The Boyfriend Thief

CHAPTER 24





I sat in my car after school on Monday while the parking lot emptied around me. Gray clouds had moved in, finally threatening to end the relentless heat wave we’d been under for weeks. A low rumble echoed across the distance as my classmates headed off to their homes or after school jobs. I sat still, my hands gripped around my gray steering wheel, the ignition idling while the air conditioner attempted to pump out cool air.

Get it over with, I told myself, which I’d been saying in my head all day. But the right opportunity hadn’t come along.

Finally, I pulled the keys out of the ignition, tossed them into my bag and nearly tumbled from the car in my hurry to get out. It was now or never.

Hannah, like myself, was a creature of habit. She was in the library, exactly where I had expected to find her. We were down to the last two weeks of school, but that didn’t stop Hannah from taking every advantage to get in extra study time whenever she could.

“I need to talk to you.”

Hannah looked up from the open physics book on the table in front of her. Her hand was poised over her notebook, where she had been making notes in her neat, curly script. Hannah’s brown eyes studied me.

“A social call?” she asked. “How unusual for you.”

I was thankful the library was empty. The librarian was the only other person in the room with us, but she was on the other side, shelving some books. Hannah sat at a table toward the back of the room.

I decided to remain standing. I looked down at her and asked, “Do you have no conscience at all?”

Hannah’s eyebrows shot upward. “About knocking you down to second place behind me? No, not really.”

I gripped the back of the chair across from her to brace myself. “I don’t mean that. I mean what you’re doing to Zac.”

She blinked at me, her expression neutral. “You’re the one who agreed to this plan. If you’re having a guilty conscience, I’ll gladly take my money back.”

How could she sit there so cool and casual, as if she had nothing to feel bad about? This was low, even for her.

“Stop playing games, Hannah. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

She stuck her pen in her book and closed it, folding her hands over the cover. “No, Avery, I don’t. You’ll have to explain a little more about what exactly is going on in your head before the rest of us can begin to understand you.”

“You’re cheating on Zac.”

Hannah didn’t flinch from my gaze. “What would make you think that?”

“I have proof. I have pictures.” I reached for my bag to grab my phone, but my bag wasn’t there. I must have left it in the car, forgetting to grab it in my rush to find Hannah. “They’re on my phone. In my car.”

She smirked. “I don’t know what you have pictures of, but you’ve obviously completely lost your mind. I suppose it’s a side effect of all the time you’ve been spending with Zac. He can be overwhelming.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. My fingernails dug into the wood of the chair as I leaned over it. “How could you do that to him?”

My building rage didn’t seem to have any effect on her. She continued to look at me with her calm demeanor.

“If you’re so concerned about Zac’s feelings, you might want to ask yourself that same question. You’re the one who’s been lying to him for weeks now. No one forced you to go along with my plan.”

“You threatened to blackmail me,” I reminded her.

Hannah smiled smugly. “So you chose to save your own reputation instead of sparing Zac’s feelings. And yet, you have the audacity to come in here and say I’m the bad person? Take a good look at yourself, Avery. Your halo isn’t exactly shining.”

“He’s your boyfriend,” I said.

Hannah stood so we were at eye level with each other. “And what exactly is he to you?”

The memory of Zac’s lips on mine flashed through my head. My hands shook and I gripped the edge of the chair harder, trying to keep myself steady. Zac had rejected me, he had pushed me away and went to Hannah when she called.

“Maybe I shouldn’t break up with him,” Hannah went on, gathering her books into a neat pile as she spoke. “He’s different lately. More focused, more controlled. Who would have thought you might be a good influence on him? Maybe I should keep him around. Would that make you happy, Avery? Would you enjoy seeing Zac kissing me in the halls? Hearing him say he loves me? Or is it possible that you’ve developed feelings for him in that cold heart of yours?”

The idea of Zac staying with Hannah after everything we’d shared the last few weeks made a cold sweat break out all over my body.

“You don’t love him,” I told her.

Hannah shrugged. “Love is negotiable. I can play the part of the adoring girlfriend, if that’s what it takes to ensure that I come out on top in the end.”

I licked my dry lips as the cold panic seeped into my bones. “It’s not fair to him. If you don’t want him, break up with him and let him find someone else.”

