The Damned

by Jennifer Snyder

  “Are you planning on leaving your blinds open for me again tonight?” I asked to lighten the mood, not deepen the color on her cheeks, but in saying so, I’d managed to simultaneously do both.

  She laughed as her cheeks turned to a beautiful shade of deep pink, one that was nearly red. “I don’t know about that.” She flipped on her blinker and waited to turn into the school parking lot. “But maybe.”

  Maybe, that was a good enough answer for me. It was better than the flat-out no I had been expecting. Maybes I could handle when it came to Emory Montgomery.

  I leaned back in my seat, thinking about how much I would enjoy her taking advantage of our window placement with another little striptease action.

  Damn, this girl was something else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  EMORY

  Without thinking of the ramifications that would surely come from offering Cole a ride to school, I picked him up. The second I pulled into a parking spot and we stepped out, I noticed the odd glances and weird stares we were receiving from the majority of the senior class.

  A twisted sense of pleasure slipped through me.

  Whispers floated to my ears even without me trying to hear what everyone was saying. What’s Emory Montgomery doing with that loser? Clutching my books tighter to my chest, I continued walking beside Cole up the ramp that led from the parking lot straight into the center of the campus. A guy I had English Honors with gave me a strange smile and nodded his head, before shifting his attention back to his friend. Their conversation floated to my ears: I heard he killed his mom or something and had to either move here or go to prison. The town he was from didn’t want him.

  My shoulders tensed. While I didn’t know much more about Cole than the majority of these people, I still couldn’t believe the crap they were spewing. It was comical, in a sense.

  Emory Montgomery is slummin’ it now, looks like. Their murmurs and harsh lies about the two of us both stung and brought me pleasure at the same time. I glanced at Cole. His head was held high as though the things people were saying about us bounced off him, leaving nothing in their wake, as though what people said didn’t matter in the slightest. We passed a group of girls who hung around Mallory, and I noticed they did a double take. I heard them mention something about how they couldn’t believe I would be with someone who was so beneath me, how I obviously had no standards since Sam had cast me aside. Their tone alone was enough to make me pause in my steps. While I enjoyed the shock factor showing up with Cole seemed to have, I wasn’t entirely heartless and cruel. The things being said about us were flat-out mean. I chewed the inside of my cheek, wondering if Cole would be upset by their reaction. I didn’t want him to be upset with me, and I didn’t want to make his transition here any harder than it probably already was.

  From the corner of my eye, I glanced at him, trying to judge his reaction to the situation. He still didn’t appear to have heard anything, but he did notice me staring at him though. Tipping his head to the side, he flashed me a small smile that led me to believe he had heard everyone, he just didn’t care.

  In that moment, I envied Cole Porter. I wanted to be as passive as he was when it came to what people thought about me. I didn’t want to crave their attention anymore, whether it was negative or positive. I just wanted to be. Exactly like Cole was. He existed, and for him, that seemed to be enough.

  He leaned toward me until his lips nearly brushed the edge of my ear. “Screw ‘em, Emory. Don’t care what they think,” he whispered.

  Chill bumps spread across my skin as the heat of his breath lingered against my ear for a heartbeat more. My teeth sank into my bottom lip as he pulled away and created the same amount of space between us as before.

  While I had always been a firm believer that people came into our lives right when we need them most, Cole made that theory a little more concrete as we stood there. He was different from any guy I had ever hung around. Something about him seemed to blur the edges of my stable, reliable, people-pleasing tendencies into something more manageable, something less suffocating. He put me at ease in a way I couldn’t explain. I’d felt it the day I brought him the bottle of water, but didn’t know entirely what the sensation was until now.

  “Emory, hey!” I heard Tara shout. “Earth to Emory.”

  Blinking, I looked away from Cole and found her among the sea of our peers. She was standing with Gary near the entrance to the main building. Intertwining my fingers with Cole’s, I pulled him in the direction of Tara and the others. He didn’t pull away, and when I brought my gaze back to him, his blue eyes seemed to have brightened a little.

  For a split second, I wondered if this was the start of an awesome friendship or the beginning of something more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  COLE

  Emory slipped into my arms. The scent of her shampoo tickled my nose and calmed me at the same time. She leaned her head against my chest and tilted her face toward the sun. My eyes skimmed over her as I wondered for the millionth time how this beautiful girl could want to spend all of her free time with me.

  It had been nearly a month since the night I’d watched her undress through my bedroom window. One month since she’d offered to pick me up and drive me to school. We had drifted toward each other as if pulled by an invisible magnetic strength I couldn’t figure out, but I was utterly thankful for it because she was the only positive constant in my life.

  Julie had taken on the role of a mother figure after learning about my scars and hazardous ways of dealing with my emotions. She was constantly asking where I was going, and had attempted to impose loads of insane house rules on me, which was something new for me. I knew it was from all the online research she read involving teens who used self-inflicted acts of violence to cope with day-to-day issues influencing her recent actions.

