As much as Liam dislikes Jake Derrick, it disgusts him that he is not here. Jake and Liz have been a couple for nearly three years. He should be here, at least, pretending to be heartbroken.
Or maybe Jake really would have been heartbroken. Liam doesn’t know. He doesn’t know Jake well and has no particular wish to remedy that situation, so he makes a halfhearted attempt to withhold judgment.
But the truth is that Jake Derrick’s heart is a fickle and melodramatic thing. He has teared up over dead dogs and spectacular football games, and no doubt he will cry over Liz too. But in a month, two, he will be making out with another girl, someone with bigger boobs who will believe him when he lies. Liz will become no more than a pickup line.
“I fell in love in high school. I know that’s cliché and stuff, but it’s true—Liz and I had something real. When she died, I just . . . I don’t know. I was so lost. Maybe I still am. I’m lost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Scavenger
Liz only stayed with Jake for so long because he kept something inside her alive, some piece of her that still believed in love and yearned for romance. And he could be so sweet, so adorable in the things he did, sending her flowers with notes written on the petals, sneaking up behind her in the hallway to bury his face in her hair, telling her all the time that she was beautiful, that she took his breath away.
Then there was homecoming during junior year, just a few months before. Liz was about to break up with him once and for all, and then he did something that made her wonder about love again.
She opened her locker after her last class, and a flower fell out. There was a ribbon tied around the stem, and some sort of Shakespeare quote written on it in Jake’s scrawl, which should have turned her off right away. Julia liked Shakespeare. Liz liked the cynics—Orwell, Twain, Swift, Hemingway. But she had just come from the homecoming pep rally; the hallways were loud and her hair was messy from the wind and the flower and ribbon were so beautiful that in that moment, she felt beautiful too.
IT IS THE EAST, AND LIZ IS THE SUN, the ribbon said (and truthfully, a part of Liz cringed because Jake was just so goddamn cliché). GO EAST, SUNSHINE, TO THE PLACE WHERE WE FIRST MET.
So she did. She went to the middle school, about three hundred feet east of the high school. The first time she had ever talked to Jake had been sixth grade. They had arrived at the water fountain by the gym at the same time, and he had gallantly stepped back. For a moment, she thought it was incredibly sweet that he had remembered, but as she walked toward the middle school, a twinge of suspicion grew inside her. Jake was not the sentimental type—he could hardly remember what had happened last week, much less what had happened five years ago.
She went into the building and stopped in front of the water fountain by the gym, read the waiting card. YOUR LIPS ON MINE, UNDER THE STARS. At the movie theater parking lot, she picked up the waiting teddy bear and took the note from its paws: WHERE WE HAD OUR FIRST DATE, A TEA PARTY WITH TEDDY BEARS. The hospital, where she had visited him after he had broken his collarbone playing football. She had brought him a mug of chai tea (which Jake had ignored in favor of his hospital-issued chili dog) and a get-well bear as a joke. They had ended up making out in the hospital bed until a nurse had come and asked Liz, none too politely, to leave.
The scavenger hunt led her all over Meridian and wasted an entire tank of gas, and at the end, she found herself parked at the edge of the overgrown field by the elementary school. Jake was standing in the middle of it, holding a sign with the last clue written in black Sharpie.
It said WILL YOU GO TO THE DANCE WITH ME?
She said yes.
Liz had a generally hard time believing in love, and she was not in love with Jake Derrick. She was in love with the things he did. Turned out, though, her suspicions were correct—the scavenger hunt was beyond the imagination of her self-involved boyfriend. Jake had known that Liz’s friends would do the majority of the work. Really, all he had to do was stand there.
But that afternoon, in the abandoned field by the elementary school, Liz pretended that they were. In love. She lied to herself. Her world was almost beautiful. She didn’t care that it was false.
CHAPTER THIRTY
After the Surgery
There are three kinds of people after the surgery is pronounced successful.
There are the ones who are breathless, shaking, crying in that crushing and desperate kind of relief—namely, Liz’s mother and Julia. When the doctor first told Monica that her daughter had not died on the operating table, she went to Julia and held her, because she couldn’t hold Liz.