by Amy Sparling
I shake my head. “Why would I go after someone who ran away from me?”
Mindy’s jaw hardens. “Because you’re her boyfriend, you dick.”
She lets out a huff and turns to go after Maddie herself, but Maria stops her.
“I know the truth, if you want to hear it. I’m not so sure your new best friend will tell it to you.” Maria smirks. “But I will.”
“What the hell could you possibly know?” I ask, wondering if this is all some evil plot that she’s concocted in her efforts to make me want her.
Maria takes her time sitting across from us at the table. She leans forward a little, no doubt purposely pushing her boobs up and out. How she doesn’t get pulled for dress code with that much cleavage showing, I don’t know.
“I noticed this picture the other day, and I thought the same thing. I mean, she just moved here, so she wouldn’t be in the yearbook. Then, I paid a visit to her house and talked with the maid.” She pauses, probably for dramatic effect because she looks right at me, expecting me to react. I don’t.
The maid told me that Maddie and her mom lived here for months, and only just moved into Landon Howard’s house in Shady Heights a month ago during Spring Break. Maddie dyed her hair right after she moved in and decided to pretend to be someone else. Even her homeroom teacher confirms it. Mrs. Brooks said Maddie used to wear the same outfits every day and then suddenly she became this pink-haired Louis Vuitton carrying popular princess.”
“Shut your bitch mouth,” Mindy says, her fangs coming out in full force. “You’re never happy until you’re destroying everyone else.”
“Right, because I’m the one who lied to you for the last month?” she says, her thick eyeliner narrowing at Mindy.
They keep at it, bitching back and forth, but it’s all white noise to me. I remember a time not too long ago when Maddie confided in me that she’s not sure Mindy really cares about her as a friend, or if it’s all just some popular girl thing to piss off her other friends. Well, I know now that Mindy does care. She’s fighting like hell to protect Maddie’s honor since she’s not here to defend herself.
But that’s just it. She’s not here. She ran away before explaining herself. That means she has something to hide, and she’s hiding it from me.
I stare at the picture again, at the girl who is so devoid of life compared to the girl I know now as Maddie Sinclair. My fingers go tingly as panic rises up my spine. I have fallen in love with a girl I don’t even know.
What happened to her to make her this way?
And why did she lie about it?
Chapter 31
The road blurs as I drive home, my eyes filling with tears faster than I can wipe them away. A dark voice in my sub-conscious laughs at me. I knew this would happen, after all. Didn’t I? People don’t get to pretend to be someone else forever. Eventually you get caught.
Eventually you lose everything.
I slam the button on my gate opener and the metal slowly moves inward, letting me drive into this massive driveway that I don’t deserve. Landon’s car is in the garage, which is a little weird since he normally works until five every day. He probably took off early today to keep working on wedding stuff with Mom. Great. Just what I need: a whole family to see me crying my eyes out.
I park, climb out, and go straight to my room without running into anyone.
My chest is on fire with how painful this feels. I fall face first on my bed, tuck my arms under the pillow, and cry. It doesn’t help the pain, and it doesn’t make me feel better, but I keep crying anyway.
My phone never rings; the doorbell never chimes. No one comes to check on me. Not Mindy, not Colby.
Colby, the world’s best boyfriend. From the moment we met, I knew I didn’t deserve him, but I lied to myself and said I did. Now he knows the truth. His resulting silence speaks volumes. I don’t know how much time passes while I lay here crying into my pillow. The fabric is soaked, my eyes are swollen, and the ache in my chest feels like a Mac truck slammed into me.
Several hours later, I hear my sisters yelling excitedly about something downstairs. Mom’s voice follows soon after, something like “Maddie’s car is here!”
There’s a soft knock on my door and then it opens. I don’t look over; I just keep my head buried in my pillow.
“Maddie?” Mom says. “Are you okay? When did you get home?”
“I’d like to be alone, please.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I turn to see if she left and just didn’t shut the door. But she’s still there, a little line creasing down her forehead.
“Honey!” she says, rushing into my room. “You’re crying! What happened?”
I shake my head, turn around and hide in the soaking wet pillow. I wish I could tap my heels together three times and disappear. Starla says something from the hallway, and Mom asks Emma to take her down to the living room. “We’ll just be a minute,” she tells her.
Mom’s hand touches my back. “Maddie, tell me what’s wrong.”
I take in a shaking breath and then roll over to face her. Mom and I have been through so many things together. I’ve always been her rock when she needed me, and she’s always been mine. But I’ve never screwed up this badly.
She gives me this small smile, probably hoping it’ll coax me out of being silent. Her hand brushes hair from my face, and I notice the sparkle from her engagement ring. Her wedding is in a few days. I can’t unload all of this drama on her now. She doesn’t need it.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
Her eyes narrow. “I’m not an idiot, Maddie. Is it boy trouble? Did you and Colby fight?”
I look away, tears forming in my eyes again. Mom makes this comforting sound as she runs her fingers through my hair like she used to do when I was younger and had the flu.
“It’s worse than that,” I murmur, looking at my fingers. “I lied to him. I lied to everyone.”
Mom quirks an eyebrow. “How’d you do that?”
