Happier Without You

by Nicole Thorn

  “Being?”

  She glared at a couple walking up the stairs. “I must guard my bed from those who would wish to get yuckies all over it. If you wouldn’t mind putting a bunch of broken glass in it, and then taking it out before you went home, that would be real wizard of you.”

  I laughed. “Not a problem.”

  I followed her, Poe at my side as we made our way through the increasingly irritating crowd. They had only gotten louder since we got here, and I had little hope that it would get better before we left again.

  We arrived in Cathy’s massive room, and she stopped in the middle of the space, telling me I could borrow the glass from her window. “If anyone jumps out,” she said. “They’ll have it coming.”

  I agreed, and took a glance at the glass in front of me. I called on it, and it wiggled free of the wood that held it up. In the air, I shattered it, and Cathy flinched at the sound. No one was in danger, and I had complete control of the shards. I dropped them on the bed, and made it utterly sex proof. Unless they were into the weird stuff.

  “Sweet,” Cathy said. “I like me a good trick.”

  “It certainly was fun to watch.” Poe smirked at me.

  Cathy turned to him, her expression thoughtful. “Hey, didn’t I see a bunch of freshman trying to bribe you last week? They wanted six packs.”

  I chuckled. “What? Why would they do that?”

  “Muscle worker,” Poe explained. “And I told them no on the cheating. They offered me money, and I only take candy as payment. Wasn’t worth the thirty seconds of effort.”

  I wasn’t in as light a mood as Poe seemed to be, because every time someone smiled, I couldn’t make myself. I wanted to try, but Peter’s face kept popping up in my head. It wasn’t the version of him downstairs, dancing with someone else that I saw. They were those memories of a couple months ago, and before that. When we had been okay, and together, and I felt like my life had a direction to go in. I had a plan, and I was fine with it. I had put all the pieces together, and felt satisfied with how my life would turn out. Everything had been set in stone. Or so I’d thought.

  “I think we oughta head out,” Cathy said, eyeing me. “It looks like you’re either going to cry, or kill someone.”

  “Both,” I suggested.

  I watched her walk over to her closet, and dig something out of it. A few moments later, she turned back to me, a dog in one hand, and a baseball bat in the other.

  “All right,” she said. “You ready for some fun?”

  Chapter Six: It Didn’t Help

  Maybe it should have made me nervous to see the utter glee in Cathy’s eyes when she had that baseball bat in her hands, but it only made me grin back in return. She handed it to me, and then brought me into her garage.

  “Um,” Poe started, now holding Cujo. “Can I ask why you have like twenty cardboard boxes out here?”

  We stood in the middle of a very large, but normal looking garage. It didn’t have a car in it, but they clearly used it for storage. Against the wall, someone had left quite a few empty boxes. I gripped the bat tighter in my hand.

  “My parents ordered some new goodies,” Cathy explained, petting the dog in Poe’s hands. “They have to wait until the trash guy can come around and take them. They’d probably appreciate the boxes getting crushed a bit. Have at it,” she told me.

  I stared at the pile, still feeling heat and misery crawling all through my body. Peter’s face stayed burned into my brain, mocking me completely. The walk out here had been spent explaining to Cathy, just why I needed this. Well, I’d tried. The thing about losing someone was, no matter how hard you tried, the words to explain, did not exist. I couldn’t perfectly articulate the hurting, or the feeling of betrayal. Never in all my days, would I have been able to tell someone exactly what it felt like, or why it hurt like this. Those words couldn’t come to me, and trying would have been a waste of time.

  I held the bat up, hearing those three words echoing in my head over and over again. In the background, pictures played, ones I didn’t want to see. The times he’d said he loved me more than anything else, that he looked forward to the rest of our lives together. The times he was afraid, and he took my hand, because I had been the only thing that silenced the world. What did all of that mean if he could be happier without me?

