love a part of me even I hate.
His voice cuts back across me. “If after everything, you can’t even look me in the eye and tell me I matter, then this is as pointless as I always thought.” He stands up, walks to the bathroom door, and stops. “You win. We’re supposed to break up tomorrow anyway. Take some Pepto and lie down or something.”
And just like that, he’s gone.
62
The first two weeks post-Whit is nothing like life pre-Whit. I keep my nose down and stay out of the mess. Show up at school and go through the motions. Turns out it’s simple, choosing to not.
Choosing to not play Adrienne’s games, not to assume Michaela is out to get me, not to kiss someone who I bribed into dating me in the parking lot, not to antagonize Mr. Doolittle. Everything is so quiet. I’m just another face in the crowd.
Mom makes me see a therapist, and he makes me talk about Ryan. Talking about Ryan makes me sad, and when Mom asks me how it makes me feel, I get mad. At the end of my second session, I tell the therapist I think Ryan died because I was mean, and he just about scribbles himself out of his chair.
It’s good progress, he says.
It’s a Monday morning, and I’m standing in the hall talking to Claire. Coxie comes up to her and takes her hand, and I wish she wouldn’t do that to herself—but she’s told me he’s the best protection she has and all I’m allowed to say is okay.
“Ethan’s looking for you,” Coxie tells me. He nods to the other side of the hallway, where Ethan is literally looking at me. I wave good-bye to Claire and Coxie and go to Ethan. He falls in line with me as I walk.
“Are you going to tell me what happened with you and DuRant?” Ethan asks me.
I want to ignore him, but he’ll just dog me down the hall. “No.” I swing my hair over my shoulder in an attempt to push him off.
“Listen, O—”
I stop in the middle of the hallway. “Stop calling me that.”
He shakes his head, and I stare over his shoulder. I wish I hadn’t done any of this; I wish he wasn’t here.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “Why are you treating me like this when I’m trying to talk to you?”
There are a million reasons. Because he cheated on me. Because he watched me go down a black hole and didn’t stop it. Because he let all of this happen, because everything changed after he stopped caring and now my life is this washed-out, colorless place. Except most of that isn’t really his fault. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t treat you like that.” Something I should’ve told him a long time ago.
“It’s okay.” And then he stops meeting my eyes, and I know something bad is coming. “Whit is hanging out with Anna Talbert. And I mean, I figure it’s Adrienne’s doing, but he’s talking to her, too, you know?”
“What?” I ask. The cogs in my head are spinning, like I have to translate what he’s saying into something that makes sense.
He puts his head down and rubs the back of his neck, looking awkward. “Anna.” He glances down at me. “And Whit.”
I take two seconds to decide this isn’t some drunken Mad Lib, turn on my heel, and take off down the hall.
“Olivia!” I hear him yell behind me.
I should’ve known. I should’ve known she wouldn’t let me go quietly into the night.
My feet carry me down the math hallway to where Adrienne’s holding court at her locker. She’s staring at her reflection in the mirror. Pretending to, at least. Really, she just uses it to watch the masses behind her—to see if they’re watching her.
I slam the locker in her face. “Stay away from him.” I speak so softly that for a second I’m not even sure she heard me. But the way she grins at her puke-green locker door like it just did something particularly nice for her changes my mind.
“Make me,” she tells the locker.
I get as close to her as I can without actually kissing her. We’ll definitely be drawing attention to ourselves, but I don’t care. I tell her, “If you don’t think he can see right through you and your games, you’re seriously underestimating him.”
Adrienne’s hair smacks me in the face as she turns to me. “Am I?” She smiles. “Actually, maybe he can see right through me and Anna. But what’s worse? Thinking he’s an idiot or thinking he genuinely wants to fuck with your head using the people you hate most in the world?”
Both. “At least you know I hate you,” I say instead of saying any of the rest.
Adrienne’s eyes go cold. “Don’t say that.”
“And you know the best part?” I continue. “I don’t have to pretend anymore because Claire knows what I did, okay? She’s forgiven me. She knows it was an accident. She can’t live with the constant backstabbing, and I can’t anymore, either.”
Adrienne rolls her eyes. “You still think it was a fucking accident?”
“We shouldn’t have said that shit behind her back, so no, it was wrong. But I didn’t want her to see it. I didn’t want anyone to see it.”
“I did,” Adrienne says.
“What?”
“You try to expose me, teach me a lesson? Two can play that game. You had to see what a hypocrite you were. I wanted to make sure.”
I step back from her. “You … sent out those texts from me? I didn’t do it?”
She shakes her head. “O, how dumb can you be? It was for your own good so you would stop acting like such a damn wounded animal. When I realized what you did, I had to push it along. I was trying to help.”
