Jake cheated on her again, and again, and again. He did it so often that he convinced himself that Liz was too stupid and too in love with him to notice—besides, the others were just flings, just for fun. Liz was the one who mattered to him. Or at least, he wanted it to look that way.
But on that day, three days before she drove her car into a tree, in the middle of a quickly intensifying argument, Liz simply did not want to deal with him anymore.
“What the f— ? No, damn it!” Jake almost fell over as he tried to shoot a terrorist on the screen. He glanced around at where she lay sprawled across the white couch. “What the fuck is your problem? Why are you just bitching at everything I say?”
Get out of my house. That’s what Liz wanted to say. Get out and don’t come back. Instead she said, “I don’t know, Jake. Why don’t you ask Natalie Zimmer?”
She watched Jake’s hands tense on the controller, but he didn’t look away from the screen. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Liz exploded. She knew about everything. She knew about Sammie Graham, with whom he had sexted all through sophomore year. She knew about Abby Carey, who had aborted a baby over the summer that she had not made with her boyfriend. She knew about Bailey Henry, who had been responsible for the hickey on his neck when he came back from the bathroom during their last homecoming.
She watched Jake go pale and then red, and before she could finish, he threw down the controller and snarled in her face. “Don’t pretend like you’re so innocent, Liz. You don’t think I know about you and Kyle on New Year’s? Yeah,” he sneered when she was momentarily speechless, “that’s right. He told me. What about you? Did you tell Kennie that you fucked her boyfriend?”
For the record, Liz had not slept with Kennie’s boyfriend. She’d made out with him. She had been drunk and lonely and breaking into a thousand pieces, and she had needed someone to hold her together.
“You’re such a slut, Liz,” said Jake. “You walk around with your nose in the air like you’re so much fucking better than everyone else, but you know what? You’re not.”
It was the way he said it. Liz never thought she was better than anyone. She thought she was so much worse that in three days, she would drive her car off the road because she didn’t think that she deserved to share a planet with seven billion people who were immeasurably better than she was.
It was the way he laughed.
After he left, Liz sat back down on the white couch and wondered if there was such a thing as love. She couldn’t remember much of her parents’ relationship—from what she remembered, they had been happy. Her entire childhood had been happy. Back then, she’d thought that the world was a wonderful place, and look how wrong she had turned out to be.
She thought of Kennie’s parents, and Julia’s, and how none of them were happy.
Liz believed love was unconditional, and the longer she sat on the couch and stared at the screen, where Jake’s avatar was filling with bullets, the less convinced she was about the existence of love.
Still, she had to make sure. And since her theory didn’t apply solely to romantic love, she called her mother.
The phone rang twelve times. Liz was about to hang up when her mother finally picked up.
“Liz?” Her mother’s voice was frazzled and far away. “What is it?”
“Mom?” Liz had to clear her throat because her voice was so small. “Mom, I . . .”
She didn’t know what to say. Do you love me? Even in her head, it sounded stupid.
Monica let the silence last for about five seconds. “Liz, can this wait? I thought this was an emergency. You know this is an international call, right? I’m in Rio right now, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember, Mom. I just—”
“Honey, I had to leave the meeting to answer this. I can barely understand what the man is saying as it is—his accent is so heavy. What do you need?”
What did she need? Liz Emerson knew what she needed. What she truly needed was help, but she didn’t know the words to ask for it.
“Mom,” Liz finally whispered. “I think I’m sick.”
“Oh, well, there’s some Tylenol in the pantry. You know that. I have to go, okay, Liz? I’ll be back Wednesday—” Her mother paused and cleared her throat.
Of course she was coming back on Wednesday. Monica had missed New Year’s and Easter and Halloween and the first snowfall, but she would never miss the anniversary of her husband’s death.
“Wednesday. Stay warm. Drink some soup. Okay, I really need to go.” Monica hesitated, and her voice was distant when she said, “Love you, sweetie. Bye.”
CALL ENDED.
Liz stared at the screen. Her mother’s words echoed through her head: love you. People threw them around so easily, as if they were nothing, as if they meant nothing.
She stood and popped Jake’s game out of the Xbox, cracked it in half, and went to clean her room. Liz didn’t want to leave any clues behind, and if anyone saw the state of her room, the accident story would be considerably less believable.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Hopes and Fears