  The bat cut through the first box like it wasn’t even there, bending and smashing into the box under it. I kept going, lifting the bat up again before I brought it down on the cardboard, trying as best as I could to render. The pictures popped up in rapid succession, screaming at me. All these things that meant nothing now. They’d been all I’d had, and without them, what was left inside of me? I’d been so hollow for as long as I could remember, and these little moments filled me as best they could have. Peter stole them back from me. Little gifts that he had given me over the time we had together. I couldn’t even look at them anymore, I couldn’t enjoy the memories, because he’d poured poison all over them. I had to wonder if those times we were together, he’d been lying about how he felt. If he had been planning this break up for longer than he’d said. I would never know which things were real, and which were false. I existed as this thing that kept him busy between his time with Kelly. The girl he played with while Kelly got her shit together enough to try again. No matter what Peter wanted me to believe, he didn’t love me. Or at least, he didn’t love me the way I loved him.

  With each box ripping, I felt little stabs to my chest. Words came back to me, mixing with the new ones. I heard ‘I love you’, and ‘I’ve been thinking’. I heard ‘We’ll have a dog, and maybe a fish’ and ‘Everything feels different now’. Lies and truths and I would never know the difference. He’d made me feel disgusting, and worthless, and used. I couldn’t scrub it clean, and I knew it would paint me forever. He ruined me, and didn’t fucking care. I stood in here, breaking down, while he partied in the other room. I’d trusted him with all of me, and I hadn’t been worth being upset for even a couple fucking weeks.

  I screamed, and went off on the boxes, even more than I had been. The music from the party almost drowned me out, but it didn’t matter either way. I kept slamming the bat down on the boxes, my hands throbbing as my throat ached from the sound I made.

  He said he fucking wanted me forever, and he’d wanted someone else. I would never know for how long, and he’d cursed me with that. He didn’t care. Didn’t care at all. Happier without you. Because I wasn’t worth anything else. I didn’t make anyone happy. How could I, when I felt so full of nothing?

  I dropped the bat, and it clattered to the concrete floor as I broke. I doubled over, falling to pieces like I’d never been whole to start with. It hurt, crying like that, and the sobs sounded pathetic to my ears. My shaking hands braced against my knees, but I didn’t know how long I would have been able to stay standing.

  The whole world vanished when Peter ended things. As horrible and weak as it made me sound, it all fell away. My plans and my certainty and my sense of who I was as a person. I had never been worth anything at all, but at least I knew how to make him feel better. Then it turned out that I couldn’t even do that, so why was I here? What point did this life have, if all I did was disappoint people?

  Cathy dared approach me, and bent so that I could see her face. “You’re going to pass out if you don’t start breathing, honey.”

  I shook my head, but couldn’t say anything to her. The girl sighed, and sat me down on the pile of crushed boxes. She told me to put my head between my knees, and to try and breathe. I didn’t feel able, but I tried anyway.

  “You’re fine,” she told me. “What that dick did to you sucked, but you’re not dead. You’re still here, and you’re going to be fine. It doesn’t feel like it, but trust me.”

  “Why?” I gasped.

  She blinked, and then sighed again. “Because I’m Jesus back from the dead. I don’t fucking know… Because I’m telling the truth, Clover. Trust me because I’m telling you the truth.”


  I didn’t see it, and I didn’t know why she would waste her time trying to make me feel better. I sat with her, unable to catch my breath or stop crying. Maybe I would always be this fragile, able to snap at any second.

  “He’s okay,” I said through the sniffling. “He was okay immediately, and then there was me. Sitting in my room and sobbing. I don’t understand.”

  Cathy shook her head at me. “You don’t know what he’s feeling right now. He could be doing all these things because he’s upset.”

  “He’s with her…”

  “That can be a coping thing too.”

  “But he said he was happier without me.”

  “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you, or didn’t.”

  “I’ll never know.”

  The girl brushed away the hair that stuck to my face, and she looked just as lost as I did. “No, I guess you won’t. But that happens to a lot of people, and you can’t let it take you over. It’ll fuck up any chance you have to heal properly, if you let it linger like this.”