I decide to tell her everything. Maybe she’ll have something comforting to say, some way to console me after this nightmare. Or maybe she’ll be so pissed she’ll disown me. Whatever the case, I take a deep breath and tell her the biggest lie of my life.
#
Two days pass. I don’t go to school out of total mortification, even though my mother thinks I should just face the hell that I’ve brought onto myself. She wasn’t too pissed at me, but she did yell at Landon for encouraging me to go along with the lie. That part freaked me out a lot. They’re about to get married, and we’re about to get to live here happy and safe and taken care of for as long as that lasts. When she yelled at him, I feared it would all fall apart and we’d be kicked out.
Landon didn’t react like I thought he would. He apologized to her, and to me, He said he should have thought it through more before he encouraged me to do something stupid. And then Mom and Landon made up and we all had a great dinner together with Pam and my sisters. If I hadn’t already known for sure that Landon is better than any other man in Mom’s past, now I know.
I’m faking like everything is slowly getting better, but I know I’ll have to go back to school soon enough. I can’t, though. I just can’t.
Colby has ignored me for two entire days. He hasn’t sent a single text, or called, or even posted anything to social media. I’ve been too scared to talk to him, too afraid of what mean thing he might reply. I guess it’s safe to say we’re broken up now, and the very thought sends me into a darkness so painful I don’t ever want to get out of bed.
I had everything I could ever want, and I ruined it.
Colby doesn’t want me, not anymore. He wanted the girl he thought I was. By now, surely they all know I was the trailer trash loser who lived in the pedophile house. I might still live in a house in Shady Heights, but I am no longer a member of this world.
I’ll dye my hair back brown, I’ll trade in my new clothes for simple ones, and I’ll go back to school and pretend it never happened. Maybe that wa
y the M’s and the football players and Colby himself will be able to forget about me.
Maybe it’ll be easier this way.
The doorbell chimes around four o’clock on Wednesday. It’s probably a delivery of more wedding stuff. We’ve had packages arrive daily for a week now.
I’m lying in my bed, still wearing the pajamas I slept in, my hair a messy pile on top of my head. The only way I could think of to remove all traces of my old life was to do a factory reset on my phone, after deleting Instagram of course. Now, instead of Colby and me smiling at the camera as my wallpaper, I have a default image of a sunflower.
Too bad my brain still remembers the way it used to be. If only I could do a factory reset on my memories.
My door pushes open without warning, a sure sign that Emma or Starla are wandering in to play with me.
“Not now, kiddo,” I say over my shoulder as I heave a sigh.
“I’m not a kid.”
Mindy’s voice freezes me in place. “Why are you here?” I say, not looking back.
She walks around my bed, her perfume fruity and strong. She’s holding a backpack, which she heaves onto my bed and unzips, revealing a six pack of beer. She takes one, cracks the top and hands it to me.
I sit up in bed, gazing at the cold beer in my hand. I lift an eyebrow, but Mindy just stares at me for a beat.
She says, “Tell me everything.”
Chapter 32
You know that saying, it’s too good to be true? That’s exactly what dating Maddie was like. She was beautiful, smart, funny. She was also an M. A Shady Heights girl.
The simple fact that a Shady Heights girl both: A) wanted to date me, and B) didn’t expect me to spend tons of money on her, was too good to be true.
Yet I was the dumbass who went and believed it.
So I guess my broken heart is just a product of my own fault. I should have known better. True love doesn’t happen in high school.
True love doesn’t happen for me.
In the days that follow, Mindy distances herself, choosing to eat lunch alone, or with someone else. I don’t know. All I know is she isn’t currently talking to Maria, who has taken the opportunity to dive straight back into my life, flirting endlessly as if her own life depended on it.
I ignore her for two days straight, simply choosing to focus my attention on Bryce and Josh and pretend she wasn’t sitting next to me. By the third day, when she walks into the cafeteria with her Diet Coke and basket of powdered donuts that she eats for lunch, I push my backpack onto the seat next to me.
She lifts an eyebrow. “Uh, excuse you?”
“Excuse you,” I say, keeping my hand protectively on my backpack. “This seat is reserved for my girlfriend.”
Maria narrows her eyes. “It doesn’t seem like you have a girlfriend right now, plus I’ve been sitting here for two days.”
“It’s always a great day to find a new place to sit. So why don’t you try it out?” I reply with equal venom. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn’t say anything else before turning on her heel and stomping away.
“Dude,” Bryce says, shaking his head as he takes another bite of his pizza. I guess that’s all he plans on saying because all of his attention goes back to his food.
Josh’s eyes flit over to me. “You talk to her yet?”
I shake my head. Stare at my food.
“You probably should.”
I know he’s right. But I don’t say anything. I’m too hurt, pissed off, betrayed—hell, I don’t even know what I am. Just that I’m not okay. After Maria’s dramatic little exposé on my girlfriend, the whole truth of Maddie’s existence came out like a tidal wave of betrayal.
She’d been a student here for months. She lied about it all when she moved to Shady Heights.
Those are the facts.
The question I still don’t have answered though, is why?
