Lucas sits across from Nonny, spooning Cocoa Puffs into his mouth while scrolling through his iPad. “Your Facebook fan page has a hundred thousand likes now,” he reports, flicking a strand of hair out of his face like it’s an annoying bug. This is good news for Lucas, who took it personally when most of my so-called fans deserted the page after the police outed me.
Nonny sniffs and flings the magazine across the table. “Awful. One boy’s dead, another ruined his life and almost ruined yours, and people still treat this like it’s a TV show. Thank God for short attention spans. Something else’ll come along soon and you can get back to normal.”
Whatever that is.
It’s been about a week since Jake was arrested. So far he’s being charged with assault, obstruction of justice, evidence tampering, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t keep track of. He’s got his own lawyer now, and he’s in the same detention center where Nate was being held. Which I guess is poetic justice, but it doesn’t feel good. I still can’t reconcile the guy I pulled off Addy with the kid who’d been my friend since ninth grade. His lawyer’s talking about undue influence from Simon, and maybe that explains it. Or maybe Ashton was right and Jake’s been a control freak all along.
Janae’s cooperating with the police and it looks like she’ll get a plea bargain in exchange for her testimony. She and Addy are thick as thieves now. I have mixed feelings about Janae and the way she let things get this far. But I’m not as innocent as I’d thought, either. While Addy was zonked out on painkillers in the hospital she told me everything, including how my stupid, panicked slight at junior prom made Simon hate me enough to frame me for murder.
I have to figure out a way to live with that, and it won’t be by not forgiving other people’s mistakes.
“You meetin’ Kris later?” Nonny asks.
“Yup,” I say. Lucas keeps eating cereal without blinking an eye. Turns out he couldn’t care less that his older brother has a boyfriend. Although he does seem to miss Keely.
Who I’m also seeing today, before Kris and I get together. Partly because I owe her an apology, and partly because she’s been sucked into this mess too, even though the police tried to keep her name out of Simon’s confession. It wasn’t part of the public record, but people at school knew enough to guess. I texted her earlier in the week to see how she was doing, and she texted back an apology for not being more supportive when the story about me and Kris broke. Which was pretty big of her, considering all the lies I told.
We went back and forth for a while after that. She was pretty broken up about the part she played in everything, even though she had no idea what was happening. I’m one of the few people in town who can understand how that feels.
Maybe we can manage to be friends after all this. I’d like that.
Pop comes into the kitchen with his laptop, jiggling it like there’s a present inside. “You check your email?”
“Not this morning.”
“Josh Langley’s touching base. Wants to know what you’re thinking about college versus the draft. And the UCLA offer came through. Still nothin’ from LSU, though.” Pop won’t be happy until all the top-five college baseball teams make me a scholarship offer. Louisiana State is the lone holdout, which annoys him since they’re ranked number one. “Anyway, Josh wants to talk next week. You up for it?”
“Sure,” I say, even though I’ve already decided I’m not going right into the draft. The more I think about my baseball future, the more I want college ball to be the next step. I have the rest of my life to play baseball, but only a few years to go to college.
And my first choice is Cal State. Since they’re the only school that didn’t back away from me when I was down.
But it’ll make Pop happy to talk with Josh Langley. We’ve gotten back on tentative father-son footing since the good baseball news started pouring in. He still doesn’t talk to me about Kris, and clams up when anyone else mentions him. He doesn’t bolt out of the room anymore, though. And he’s looking me in the eye again.
It’s a start.
Addy
Saturday, November 17, 2:15 p.m.
I can’t ride my bike because of the skull fracture and my sprained ankle, so Ashton drives me to my follow-up doctor’s appointment. Everything’s healing the way it should, although I still get instant headaches if I move my head too fast.
The emotional stuff will take longer. Half the time I feel like Jake died, and the other half I want to kill him. I can admit, now, that Ashton and TJ weren’t wrong about how things were between Jake and me. He ran everything, and I let him. But I never would have believed he could be capable of what he did in the woods. My heart feels like my skull did right after Jake attacked me—as though it’s been split in two with a dull ax.
I don’t know how to feel about Simon, either. Sometimes I get really sad when I think about how he planned to ruin four people because he thought we’d taken away from him things that everybody wants: to be successful, to have friends, to be loved. To be seen.
But most of the time I just wish I’d never met him.
Nate visited me in the hospital and I’ve seen him a few times since I’ve been out. I’m worried about him. He’s not one to open up, but he said enough that I could tell getting arrested made him feel pretty useless. I’ve been trying to convince him otherwise, but I don’t think it’s sinking in. I wish he’d listen, because if anyone knows how badly you can screw up your life when you decide you’re not good enough, it’s me.
TJ’s texted a few times since I was discharged a couple of days ago. He kept dropping hints about asking me out, so I finally had to tell him it’s not happening. There’s no way I can hook up with the person who helped me set off this whole chain reaction. It’s too bad, because there might’ve been potential if we’d gone about things differently. But I’m starting to realize there are some things you can’t undo, no matter how good your intentions are.
It’s all right, though. I don’t agree with my mother that TJ was my last, best hope to avoid premature spinsterhood. She’s not the expert she thinks she is on relationships.
I’d rather take my cues from Ashton, who’s getting a kick out of Eli’s sudden infatuation. He tracked her down after things settled with Nate and asked her out. She told him she’s not ready to date yet, so he keeps interrupting his insane workload to take her on elaborate, carefully planned not-dates. Which, she has to admit, she’s enjoying.
“I’m not sure I can take him seriously, though,” she tells me as I hobble to the car on crutches after my checkup. “I mean, the hair alone.”
“I like the hair. It has character. Plus, it looks soft, like a cloud.”
Ashton grins and brushes a stray lock of mine off my forehead. “I like yours. Grow it a little more and we’ll be twins.”
That’s my secret plan. I’ve been coveting Ashton’s hair all along.
“I have something to show you,” she says as she pulls away from the hospital. “Some good news.”
“Really? What?” Sometimes it’s hard to remember what good news feels like.
Ashton shakes her head and smiles. “It’s a show, not a tell.”
She pulls up in front of a new apartment building in the closest thing Bayview has to a trendy neighborhood. Ashton matches my slow pace as we step into a bright atrium, and guides me to a bench in the lobby. “Wait here,” she says, propping my crutches next to the bench. She disappears around the corner, and when she returns ten minutes later she leads me to an elevator and we head for the third floor.
Ashton fits a key into a door marked 302 and pushes it open to a large apartment with soaring, loftlike ceilings. It’s all windows and exposed brick and polished wood floors, and I love it instantly. “What do you think?” she asks.