  How did I explain it to her properly? “It’s like none of it mattered. He’s back with the same girl as he was with before me, so nothing that happened with me mattered. It wasn’t enough.”

  Cathy rubbed her sweater all over my face, not caring at how I flinched. “You don’t know that. Just because that little bitch boy went running back to the easiest thing, doesn’t mean you didn’t matter. Maybe you mattered so much, that he’s scared to try something new.”

  I scoffed at her.

  “Either way, you’re traumatizing my dog, so can you pull your shit together?” She said it with a smile, and I looked up to see Cujo howling, and Poe struggling to hold her.

  He set the puppy down, and she ran over to us. She used Cathy’s lap to propel herself onto me, and settled onto my lap. She sat there, staring at my face with a cocked head.

  “Sorry, Cujo,” I said.

  She barked at me.

  Poe came over, and helped get me off of the ground. I held the dog to my chest, because she seemed intent on guarding me from the imaginary monsters. “Sorry I lost it,” I said.

  Poe frowned. “Don’t apologize. I get it.”

  I still felt embarrassed to have sobbed in front of two strangers. Cathy tried to make it better.

  “I don’t even know you, but I wanna kick your ex’s ass for upsetting you so much. I can have my brother boot him from the party if you want. A lifetime ban might sting.”

  Probably more than our break up had. “No, that’s okay. I don’t need him to hate me anymore than he already does.”

  “Fine then,” Cathy said. “Clean your face up before we go back out there, or they’ll think I’ve been beating you.”

  I smiled, and wiped my remaining tears away. My head still hurt, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with. “I should probably head home.”

  Poe rubbed my back briefly. “I’ll take you.”

  Cathy took her dog back, and the three of us left the garage. Something about a girl holding a baseball bat and a tiny dog would have struck terror into anyone who saw her, so I felt mildly guarded when we had to meet the crowd again. It would only be for another few minutes, so there was that.

  “Which way to the bathroom?” I asked Cathy when we got to the main room. The music had switched to something a little less dancey, so I didn’t have to scream this time.

  Cathy nodded to a hallway. “Second door. Don’t mind the horrific air freshener that’ll go off when you walk in. Hold your breath.”

  I smiled, and started pushing past people Dirty Dancing to a song about murder. It wasn’t a real effort, yet I tried to convince myself that I didn’t look through the crowd to see Peter. When I did see him, still dancing and looking at Kelly like she set the sky alight, I ignored the weird way my heart thumped.

  I walked into the bathroom, locked the door, and pretended like I didn’t feel like a used tissue. What would he have seen if he looked back on his life and remembered me? This little blip that didn’t matter, taking place between the start and reunion he had with Kelly. I couldn’t make it better, so I wished I could have forgot all about it.

  The air freshener indeed smelled offensive, and it only added insult to injury. At least I had an excuse as to why I looked so wrecked, since washing my face did little.

  I left the bathroom, and had to start searching for my companions again. It was nine thirty, so why did people stay here? They should have shuffled out a while ago, damn hooligans.

  It wasn’t until I turned down a new hall, that I realized I wasn’t in the right spot. The massive house felt like a maze, and I didn’t know which way to turn. I would have followed the crowd, but I only saw one person in the hall with me. Tammy.

  I started walking toward her, but didn’t dare ask which way to go. Something about destroying a car made me think she wouldn’t have been willing to help. My feet stopped moving when I realized what she was up to.

  Tammy had a bag with her, and I watched as she picked up a picture on the shelf, and then shove it into that bag. I blinked, trying to clear my vision because obviously, I saw things. Then she did it again with another picture, and then the very last two.

  “Hey!” I said, storming the rest of the way up to her. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Tammy saw me, and for a moment, I thought she wanted to pop me in the jaw. Instead, her eyes went wide, and she scurried away from me. An hour ago, I probably would have let it go. But Cathy had tried her best to make me feel better, even though she had no reason to care. I wasn’t about to let someone steal from her house.