“I’m done with you,” I say. “I don’t need your help. Once and for all, I am going to be better. I won’t sink to your level anymore.”
She laughs, but there’s no fire behind her eyes. She’s all gone, the good part of the girl I used to love. There’s nothing left.
“Why did we do this, Ade?” I ask her, my voice raw.
She looks sad, just for a moment. Lost. Then she kills that part of herself. “You don’
t get to quit,” she says, the smirk back in her voice. “You started this. And wait until you see what I’m going to do. You thought seeing me with Ethan hurt? Just wait. You can’t give up, O. You’ll miss the grand finale.”
She turns around like she’s going to walk off, and I yell behind her, “It wasn’t even real!”
She swings around. My picture will be next to desperation in the dictionary; kids will remember the word etched in every line of my face. “I asked Whit to pretend. None of it was real.”
Everyone is listening to me.
Everyone including Whit.
“I told him. I told him I’d sleep with him if he’d pretend to date me because I knew how much you’d hate it. That was the deal. I don’t give a shit about him,” I finish. It was overkill in the end, but they’ll buy it.
She has to buy it.
Whit stares at me, like he couldn’t give a fuck if you asked him to, shrugs, and walks away.
I hope everyone tells everyone.
63
“That’s not what Whit always said,” I argue with Vera three days later. “He said to read the questions first, which would help me get the gist of what I needed to take from the story. He said sometimes they won’t make sense.”
Vera Drake is my official new SAT tutor. I cornered her in the hallway the day after Whit and I “broke up” and begged her to set me on the path to SAT success. She reluctantly agreed, so now I am with her at the country club on her break, going over verbal reasoning, and she is looking at me as though she hopes I turn into a cloud and float away from her.
“So do that,” she says in that tiny voice of hers, and I swear she’s almost sassing me.
“But that’s not what you think?” I ask, because I still want to do it right.
She shrugs.
“What would you do?” If I have to choke an answer out of her, I think I might.
She pushes her hair back, her wide eyes on the paper. “Take notes. Go over everything. It’ll help with your understanding.”
My eyes narrow. “So why didn’t you say anything?”
She still doesn’t say anything. “What’s wrong with you?” I finally ask.
“Do you think I want to be here?” It’s barely more than a whisper. Here we go again.
“Excuse me?”
“I have to do this. I have to say yes. You don’t want to hear anything I say.” Her eyes are defiant, full of nerves. She’s right. I did ask Vera because I knew she wouldn’t say no. Some people just can’t. I’m usually pretty good at spotting them.
I sit back, sighing. “I need help, Vera. So if you could give me that, it’d be great. I really don’t have time to argue anymore and since I don’t have Whit—”
“What happened anyway?”
“What?” I ask, distracted.
“With Whit,” she replies like it’s obvious. “He, like, pretty much pretends he doesn’t hear your name when people say it. Like you don’t exist.”
“Yep.” I flip a page. “I pretty much don’t.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you care?” she says, all casual. “It seemed like—I don’t know—you should do something, you know? Say something.”
I look up at her, study the lines of her face. “You don’t get it.”
She scribbles on the paper.
“It wasn’t real,” I say. “Everyone’s heard about it. Everyone’s heard what I said.”
She’s doodling on the margin of her paper. “It seems like it was pretty real to you.” She doesn’t even look at me, says it like it’s a fact. Like she knows things about me. Like maybe I should write a terrible poem about it.
I shrug. She doesn’t see it. Casually, I draw my pencil across the page. “What do you think he thinks? About me?” I glance up.
She meets my eyes. “When he finds out what you did—the Mrs. Baker stuff—he’ll never speak to you again.” I don’t have any idea how she knows that. I feel like I should be really concerned that she just said the words Mrs. Baker out loud. I should be threatened. Someone like Vera, she picks things up. She blends into the walls and no one ever notices her, no one worries about gossiping in front of her in the bathroom.
Did I do that? Am I that oblivious?
I point at something on the page. “That word. Vicarious. I’ve heard that before. What does that mean?”
“It’s like secondhand. Living vicariously through someone?”
“Oh.” I nod.
“I mean, I don’t know,” she finally says. “I don’t really know anything about it. Whit always looked—” She pauses, contemplating, her eyes on the sky. “More complete when you were with him. Like someone finally got him.”
“Don’t you think I’m just some ‘hot unhinged cheerleader’ he can tell his friends he dated once? Only good for a month and a story?”
She’s still staring off into space. “How would I know?”
“I guess you wouldn’t,” I reply. “Why do you like Ethan so much?”