“Such as you?” She raised one eyebrow at me, amusement etched into her smile. “If I didn’t know better, Avery, I’d think maybe you had fallen in love with Zac Greeley. But that’s ridiculous, of course. You’ve never loved anyone except yourself.” She picked up her books, propping them on her hip. “Don’t tell me you honestly thought maybe you and Zac had something real. I paid you to spend time with him and the only reason he’s spent time with you, other than for your business project, is because he feels sorry for you.”

I took a step back, my mouth open as I tried to form words.

“He told me himself,” she went on. “He thinks you’re a lonely, miserable person who is too afraid to let people get close. He pities you.”

Nausea welled up inside me, rising in my throat. I didn’t want to believe that Zac would say those words.

But hadn’t he already said them to me? He’d told me—more than once—that I needed a date, I needed to loosen up, I needed to stop hiding from everyone. The truth was Zac had already told me what he thought of me, and it wasn’t something good.

I stumbled backward away from Hannah’s table as she continued staring at me with a gleeful look in her eye. She knew she had me. She could see that underneath the walls of a perfect life I had built, I was crumbling into nothing. Everything I had worked so hard for was falling to pieces. Because of Zac. Because of a guy who thought everything was a joke and had the nerve to pity me.

I spotted him at his locker when I left the library. Papers spilled from the door, fluttering the floor around his duct-taped shoes. He bent over, attempting to shove his math book into the mess inside his dirty backpack.

He pitied me?

My heart pounded an erratic rhythm in my ears as I forced my feet forward, closing the distance between us. My vision darkened around the edges until all I could see was him, this pathetic, disorganized class clown who had come into my life and ruined everything. My chest felt tight and I gasped for air.

He looked up as I drew closer. His lips stretched into a nervous smile. “Hey,” he said.

“Hannah is cheating on you,” I said before I could change my mind.

Zac’s backpack hung limply at his side. “What?”

“I have pictures of her with another guy,” I said. My voice sounded loud in the empty hallway, almost as if I were shouting. “She wants you to break up with her so that she can look like the victim. She paid me to flirt with you and get you to fall for me so you’ll dump her.”

Zac’s face paled.

“You were paid to spend time with me?” His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper, but it sounded like a shout in the silent room.

The pressure in my chest tightened when I saw the hurt in his eyes. I wished I could take the words back, erase them from his memory.

“Zac,” I began, swallowing a lump that had formed in the back of my throat. “It’s not like that—”

“What is it like then?” When I didn’t answer, he said in a choked voice, “Could you please explain to me what’s going on?”

He looked hurt and angry and afraid. He looked so small surrounded by the row of lockers behind him.

So I told Zac everything. The break up plot. The money. The fact that Hannah was seeing another guy.

The fact that I had, somewhere along the way, fallen in love with him. I hadn’t realized just how true that was until now.

I didn’t know what I expected when I was done. Maybe that he’d become so engulfed in fury he’d kick or throw something. Or he’d yell.

I expected Zac to do anything other than what he did. Which was nothing.

He stood there, his face set in a blank look. It was like he had nothing at all to give in response to my revelations. He was completely empty.

“Zac?” I asked.

I reached out to touch him, but suddenly he jumped back out of my reach.

“Are you okay?” I knew the question was stupid as soon as I asked it. Of course he wasn’t okay.

Zac shook his head. “No. Hannah wouldn’t...You couldn’t…” He paused, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “All this time, you were lying to me about why you spent so much time with me? The comedy shows, the slushies, everything?”

When he looked at me, I wanted to sink into the floor to get away from the hurt in his eyes. I realized maybe I had hurt him more than Hannah’s cheating had. Maybe he’d known things weren’t right in his relationship with Hannah, but he’d had no reason to suspect me of doing anything behind his back.

He wasn’t pathetic. I was. I had done the one thing I swore I would never do and yet here I was, once again pushing away someone I cared about. But this time, I didn’t think I could rebuild the walls he had broken down.

“Zac, I—”

But he held up his hands toward me, as if to protect himself from my words. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

“I’m so sorry—”

He shook his head. “I can’t talk to you right now.”

Zac turned, slinging his dirty orange backpack over his shoulder. A piece of paper fluttered out, falling to the floor, but he didn’t stop to pick it up.

* * *

The parking lot of Willowbrook High was empty when I stumbled out of the school. Lightning crackled overhead among the dark clouds. I headed toward my car, fishing blindly in my pockets for my keys.

My pockets were empty. A memory flashed through my head—pulling the keys from the ignition, tossing them into my bag.

Which sat in the passenger seat of my car. I stared through the window at it dumbly, trying to figure out why it was in there and I was out here. I pulled on the door handle, but the car was locked.

