“Tab. It’s not all about you, you know?” She’s looking at the photographs. More and more students and teachers gather around them, but I don’t see Joe or Sasha.
“There’s, like, a whole reason she did this,” I say. I’m begging Elise with my eyes to be my best friend again, if even for just a few minutes.
“I know there is. You. Going after her boyfriend. Making her feel like she had to do something insane to keep him.”
Heather clears her throat again. Elise shakes her head, and I try to unhear those words. The things Jemma and Alison and Mrs. Drake and Luke think about me—those are the same things Elise thinks about me. It’s all over her face: disappointment, disgust, distance.
“How did I—” I try.
“You pushed her. Excuse us, Heather.” Elise takes my elbow and moves me away from the photographs and Heather. We’re just a few feet away, so Sasha’s big eyes and smooth skin are still haunting the whole conversation. “Did you sleep with him? With Joe? You did, right? I mean, you must have. And she knows. Or suspects. And is trying to compete. Why couldn’t you just let her have him, you know? You could be with some other hockey-playing guy.”
“I’m not—”
“What if a college hears about her doing this? What if she gets kicked out? I mean, look at those douches, staring at these pictures like it’s porn. She’s going to have to live with that. That’s who she is now. Because of you.”
I glance to Elise’s left and catch sight of Luke feeling up the photograph. He cackles while pretending to grab her breasts, his grubby fingers circling the nipples. Elise is wrong about a lot of things, but she’s right about something: Sasha shouldn’t have to see this.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” I say, but the words are weak and small and sound ridiculous when I can hear the boys in the background talking about how her boobs are too small and her stomach too round. It’s hard to see how this could be a good thing.
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about anymore,” Elise says. “I don’t recognize you or understand anything you’re saying or doing at this point.”
“I mean, we don’t know what the future holds, and maybe this somehow will turn out to be a good thing? Or, like, her life will change and shift because she did something scary and strange and special?”
Something happens while I watch Elise’s face respond to my words. Zed’s words. The words I’ve been relying on the last few weeks.
They sound all wrong.
I grip my backpack. The Ziploc full of Paul’s weed is in there, begging me to bring it to Mrs. Drake, or plant it in Jemma’s locker, or do something shocking and daring and LBC-worthy. My mind is in some strange tug-of-war with itself, on one side thinking maybe LBC is a terrible idea, and that Zed is a dangerous dude or at the very least a total stranger, but on the other side still needing to believe in something bigger than my own pathetic life.
Elise’s face tells me I should be afraid of what LBC has done to me. She looks not only disappointed or angry or annoyed. She looks scared. Scared of the person I’m becoming, and scared of the possible reasons I have become this person instead of the one she loved looking at books with.
“I have to go,” I say, and fly out the door, hoping maybe I’ll run into Sasha Cotton, but her car is already gone, so I hop into my own car and drive away.
Twenty-Four.
I drive in circles for an hour before ending up back at Tea Cozy.
My mind’s not working that fast, and I couldn’t think of what to do or how to understand what’s happening until I remembered how it all began: with Paul. With The Secret Garden.
“Tabitha! I told you to go to school!” Paul says. He and Cate are at the counter with coffee and cookies and no customers. “I told her to go to school,” he says to Cate. They are sitting close enough that their knees touch, and I’m happy to see that, but I want him to see that I am sweating and crying and fighting back more dry heaves, so obviously school is so not the point.
“Where did you get my book?” I say, and I’m out of breath even though I haven’t been running or anything. I didn’t know I could get out of breath from living life and nothing else.
“You need water,” Cate says, running behind the counter to pour me a huge glass.
“I need to know where you got that book,” I say again, and I rummage through my backpack, because I can’t keep talking and explaining—I need to get answers. I throw my copy of The Secret Garden at him, and he blushes the second he sees it.
“Oh shit, Tab,” he says.