“I meant it. I have since the day I met her. Still do.”
“Then why didn’t you ever tell her? You spent nearly every second of every day together and you never thought to tell her? Never thought she’d want to know or that perhaps she felt the same way?”
He took a step toward me, then stopped. His hands tensed at his sides, his tone low, guttural as if he was fighting to speak through his gritted teeth. “She was never, ever, on her own. And as for why I didn’t tell her … well, she never seemed ready to hear it. Still doesn’t.”
34
I couldn’t move, couldn’t even muster the resolve to look around me. It took an enormous amount of effort just to stay upright, not to dissolve in a pile of tears in the middle of the hall.
“Trouble with your sister’s boyfriend?” I swung my head around at the sound of her voice, wondered exactly how long Jenna had been standing there and how much she’d heard.
“Piece of advice,” she said. “Try worrying less about your dead sister and more about yourself.”
It was no secret that Jenna had had no use for Ella. She’d made that clear at the party the night my sister died. Part of me hoped it was a fa?ade, something she did in public to keep up her image. To hear her express it in private, to me, wounded me in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, please, Maddy. Are you blind? Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like crap, and your behavior kind of reminds me a bit of Molly’s. You want to be her? The fragile girl who everyone thinks is crazy?”
“Are you kidding me, Jenna? Do you have any idea what she—”
Jenna cut me off with a wave of her hand, the sarcastic grin spreading across her face too telling. “Oh, I know exactly what she went through. But they let her back on the team this year, so I guess all is forgiven.”
I was confused as to why Jenna found this amusing. Her reaction, frankly, was downright twisted. I didn’t care about pretending to be Maddy in that moment, didn’t care if I slipped up and she figured out who I really was. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of the year being her friend. Forget Alex and his you-have-to-play-nice-with-Jenna attitude. I was done with her.
“I don’t get you. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why we are even friends.”
“Because we’re exactly the same,” Jenna replied.
I shook my head. I refused to believe that. The Maddy I’d shared a room with for the first ten years of my life, the Maddy Mom and Dad adored, the one who still made cards for our grandmother at Christmas could never be as cruel and self-serving as Jenna.
“Deny it if you want,” Jenna continued. “You and I both know it’s the truth.”
“No. It’s not.” I don’t know where my courage came from, but I didn’t care. I had waited three long years to tell Jenna what I thought of her, and I wasn’t going to stop myself now. “I am nothing like you. I don’t use my family problems as an excuse to treat everybody like crap, and I would never go crying to my best friend’s boyfriend about how mean my father is or how broke we are. You think crying to Alex is going to gain you sympathy points, gonna make him dump me to take care of you?”
Jenna reached over and grabbed my arm, towed me into the girls’ bathroom across the hall. She kicked open each stall to make sure they were all empty before turning to the two girls staring at us from the sink. “Get out,” she yelled. “Now!”
She slammed the door shut behind them and put her ear to the wood—I presumed to make sure no one was eavesdropping. I didn’t know how she could tell, but I guessed certain types of people, those who are well versed in gossipy behavior, had their ways.
“You have shut me out for nearly a month, letting Alex be your go-between. I don’t know why, and, to be honest, I don’t care because it’s absolutely working in my favor.”