“The next day I requested a meeting with the school director, and we agreed that even though I’d committed no fault, it was best for me to resign. Later I heard she began sleeping with any man who looked her way. I’m guessing you’re a product of that.” He met my eyes, and a cold burst of air moved through me. “I wanted nothing to do with your mother, and I want nothing to do with you.”
“You’re a liar.” My voice trembled. “And a complete coward. Look at me. I look just like you.”
He shook his head slowly, a pained smile on his face. “No, Carolina. You look just like her. And whatever poor man she suckered into her pathetic imaginations.” In one quick motion he stepped forward, snatching the journal out of my hands.
“Hey!” I tried to grab it back, but he whipped around, blocking me with his shoulder.
“Ah, yes. The famous journal.” He began flipping through it. “I guess she called me X? Clever, wasn’t she? ‘The only hard part about being with X is not telling anyone about it’ . . . ‘Sometimes I feel like my time is divided into two categories: time with X, and time spent waiting to be with X’ . . .” He turned around, fanning the pages lazily. “Carolina, you seem like a smart girl. Does this sound real to you? Does it seem likely that your mother was in a relationship that she managed to keep entirely secret?”
“She didn’t make it up.”
He glanced down at the book. It had fallen open to the front cover, and he held it up to me. ‘I made the wrong choice.’ You see? Even in her craziness she knew that faking this journal was wrong. She was so talented, but folle. I hate to tell you this, Carolina, but science has proven that the parts of the brain responsible for creativity and madness are the same. At least you can take comfort in the fact that it wasn’t really her fault. Your mother was a genius, but her mind was weak.”
Suddenly all I could see was hot, boiling red. Before I could think, I lunged at him, twisting the journal out of his hands and running for the foyer.
“Lina?” Ren looked up from the desk. He had a clipboard in front of him. “Are you okay?”
I pulled the door open and burst out onto the sidewalk, Ren chasing after me. I turned and ran up the street, my legs heavy as sandbags. Her mind was weak.
Finally Ren caught up to me, grabbing my arm.
“Lina, what happened? What happened in there?”
A wave of nausea washed over me and I ran over to the edge of the street and started dry heaving. Finally the feeling passed and I sank to the ground, the pavement hard under my knees.
Ren was kneeling next to me. “Lina, what just happened?”
I turned and pressed my face into his chest and suddenly I wasn’t just crying. I was sobbing. Like splitting-at-the-seams, exploding-into-a-million-pieces, falling-apart crying. The weight of the last ten months was dumping down on me, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
I cried and cried and cried. Hot, noisy tears that didn’t care who was watching. The kind of crying I’d never done in front of anyone.
“Lina, it’s okay,” Ren said over and over, his arms wrapped around me. “It’s going to be okay.”
But no, it wasn’t. And it never would be. My mom was gone. And I missed her so much I sometimes wondered how I was breathing. Howard wasn’t my father. And Matteo . . . I don’t know how long I cried for, but finally I felt my feet reach the bottom, my last few sobs coming out in shudders.
I opened my eyes. We were both still kneeling on the ground, and I was smooshed into Ren, my face buried in his neck, his skin hot and sticky. I pulled back. Ren’s shirt had a giant soggy puddle on it, and he looked mortified.
This was so much more than he’d bargained for.
“I’m sorry,” I said hoarsely.
“What just happened?”
I wiped my face, then pulled him up to standing. “He said my mom made it all up. She was obsessed with him and she wrote a fake journal to get him in trouble with the school.”
“Che bastardo. That’s not even that good of a story.” He looked at me closer. “Wait. You didn’t believe him, did you?”
I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head hard, my hair sticking to my wet cheeks. “No. At first it scared me. But that wasn’t her. She never would have hurt someone she loved.”
He exhaled. “You scared me for a minute.”
“I just can’t believe that she loved him. He was horrible. And Howard is so . . .” I looked up.
Ren’s face was like six inches away from mine, and suddenly we locked eyes and I wasn’t thinking about Matteo and Howard anymore.
Chapter 21
IT WASN’T A LITTLE KISS. Not like your first peck or like the time you made out with your junior high boyfriend behind the movie theater. It was throw-your-arms-around-his-neck, bury-your-fingers-in-his-hair, why-haven’t-we-done-this-before kissing straight through all the salt on my face. Ren circled his hands around my waist and for five seconds everything was perfect, and then—
He pushed me off him.
Pushed.
Me.
Off.
Him.
I wanted the sidewalk to swallow me up.
He wouldn’t look at me.
Seriously, why hadn’t it swallowed me up yet?
“Ren . . . I don’t know what just happened.” He’d been kissing me back, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he?