“She did? So you don’t hate me?”
“No! I don’t hate you. I have in the past. Not anymore.” I’d said that too loud. I knew I had. It was too late to clamp my mouth shut but I did anyway. It didn’t matter. The door swung open and a man holding a flashlight pointed it directly into our eyes.
“Cade Jennings?” he said.
“The one and only,” Cade answered.
“Come with me.”
The night ended poorly. Cade went to hotel jail. Okay, just the security guard’s office where he was forced to call his parents to come pick him up. And I was allowed to go. I didn’t want to leave, but he kept telling me, “Lily, seriously, it’s fine. I’m fine. Go.” He was saving me again.
So I went, even though I probably should’ve stayed. No, I shouldn’t have stayed. I needed to go before he made me like him even more. I was sacrificing him on the altar of friendship, I told myself. Isabel was more important.
I went home and finally was able to finish the rest of the lyrics for “Left Behind.” A song I couldn’t technically record because I didn’t have my guitar. But even if I borrowed a guitar, I couldn’t use this song. It was about Cade. I wasn’t sure he’d take kindly to me winning a songwriting contest with a song that was based on his life that he kept very private. Like he’d want the world to know about his absent father when he had a hard time even writing about it anonymously.
As I sat on my bed with my notebook, I laughed at myself. At the idea that this song would win. That it would become world-known just because I entered it into a contest. The chances of that were slim to none. But even with those odds, I couldn’t do that to Cade. I liked him too much.
All Monday morning I kept my eyes out for Cade. I wanted to see him so I knew everything worked out fine with the hotel, with his stepdad. Since he was no longer writing me letters, I had to count on an actual sighting to check up on him. But I hadn’t seen him at all. In Chemistry I hoped and prayed that there would be a letter. That now that finals were over, he’d write and tell me that he was sorry he’d stopped writing, he’d been too busy studying, or too busy with school responsibilities, or something. Some really good excuse as to why he’d stopped.
But as my hand searched in vain underneath the desk for a letter it never found, my heart dropped another degree. He’d either found out that I was the letter writer and was giving me a very big hint about how he felt about that, or he was just moving on—Cade always did have a short attention span.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter.
“What do you want for lunch today?” Isabel asked.
I tugged on my zipper that was stuck at the bottom of my hoodie. “I don’t know. Something hot. I’m cold.”
“They should have a soup cart here. That would be awesome.”
“In Arizona?”
“Okay, for the month of December, they should have a soup cart here.”
“Agreed.”
I growled as my zipper refused to budge. I was blindly following Isabel wherever she was leading us, her shoes in my peripheral vision as I messed with my zipper.
“What do you think Sasha wants?”
“Huh?” I looked up to see Sasha on a course straight for us, her face a mixture of anger and sadness. I wasn’t sure what to do with that. She had a bundle of papers in her right hand and it took me a moment to place them but I knew before she reached me that they were my letters. All the letters I’d written to Cade. How had she gotten them?
“You make this impossible,” Sasha grunted. “You’re so weird.” She shoved the letters into my arms and a few fell to the floor. “I can’t be that.”
Isabel helped me pick up the scattered letters as Sasha marched away.
“What was that about?” Isabel asked in surprise.
“These are my letters.”
“How’d she get them? Did Cade give them to her?”
My stomach twisted into a knot. I had no idea.
I opened my backpack and started to shove my letters in with his that I kept there. I stopped, gathered both his and mine, and held them out for Isabel. “Will you just take these? Can we have a bonfire at your house after school?”
She gave me a sad smile. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
She opened her backpack and I dropped them all inside. I needed him out of my life once and for all.
Cade was standing by the minivan talking to my mom through the open window when I approached. I felt like I had on the same angry/sad face that Sasha had been wearing earlier.
“Hey, Lily,” Cade said when I opened the side door.
“Hey.” I got in and closed it.
He looked confused. “Well, it was nice talking to you, Mrs. Abbott. Wyatt, I’ll see you Thursday.”
“Okay!” Wyatt said.