In the year that I’d owned the car, I had never once locked myself out. Avery James didn’t forget her keys. Avery James didn’t leave without making sure she had her bag.

Avery James didn’t fall in love and then crush her own heart.

The clouds opened and rain pelted me as I walked down the sidewalk toward home. I lifted my face toward the sky, letting the rain wash away the tears on my cheeks. No matter how much I had tried, it had never been enough. I chased everyone away. It was no wonder Zac, Molly, Ian, and everyone else hated me. I was damaged, deep inside.

A car horn next to me startled me out of my thoughts. My heart thumped, hoping maybe it was Zac.

But the silver SUV that had slowed to a crawl at my side wasn’t Zac’s. Trisha looked through the window at me. “Need a ride home?”

I hugged my arms around myself, shivering in the sudden chill that had arrived with the storm. Trisha didn’t look annoyed by how long I stood there while rain pelted the inside of her passenger door and she didn’t ask if I was okay. She waited, patiently, for me to make up my mind.

Trisha’s car was nearly as spotless as my own, the interior polished until it gleamed and the heart shaped air freshener on the rear view mirror giving off a vanilla scent. She cranked the heater up and pulled slowly away from the curb once I was buckled in. She didn’t try to talk to me, so we rode silently toward my house.

When we were only a couple blocks away, I finally spoke. “Thanks,” I said. “For the ride.”

Trisha nodded, smiling a little. “Anytime.”

She said it so casually, as if it were no big deal that she would do this. After the way I’d treated her the last few weeks, she had every right to leave me walking along the side of the road.

But she had stopped. “You could have left me there,” I said. “My dad would never have known if you didn’t pick me up.”

“I didn’t pick up for your dad. I picked you up because you looked like you could use a friend.”

I studied her warily. “Why are you being nice to me?”

“Because believe it or not, I care about you,” Trisha said.

She pulled to a stop in the driveway and looked at me as I unbuckled the seat belt. “Do you need anything, Avery?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I want to be alone right now.”

She pressed her lips together, but she nodded. “If you ever feel like talking, you know how to find me.”

I managed a small smile as I climbed out of her car. “Thanks.”

My feet found their way up the path toward my house. My numb body moved on autopilot. I didn’t have my house key, which was on the keychain in my bag, but I did have the extra key Zac had made for me. I fished it out of the little groove in the front porch where I’d hidden it.

I rubbed my thumb over the grooves cut into the key Zac had made for me. He was saving me, even now when he hated me the most. The soft click of the lock as I slid my key in barely even registered in my head.

In my room, I paused in the middle of the floor and stared at the map on the wall. Where had I gotten this insane idea that I could possibly fix things? How could someone who was broken ever begin to repair anyone else?

I leaned over the bed, reached up, and ripped the map off the wall. The thumbtacks stayed behind, clinging to tiny pieces of the map they held in place. I crumbled the rest in my hands and then hurled it across the room. It hit the wall and fell to the floor behind my TV.

I didn’t know how long I cried, but my throat ached when I felt the arms wrap around me. I hadn’t even heard anyone come home, but when I opened my eyes there was my brother, seated on the edge of my bed and his cheek pressed against my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my throat hoarse.

“It’s okay.” He rubbed a hand over my hair like Mom used to do sometimes when I’d had a bad dream. I had forgotten about that. After she left, I had focused so much on the distant, restless woman she was near the end and buried away the little moments that had made me love her long ago. Maybe it was easier that way, to not think there was anything good to hold onto.

I sat up, holding Ian’s hands in my own. “Ian, there’s something I never told you.” My chest filled with air as I took in a deep breath, bracing myself for what I was about to do. “It’s my fault Mom left.”

My brother blinked at me for a long time before he spoke. “What?”

“Do you remember how she used to get sometimes? How she’d zone out in one of her moods and forget everything? She’d talk about all kinds of things then, about disappearing into the jungle forever or hiding out in a little village on the countryside in Europe.”

He nodded slowly. “A little, yeah.”

“A week before she left, I had entered the school science fair and had made Mom promise to be there. Even Dad left work for about an hour to come see the judging. I waited and waited for her to show up.” I fought against the tears that threatened to spill down my cheeks. “But she never did. She forgot all about me and spent the day researching one of her crazy jungle ideas on the computer in her pajamas instead. She was still sitting there when I got home.”