She finally makes eye contact, surprised. After a moment, her face clears and she thinks. “He always says hello to me.”
“Excuse me?”
“So many people at Buckley would walk over my dead body to get to gym class on time. Ethan isn’t like that. One time, I was crying in the hall and no one noticed, or cared, except Ethan. He asked me why. And when I told him, he kept talking to me. He wasn’t asking to ask. He was asking to help. He’s a good person.”
“Even after everything he did to me?” I ask her pointedly. “You think you know him?”
She shrugs. “No. Did you know Whit? Sometimes love finds us by accident, and I think … well, I think Ethan’s soul calls to mine,” she explains, and I gag a little in the back of my throat.
But there’s such sincerity, such belief and innocence on her face, it almost stuns me.
“You think Whit and I were like that? Even though he’s talking to Anna Talbert now?”
Vera shrugs again.
I go back to my work, defeated.
I guess I need to ask him myself.
64
I drove over right after I finished with Vera. I’m sure Whit heard my car pull up, but he didn’t acknowledge me. The trees are dancing around his secret cove as he pounds out golf balls into the distance. I sit down in the grass and silently watch him work for a few minutes. Now he captures a ball with the head of his club, pulls it toward him, and knocks it out and away. He is kind of remarkable at it.
“I don’t understand why you’re mad at me,” I say after a while.
He sighs, without pausing. “Not mad,” he mutters.
I almost believe him. Which makes me want to provoke him. Which makes me irrational. “It’s better if everyone knows it wasn’t real. That way, they’ll leave you alone.”
“Who?” he asks, hooking a ball badly.
“Everyone.” I toe the grass. “You don’t want them bothering you about us.”
He loads up another ball. He’s wearing that look—the serious one. “I don’t care.”
It eats away at me a bit. “At least you’re interesting now.”
He drives the ball straight into the ground. “I don’t want to be interesting.”
That I believe.
I sit up straighter. “Then what are you doing?”
He stops and drops his club right in front of him like it’s useless. “What do you think I’m doing?”
Blink. Breathe. With his eyes on me, I’m hyperaware of everything: my breath, my skin, every small movement he makes. Taking off his hat and running his hand through his hair. Flexing his hand with his class ring on it. He’s twenty feet away. Fifteen. Ten. Five. One. Inches.
I stand up.
His shoulders slump. He’s smaller when I’m looking him in the eye. “What am I doing?” he asks, genuinely confused.
“Anna Talbert.”
He scoffs. “I am not doing Anna Talbert.”
“I didn’t mean doing,”
I say, though I’m sure she’d like to. “I meant talking to.”
“Since when do you regulate who I talk to? Especially now.”
“Look, I don’t know what she’s up to, but I know it’s something, and I know Adrienne is involved. Don’t you see it? She’s talking to you, probably telling you this huge sob story about what a dick her dad is and how desperate she is for attention. What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”
“I don’t know, Liv, but you seem to have a pretty good idea of it.”
“What next? I open up my phone one day and Adrienne Maynard’s sent a text of you hooking up with Anna? Can’t you see you’re part of their game?”
He glances up. “She was talking to me about Mrs. Baker, okay? Their families are close, and she was telling me how she was doing. So yes, I’ve been talking to Anna, trying to figure out how to make all that whole situation go away as soon as possible. Is that okay with you?”
I feel horrible, I do. But I can’t shut my mouth. “It’s an excuse. You’ll do whatever they talk you into.” The words sit between us, simmering, and I want to swallow my tongue.
“Because that’s all I am. Some fucking idiot to manipulate for whatever you need today.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I amend quickly.
“Yes, you did. You may not have meant to say it, but you meant every word of it. No one is a person to you.” A beat. Then, “She told me you almost killed her.”
I run my fingers through my hair, near tears. “God, Whit, I was such a bad person, you know that. I felt so much guilt over what happened to Anna, but it’s not an excuse, okay? I know that. I think about everything I’ve done wrong that’s led me up to this point.” I blink a tear out of my eye. “I think about it all the time and wonder why I can’t stop. But I always felt so much closer to being who I want to be when…” He waits for me to say it; I can practically see it in his expression. But I don’t. I wipe the tear out from under my eye.
He almost looks disappointed for a moment. But then he goes to turn around, stopping in this space between going and gone, and says, “I thought—you sent out those texts that day and I wanted to know, okay? You were just this popular girl with no aspirations except to be popular and laugh at everyone else, and I wanted to know why you hated yourself so much. Why you needed so badly to tell me what you’d done. That was why I let it happen. You were pretty and wrong and…” He stops, lost. I try to latch back on to the words, afraid of where I’ll be when he stops talking to me.
How to Break a Boy Page 25