“So none of this is about Hayden at all?” It was bad enough that Astrid was behind all of this, but somehow the idea that it was unconnected to Hayden made it worse.
“Of course it’s about Hayden,” she said. “That means Ryan’s the most important, for his sake and mine. But this part won’t work without Eric. I’ve been trying to make him see that, but he’s obsessed with taking Ryan down on his own.”
I took a step back, almost involuntarily. I felt the need to be farther away from her.
“Oh, come on, Sam,” she pleaded. “Don’t be like that. You know they’re monsters. They ruined Eric’s life, and Hayden’s, and Jess’s, and mine. And yours. They were destroying everything they touched and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I’m so sick of them being able to get away with it. Someone had to do something. You have to understand that.” She reached out toward me, as if to take my hand.
But I pulled back farther. “You hurt people,” I said. “Badly.” My voice was getting louder.
“They deserved to be hurt. A lot worse than anything I did. Jason mostly just got humiliated, and Trevor’s going to be fine.”
“What about what you were planning with Ryan? What did you think would happen, if it worked?” Now I was yelling. People were starting to look.
She shrugged.
“Did you even care?” My voice cracked. I couldn’t remember ever being this angry. Not at someone I could confront.
I’d been so worried that I was responsible, and then that Eric was, that it hadn’t even occurred to me to consider the possibility of Astrid being involved. To think about how I might feel. But now I knew.
It was awful.
It was so awful that it overshadowed my relief at the knowledge, finally, that it hadn’t been me.
Astrid must have seen something in my face. “I did it for Hayden,” she said softly.
As if that made it better. But it wasn’t even true, not really. “You did it for yourself,” I said, just as quietly.
She looked at me, as if trying to think of the words that would fix things. But there weren’t any. I felt like everything I knew about her had turned out to be a lie. I’d thought we were the same, that we’d been lucky to find each other, especially now, but maybe it wasn’t good luck. Maybe this was just another horrible way of reminding me that I really had lost the only true friend I’d ever had.
There wasn’t really anything I wanted to say to her, except one thing. “Please don’t do this,” I said. “Let Eric handle this his own way.”
She nodded, then knelt back down and started picking up the potatoes and putting them back in her bag. “I thought you’d understand,” she said, not looking at me now.
In some ways I did, but not in the ways that mattered. She wasn’t who I thought she was, who I’d wanted her to be. And now I had to face being alone again.
I walked away.
I hadn’t asked Astrid a lot of the questions I’d meant to; I wanted to know how much Eric knew, if her other friends did too, why she’d decided it was her job to take the bullies down in the first place. But did it matter? I’d lost her—or she’d lost me, really—and with that, I’d lost the prospect of a new group of friends. Maybe the problem was the whole idea of groups; as soon as more than two people got involved in anything, so many things could go wrong. There was the bully trifecta, three idiots all but sharing one brain; Astrid’s old cheerleader friends, who’d dumped her when Ryan did; her new friends, helping her plot revenge against the bullies without even seeming to realize that they were condoning violence themselves. I was almost inclined to think that what they were doing was worse—there was no question what the bullies were, because they did most of their harm in the open, but Astrid’s crew did everything in stealth, leaving someone like me to take the blame.
Who needed a group? What was so bad about having one best friend, anyway?
I missed Hayden as much as I had since he died. I missed him so much I finally didn’t even feel bad thinking about it; I just sank into it, let it roll over me in waves. It was the closest I’d come to crying, and if I hadn’t been like two feet away from a field full of people I mostly didn’t know or couldn’t stand, I might have just said fuck it and started bawling.
I didn’t, though. Not that I cared so much about what any of those people thought of me most of the time, but I had some pride. And there was no way, absolutely no fucking way, I was going to stand around crying in a cornfield—soybean field, whatever—and let Astrid and her friends think she’d reduced me to tears. But I couldn’t seem to manage standing up anymore; I let myself fall to my knees and stared at the ground, trying to pretend everyone else was gone. I heard the song I’d been listening to in the car playing over and over in my mind, with its references to loving people who lied to you. That wasn’t going to be me. I was done with lies, with secrets and hidden things. I would get over Astrid, in a way I might never get over losing Hayden. I was fine with being alone.
And then I felt the tap on my shoulder.
I COULDN’T IMAGINE ASTRID would have dared come back. But I braced myself when I looked up, just in case. No Astrid, though. Just a small, scared-looking girl with short spiky hair.
Jess.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked. Her voice was high pitched and as quiet as I’d have expected from someone as shy and withdrawn as she seemed to be.
I stood up. I must have been a foot taller than her. “Sure,” I said, trying to sound like someone who had his composure, which I was not. “Do you mind if we go over by the bonfire, though? I’m freezing.” It was true; the air had gotten even colder as the sky darkened, and my sweatshirt wasn’t nearly warm enough. But really, I didn’t want to be able to see Astrid.
She looked up at me and gave a little nod. We walked closer to the fire, where it was warmer, and found a dry patch on the ground to sit.
“Are you okay?” Jess asked.
She must have seen everything, so she had to know I wasn’t. But I didn’t want to think about that; I wanted to know why she’d asked to talk to me. Now that we were right next to each other I had a chance to see her more clearly, to imagine how Hayden would have seen her. She wasn’t a particularly pretty girl; everything about her was tiny, almost too much so. Her eyes were small and set close together; her mouth so little that her lips were just two thin lines. Her hair was clipped short and I could see her miniscule ears, their lobes just barely large enough to contain her stud earrings. “I’ll be okay,” I said, and I wanted it to be true.
She looked back at me, and I became aware that I was staring. But then she gave me a shy smile, and I got it. I could see why Astrid had imagined them together, could see how she and Hayden fit, how her size would make him feel strong. And they’d fallen for each other without ever having met in person; I had no idea whether Jess had asked Astrid to point Hayden out, but if she had, clearly she’d found him appealing in some way. I’d always thought people who started relationships online were nuts, but now I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. There was something so pure about it, how Hayden and Jess had based everything they felt on who they were, on who they knew the other person to be, and maybe they’d been right.
“Astrid talks about you all the time,” Jess finally said, softly. “And he did too. I’m glad we have a chance to talk. I thought maybe if I explained things to you, you’d understand a little better.”
I understood why she didn’t want to say Hayden’s name out loud. She was dead wrong if she thought she was going to change my mind about what I’d just learned, though. But I didn’t want to stop her from telling her story. “I wasn’t sure you were real at first,” I admitted. “When Astrid told me about Athena, I thought maybe it was her.”
Jess laughed. “Hard to imagine,” she said. “It took Astrid a long time to get over Ryan. I think maybe it didn’t happen until Hayden told her about you.” She swallowed a little after saying “Hayden,” but it seemed to loosen her up.