Was this some made-for-TV movie scheme where someone bet her she couldn’t infiltrate the M’s and make a football player fall in love with her? Is she off laughing about it somewhere with her real friends? Was I the butt of some awful joke?
This thought cuts me to the core. I’d given my heart to this girl, meant every single thing I ever told her. And her contribution to our relationship? It was all a lie.
How could I have been so stupid?
After lunch, Josh finds me on my way to athletics, even though he’s almost always late to class.
“Hey man,” he says, falling into step with me.
The tone of his voice tells me there’s more he has to say, so I just look over and wait for him to say it.
“You need to talk to her,” he says, his normally happy-go-lucky expression now serious. “You can’t just give up on her. Hear her out.”
“She hasn’t called me,” I say, staring at the tiles on the floor. I’ve checked my phone more times than I care to admit.
“So call her.”
A moment of silence passes and Josh clears his throat. “Look, I’m no expert or anything, but you can’t just go on ignoring each other. I know you really liked this girl and Maria ambushed her, so it wasn’t even a fair fight. Just talk to her and see what she says. Maybe you can get closure or something.”
Coach stands in the doorway of the locker room, looking right at us, so I’m not about to say anything too revealing when a teacher is around. I look over at Josh, and I lie to him. “Yeah, maybe I’ll do that.”
Chapter 33
My reflection looks back at me. It’s clearly disappointed. It’s wondering how I can be wearing such a beautiful dress and still look like a horrible person. Maybe because this is just a normal dress, not some magical bad-decision-erasing dress from a mysterious and far away land.
Nope, I am in the real world. And I’m a terrible person.
In one hour, my mom will marry Landon and this will be the happiest day of her life. So I stare at my reflection in the tall mirror in my room and tell it to smile, stand tall, and look happy. So what if it’s all for show?
This is Mom’s night, not mine. I have the rest of my life to wallow in the self-pity of having ruined my shot at love with the greatest guy ever.
Mindy thinks I should talk to him. After a very painful talk that lasted for three hours, where I told her absolutely everything, she decided to forgive me. I told her about that day I tried applying for a job at the ice cream shop and she was there with the other M’s and didn’t even see me. I told her about how I feel when Colby enters a room, and how great it felt to have a boy care about me for the first time. After revealing every lie and every cover up—I even told her about the date with Jacoby—she’d agreed that she might have done the same thing in my positon. Then she made fun of me, saying she should have known I wasn’t raised with money by the way I acted. I think that’s what makes her like me. Underneath it all, I’m just a normal person.
The good news is that Mindy still wants to be friends. The bad news is that Colby still hasn’t called me. Mindy thinks I should just give him time. I think I should give him the entire planet while I move away to Mars and never come back again.
Pam comes in the room, my sisters holding each of her hands. They’re both dressed like tiny little flower girls, their hair all curled and styled with a tiara.
I lean forward and put my hands on my knees. “Girls! You both look so pretty!”
They grin, and Emma shows me her basket of white rose petals. “We get to throw them on the ground and we don’t even have to pick them up,” she says, grinning mischievously like the idea of leaving a mess on the floor is getting away with something truly evil.
“That’s just one of the reasons weddings are fun,” I say. “Are we ready to go downstairs?”
In the back yard, the guests mingle and drink wine. I’ve already met all of Landon’s family members over the previous days, and my Aunt is too busy chowing down on appetizers to bother trying to talk to me, which is a good thing because I’m not in the mood for small talk.
I lea
ve the girls with Pam and then head inside to find my mom in her dressing room, which is really just one of the spare guest rooms. The makeup artist and hair stylist are working hard on her, transforming her into a princess for this special night.
“Honey,” Mom says, looking at me through the mirror in front of her because she can’t turn her head while it’s being styled. “You look beautiful.”
“Not as beautiful as you,” I say, sitting on an ottoman near her feet. “Are you excited?”
Mom grins. “Very.”
When the stylists are finally done, I walk with Mom down to where the wedding guests are all waiting to see her. We stop just inside the double doors that lead to the back yard where Mom will make her entrance. Well, we both will. She’s asked me to walk her down the aisle.
My sisters ooh and ahh over Mom’s pretty dress, and Mom kisses them both on the tops of their heads.
“Thirty seconds and the flower girls will go out,” our wedding planner says. She’s a tall thin woman with her hair always pulled back in a severe bun. She winks at my mom as she walks past.
I hold out my elbow, and Mom loops her arm into mine. The doors open and my sisters step out, reveling in the attention and the beauty of the night. Our backyard has been transformed into an outdoor ballroom, the pool sparkling like a chandelier.
“I take it you didn’t invite Colby?”
Hearing his name sends a stab of pain through my heart. I shake my head.
Mom frowns. “Well, I hope you two find a way to work things out.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen,” I say, staring at the doors in front of us. In the distance, wedding music plays, and all of our family is out there waiting on Mom and Landon to tie the knot. Talking about Colby is the last thing on my mind right now.
“Honey,” Mom says as the wedding planner ushers us forward to make our debut on the makeshift wedding aisle. “I am living proof that real love will find you someday, even if you don’t think it ever will. If what you had with Colby was real, don’t fret. He’ll find his way back to you.”