  While I understood her desire to see me be okay, the things she did in an effort to make that happen were annoying as fuck and made me cut myself even more at times. It was all too much and too fast.

  Nick on the other hand didn’t do anything besides watch me and Julie go about everything with a permanent scowl on his face. I was sure to him we both seemed unhealthy. A little under nine months, and then I wouldn’t be their problem anymore. Julie wouldn’t be able to watch me as closely, and my issue would become an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing for her. Once I was gone, Nick would have his worry-free wife back. I was sure he was counting down the days until that time, same as I was.

  Emory shifted around in my grasp, the protruding bones of her hips jabbed into my side, and the ill mood I was attempting to lift while burying myself in her presence clouded once more.

  “Oh, so did I tell you what Tara had the nerve to say to me today?” She twisted a little more to face me. The anger present in her eyes and the sharp tone to her voice took me by surprise.

  “No.”

  “We were standing in line together, waiting to pay for our lunches, and she turns to me and says something along the lines of how she wished I would eat something more than an apple for lunch just this once.” Emory paused, giving me the impression that I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t know what, so I kept quiet. “I don’t even remember everything that I said to her, but I know it was something about how I was sorry if I didn’t want to eat calorie-rich school spaghetti, that I was trying to eat healthier.”

  My throat went dry. The desire to say something to her swelled in my chest, same as it did every time I noticed how she’d lost weight since I first met her. Tara wasn’t wrong in saying what she did, but how could I say that to Emory without her getting pissed?

  “We started arguing right there in line. After she said something about how I’m not fat, that she has a little cellulite and love handles, that every real woman does, I set my apple and water down on her tray and walked out of the cafeteria.” She picked at her already chipped fingernail polish and leaned back against me. “I mean, what is she trying to say, that because I’m not fat, I
can’t be a real woman, that I’m fake?”

  How was I supposed to answer that?

  “Nah, I don’t think that’s what she meant.”

  Emory shifted to glare at me. “Then what do you think she meant?” Her eyes narrowed into one of pure skepticism. “Do you think I need to gain some weight too?”

  Maybe I should mention how I had noticed the pounds she’d lost recently. While thick girls weren’t my style, I didn’t like skin and bones either, and that was exactly where Emory was headed if she didn’t stop whatever the hell it was she was doing.

  Inhaling sharply, I thought of the best way to word what needed to be said. My thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of her cell phone. She sat up and reached for it.

  “It’s my mom.” A gentle breeze blew, sending strands of her dark hair into her eyes. She reached up and slipped them back behind her ear with a sigh. “I should answer this.”

  I watched her without saying a word as she walked a few feet away, until she had a false sense of privacy spaced between us. I could hear every word she was saying to her mother, but I didn’t focus on them. Instead, I chose to focus on the thin form of the girl I had met a month and a half ago standing in front of me.

  While Emory wasn’t disastrously thin, she had noticeably lost weight from the time I first met her. Why this was hitting me so hard all of a sudden, I couldn’t be sure, but it was all I could focus on. I heard the recent rumors floating around school about how she was practically starving herself and had chosen to ignore them. What I should have done was remember how sometimes there were slivers of truth embedded within rumors. There had been when it came to my mom and home life in Harper. Why should I have assumed this situation was any different?

  My eyes grazed over her. She had been a thin girl to begin with, or so I’d thought, but now…now she was almost too thin. Her face was beginning to sink in on her cheeks, and her hip bones poked out prominently above the waistline of her shorts.

  When I focused on it like this, it became scary, especially when I took into consideration that her best friend was starting to worry about her enough to mention something to her too.

  “I have to head home in a bit.” She’d hung up with her mom and was sitting back down beside me. “I guess my dad will be home within the hour, and she wants me there.”

  “Okay.” I wrapped my arm around her the way I knew she was expecting.

  The distinct sound of her stomach rumbling met my ears as she leaned into me a little further. I reached for my book bag and fished out a small bag of Doritos.

  “Want some? You sound starved.” I held the bag out to her, praying she would take it from my fingers and eat the entire thing in front of me right here and now. At least then I would know I had been wrong about her, for thinking she suffered from an eating disorder.

  Hell, for all I knew, she could have been some morbidly obese chick last summer and this whole skinny thing had been a work in progress for that long.

  “Nah, I’m sure Mom’s cooking up some massive welcome home dinner for Dad just like always.” She rolled her eyes and I wanted to die.

  Had I missed all the signs? Were there signs to miss? I thought back to each time we hung out prior to this moment. Had she ever eaten anything while in my presence besides a stick of gum? Had I seen her munching on anything at school? While sitting on the roof of her garage?

  The answer was a loud as fuck no inside my head.

  Staring at her, a tiny piece of me broke. I had known upon first seeing her there was something about her, something in me that I could see reflected inside of her, a certain brokenness we both seemed to share. Emory was one of the damned, just like me. I’d known it all along, but never in a million years would I have thought that this—her possibly suffering from an eating disorder—would have been the piece of the puzzle I’d been missing.