  I chased after Tammy, and it led me to the main room. She tried to get to the door, but I grabbed her hair, forcing her into a halt. “Put it back!” I shouted.

  A few people looked over, and Tammy’s expression tightened as she hissed through her teeth. “Let go of me, freak!”

  “Put them back,” I said. “What the hell is your problem?”

  Tammy shoved me at the shoulders, and I bashed into someone in the crowd. It turned out to be Poe, who put himself between the two of us. “I don’t want to hit you,” he said to Tammy. “But I wouldn’t be opposed to having my new friend test out her bat on you, so I suggest you calm down now.”

  Cathy appeared on my other side, dog and bat still in her hands. “What’s going on? What did you take?”

  By then, the crowd started looking over at us. Tammy noticed as well, and nervous eyes met the spectators. “I didn’t take anything,” she lied. “Let me go home.”

  Cathy handed Cujo over to me, and lifted the bat in the air. “I think you oughta go ahead and tell me right now, because I’m not a big fan of thieves. Unless they’re street rats with monkey pets.”

  Tammy refused to tell her, and she started for the door again. Everyone parted out of her way, not wanting to actually get involved. Unlucky for her, Cathy moved like lightning, and caught up to her in only a second. She yanked the bag off of her shoulder, and poured it out onto the floor.

  Among the makeup, phone, tissues, pens, and wallet, the pictures fell out. It must have been about ten, and not only ones from the hallway. Those ones had matching gold frames, while half had silver. Cathy bent to pick one up.

  “This was in my parents’ room,” she said. “What the hell were you doing in my parents’ room, Tamara?”

  The girl didn’t have a thing to say, and she curled in on herself. Her arms wound tight around her body as her face turned red. She’d stolen from this family, and somehow, I felt bad for her. She looked like she would have rather been set on fire than stand there in front of all of us, but she had it coming.

  I didn’t know when it happened, but the music had stopped playing. Someone pushed through the crowd, and he shared almost all of Cathy’s features. His eyes were a lighter shade of brown, and he stood a few inches taller, but he had to have been her brother.

  “Problem?” he asked Cathy.

  She pointed to the floor. “This chick stole a bunch of our pi
ctures, Jamie.”

  He glared at Tammy. “Um, okay then. Care to let us know what your problem is? Do you just think my family is super hot or something? I mean, obviously me, but is there something I should know?”

  Cathy swatted at him. “Shut up, this is serious. And I’m the hottest one.”

  A few people chuckled, but it didn’t lighten the mood at all. Tammy still looked like she wanted to fall down a mountain. Why she said nothing, I couldn’t have guessed. I thought she would have at least tried to defend herself, considering how aggressive she had been with the car thing. Now that she was the one in the wrong, it seemed to be much easier to stay silent.

  “You should leave now,” Jamie said to Tammy. “And not to be a dick or anything, but you’re not welcome back to my future parties. I prefer guests who don’t steal from me, or at least, who aren’t creeps about what they take.”

  The laugh from that one was even bigger, and I didn’t feel good about it. Tammy shrank into herself again, and fumbled on picking her things up. She left the pictures, but took the rest, and then ran out of the house as fast as she could have.

  When the crowd started to simmer down, Jamie put his hands on his sides. “Well…get back to it!”

  Everyone waited a moment, but slowly started to resume their activities. Cathy huffed, helping her brother pick up the pictures on the floor. They focused more on how weird it was, but I mostly wanted to know why she had taken them in the first place. As far as I knew, I’d never seen her with either Cathy or her brother. My first thought was that she had some obsession, but she had also take pictures of their parents, and one of what looked like a much older couple, who must have been grandparents.

  “Let me take you home,” Poe said, tugging on my sleeve. “I think you’ve had enough human interaction for the day.”

  I smiled, nodding. “Yeah, I guess so. I should probably go take care of that glass. Maybe put this dog down.”

  Cujo didn’t pay attention to me. She had her eyes on her mom as she growled at the other people in the room. Cathy took her back, petting her behind the ears.