I rubbed a thumb over Ian’s hand, hoping this wouldn’t cause him to hate me more. “I only won second place instead of first and I was convinced it was because she hadn’t shown up. So I yelled at her like I never had before. I told her I hated her and wished she really would disappear into the jungle forever.” A tear fell, landing on my arm. “Then she was gone. I wasn’t good enough to win and I wasn’t good enough to make her stay.”

Ian hugged me when I started crying again. I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his shoulder. He felt so solid and wide. When had he grown up from the little boy I used to hold in my lap?

“It’s not your fault,” Ian said.

“He’s right, Avery.”

We turned to find my dad leaning against the door frame, a frown etched across his face. He walked across the room toward us, sitting down on the other side of my bed.

“It’s no one’s fault,” Dad told us. “For a long time, I blamed myself. I thought maybe I’d pressured her into marriage too soon. Pressured her into a family before she was ready. Didn’t give her enough freedom or encouragement or love or a hundred other things I could have done differently. But the books I’ve been reading helped me to see it was never about us. It was about her. It was her choice to go and nothing we could have done or said could have made her stay. We may not ever know the reasons why she left, but it was never your fault.”

Dad pulled us into a tight hug, kissing the tops of our heads.

“I used to think,” I said, scrubbing the tears off my eyes, “that I could find her and make her tell me why she left. That’s the real reason I’ve wanted to go to Costa Rica all this time.”

Dad smiled sadly at me. “I know. Your mom talked about Costa Rica a lot, so I figured your interest in it had something to do with that. I guess that’s why I’ve been afraid to let you go, that maybe you’d find her and decide to stay too.”

“I’m not like her.”

He rubbed a hand over my cheek. “No, you’re not. You care too deeply about the people you love to hurt them.” He took a deep breath, as if what he were about to say would hurt him. “But I shouldn’t try to keep you from following your dreams. If you want to go to Costa Rica, to work with the medical program there, I’ll give you my full support. But I’ll miss you like crazy.”

Ian made a face. “I won’t. I could use a summer free of annoying older sisters.”

I bopped him over the head with my pillow. “Maybe I’ll stick around here then, to annoy you as much as possible.”

Ian jumped up from the bed, apparently having had his fill of touchy-feely family time. He was still a thirteen-year-old boy. “I’m getting out of here while I still can,” he said as he dashed toward the door.

I smiled at the empty doorway. He may be aggravating sometimes, but I loved the kid to death.

“What happened to your map?” Dad asked, staring up at the wall over the bed.

I shrugged. “I tore it down. It doesn’t matter much anymore. It was a stupid idea. Mom could be anywhere in the entire world. I’ll never actually find her.”

Dad squeezed my hand. “Just because you may not find your mom doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. You’re going to be a great doctor one day and you could learn a lot on that trip. Not only educational things, but things about yourself. Don’t be afraid to go because you think you might fail.”

I traced a line in my comforter with one finger. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“What makes you keep trying to find love, even after everything you’ve been through? Why aren’t you so angry and hurt that you shut yourself off from everyone else?”

Dad was quiet for a moment, his gaze focused on the thumbtacks still attached to the wall. “For a while, I was very angry and didn’t want anything to do with anyone. But over time I realized I couldn’t shut myself off from contact with other people. I couldn’t let this one failed relationship define the rest of my life. One day you and Ian will leave and create your own lives. I don’t want to be stuck here alone and miserable because I was too afraid of being hurt again to take another chance.”

He smiled sadly at me. “I don’t want you to be afraid to take a chance either. Your mom and I didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean every relationship ends up the same way.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I managed a small smile at him. “You know, maybe Trisha isn’t that bad. As far as the women you’ve dated go, she’s one of the better ones.”

Surprise washed across his face, quickly replaced by happiness. “She’s really great. I wouldn’t let her stick around if she wasn’t.”

Ian bounded back into my room, carrying a gift box in one hand. “If you don’t hurry up and open this Mother’s Day gift I got you, I’m returning it. I could easily find something else to spend the money on.”

I reached for the gift, shooting him a stern look. “You return my gift and I’ll return you. I’m sure someone would be willing to give me two cents for you.”

I pulled back the purple wrapping paper to find one of the crystal roses from the card shop at the mall. The flower was painted purple, with a long crystal-clear stem and gold thorns. I smiled at my brother. “This is beautiful. Thank you.”

He let me kiss his cheek quickly, then he leaped away and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Ugh,” he moaned. “Now I’m contaminated with your germs.”