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” She twisted her hair into a lose knot at the base of her neck. The motion made her collarbones protrude, and I knew right then what Tara was worried about, what I’d been thinking, had to be the truth.

  How the hell had I missed this?

  I licked my bottom lip, wondering how to tell her, how to ask. “Like what?”

  If she was anything like me, and if this situation was anything like my cutting, there was no right way to bring it up. Regardless of the words chosen to ask the question, it would only harbor one response from her—anger.

  Anger was how we as humans chose to react when it came to things we didn’t want to face, things we didn’t want to talk about or acknowledge.

  Emory shrugged. “I don’t know, like you have something you want to say, but don’t know how.”

  This was the moment. It was the perfect moment to ask. I’d already missed the last one and I couldn’t miss this one too, but the second the words formed on my tongue her damn cell phone went off again.

  “Crap, that’s my mom again. I guess I’d better go.” She flashed me a smile. “Want a ride home, or are you just gonna hang out here?”

  I swallowed the words I’d been about to say and forced my face into a neutral expression. “Nah, I think I’ll stay for a bit longer.”

  “Okay.” She leaned forward and pressed her lips against mine.

  I cupped the back of her head and pulled her into me deeper, attempting to fill the void I could feel growing within me with each passing second at the thought of her being that broken inside. While she had seen my scars a time or two, and never bothered to ask how or why they were there, this was different somehow. In some weird way, what I thought she might be doing to herself seemed worse, more serious. It made anxiety prickle through me and numbed my thoughts. It was twisted, but it made the desire to harm myself come front and center in my mind because I didn’t know how to deal with what I was feeling in any other way.

  Brushing my lips against hers in the softest way possible, I tangled my fingers through her soft locks of hair. Slipping my tongue against her lips in an effort to part them, I deepened the kiss she had intended to last for only a second. It felt important to let her know how much I cared about her through a simple kiss, because the next time I saw her, I would have to ask. I would have to force myself to say something because remaining silent would kill me.

  If she really was starving herself, then I needed to know why. I needed to know how to fix her. She was too beautiful to be that broken. Not only that, but she was too brave. She was braver than she knew.

  In all the time I’d spent with her these last few weeks, I’d gotten to know the real Emory Montgomery. I realized that she saw herself as someone who was weak-minded, because she was constantly conforming to who others expected her to be. I didn’t see her that way though. I saw someone who was strong enough to bend, because she wanted to make others happy and would do anything within her power to make that happen.

  Emory could ask me a million questions about my scars, about me, about why I harmed myself and how I felt afterward. All she had to do was answer truthfully when I asked the same. I would explain everything about me if she thought it would make it a fair trade—her secrets for mine.

  I’d heard somewhere once that silence is the most powerful cry. I couldn’t be silent about this; I couldn’t forget. I had to say something; I just didn’t know when or what.

  “Wow,” she breathed as she pulled away. “Where did that come from?”

  I released the grip I had on her hair. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I liked it.” She grinned. “But, I’m out of here. Be careful on your board.” She started walking backward away from me.

  “I will, always am.”

  “See you tonight.” She flashed me a devilish grin.

  “Oh, I’m looking forward to it.” And I was. That part hadn’t been a lie. Any time I got to witness Emory in a state of undress, I was happy, but this time, I would also be scrutinizing her body with a level of concern while I debated whether I was right about her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-S
IX

  EMORY

  I scooped a small amount of everything my mother had cooked onto my plate without any intention of eating it. Normally, I would have said that I had eaten earlier, but tonight I couldn’t use that excuse. Mom had cooked all afternoon for my dad’s arrival, and she hadn’t been shy about reminding me of that fact throughout the day.

  I took a sip of my water, wondering what this feast-like meal was in celebration of. Generally, she only cooked massive meals when there was good news to be shared, or she had just finished another novel.

  It was sad how I didn’t even know which celebration the meal was for; we talked so little lately.

  “I have some great news.” Mom spooned another helping of green beans onto her plate. “I’ve just signed a two-book deal with a great publisher for a new series on teen life and how to deal as a parent.”

  I knew it. I knew there would be something like this coming. Her book themes seemed to grow with Chelsea’s and my age. It was as though we were her test subjects instead of her daughters. Who knew, maybe that was the reason she chose to have kids, so they could be her living muses. She could test theories out on one, and revise and test them again on the other.

  This thought disgusted me.

  “That’s great, honey,” Dad praised her. “What’s the topic for this one?”

  “How to help steer teens away from the wrong crowd.” She flashed me a pointed look, before shifting her eyes to Chelsea.

  Right then, I wasn’t sure if this was her way of telling me yet again she didn’t like the fact that I was hanging out with Cole so much, or if she was simply trying to get a rise out of me. Either way, I didn’t care. Nothing she said would make me stay away from him. Nothing.

  He was my only anchor in this screwed up world. The only one who could see me for who I really was. With Cole, there were no judgments, standards, or unrealistic expectations tossed my way. I was just Emory with him, and it was amazing.