On the one ten A.M. train back to Melville with three other passengers—two sleeping, one sketchy—I watch the city skyline recede like I usually do, but it’s the first time I’m glad to leave it behind. Not that being back home is much better. I wish I could just stay on this train, a safe, in-between nowhere.
I finally check my phone. Fifteen texts from Avery. Slightly more than usual. She probably just had sex with Mike and all fifteen are “interesting” tidbits of physiological info copy-pasted from the “Sexual Intercourse (humans)” Wiki page. I don’t even have the energy to tell her my life has turned into a Dr. Seuss book called Oh the Assholes at Home and the Assholes You’ll Meet.
Before I get a chance to open any of the texts, she calls me. I answer.
“Hi. Pregnant yet?”
“Oh God, I’m so sorryyyyy,” Avery wails, not sounding like herself. She repeats it over and over raggedly: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t be mad at me, I’m sorry.”
Chapter 20
FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TRAIN RIDE, I PIECE TOGETHER what happened, Law & Order style: Mike came early to pick Avery up for a movie. Avery closed but didn’t shut off her laptop. Ashley went into Avery’s room because she wanted to e-mail herself Avery’s AP History essay. Avery had been reading the last Ordinaria chapter on the Were-Heads message board.
Ashley read the chapter. She read all the chapters. Then she sent them to Gideon.
My basic nightmare, essentially. Created by Dick Wolf. Donk-donk.
“It’s not your fault,” I lie to a hyperventilating Avery, as one of the other passengers wakes up with a start and glances curiously at me. “Come on. Calm down.”
“I just wasn’t thinking!”
“It’s really okay.”
“I’m so sorry!”
“It’s fine.”
“Ashley’s been crying in her room for like an hour.”
I’m taken aback by this. “What?”
“You really hurt her feelings, Scarlett.”
“I hurt her feelings?” I’m aghast.
Ashley’s been hurting my feelings for the past seven years. But everything feels different now. I’ve been a bully too, just in a different way. I guess good writing is like an X-Man power, a magic trick, and I abused it.
“What are you gonna do?” asks Avery.
An excellent question, considering the only real choice I have is to move to the People’s Republic of Totally Screwed. Gideon must be so weirded out by this, and nothing’s worse than freaking out the person you like; it’d be way less embarrassing to just be hated. A burst of fear crashes in on me, as if it’s coming from outside my own body, the first tidal wave of a panic attack.
“I have to go.”
I hang up on her.
Dawn’s car is idling in neutral in the desolate parking lot of the Melville stop when I get off the train at a little past two in the morning. As soon as she sees me, Dawn jumps out and slams the door, her North Face jacket hastily thrown over pajama pants, and starts screaming.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Wait, stop, I—”
“Your dad and Kira have been looking for you all night! I thought you were lying dead in some bar bathroom! How could you do this?”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, echoing Avery, but about something so much bigger that two words can’t begin to cover. The tears I held in in front of Dad and Kira at that awful book party finally start to fall and don’t stop.
Dawn is astounded, the anger melting off her face.
“What happened? Please tell me. You’re scaring me. Did somebody hurt you?”
This time she’s the one working the Gilmore Girls/Jeopardy! technique on me, trying her best to get me to open up so she can suck the pain out of me like it’s poison. But all I can do is cry harder.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I sob as she wraps me in a confused hug. “I’m sorry.”
Waking up for school on Monday feels like I’m taking doomed steps up a few rickety wooden stairs to a guillotine.
I always thought part of the reason I didn’t like school was that nobody knew what I was actually good at. Turns out, it’s the opposite. Now that I know at least three people read my stories who are sort of in my stories—and, oh God, if his reading level is above picture books, Mike Neckekis makes four—what needs to happen today is that I avoid them at all costs, even if it means cutting class. Which I do. Mr. Radford’s class is the first I bail on to hide in the library stacks instead.
The library remains a safe haven for approximately three minutes until I realize that Gideon is sitting at one of the computers with his arms crossed, watching me crouch behind the astrology section like a nervous rodent.