This is a nightmare.
But then I get a little indignant. He’s the one who’s been running hot and cold with me for months. He’s the one who flirts with me in private, then ignores me in public. At least I told the truth. I mean, I told the truth in a speculative fiction serial on the Internet, but I told the truth. How hard could it be to tell the truth to his face?
I tentatively slink out from behind astrology, wondering if my horoscope this week was “Pisces: Your World Will Implode,” and confront him.
“Hey,” I say.
His expression remains ice-cold.
“‘Hey’?” he repeats. “Really?”
“Well . . .” I scuff my sneaker against the linoleum, ashamed. “There’s not really a handbook for this.”
He looks lost. Angry and lost.
“I just don’t really know what to say, you know?”
Actually, I don’t know. He’s acting like I’ve been calling the shots this whole time and all he’s done is react to my insanity. I have a memory-flash of something Dawn said in a family-therapy session, right before my dad split—He’s calm but wrong, and I’m loud but right, but since he’s calm, it always seems like he’s right.
“Did you talk to Ashley? She’s really upset,” he says in the same placating voice.
“Why do you like her? You’re supposed to be with me,” I blurt out.
His eyes widen. All the kids at the computer cubicles put on very intent fake-not-listening faces, like they are way too engrossed in copy-pasting a Wikipedia article about feudalism to pay any attention to this ridiculous live-action telenovela we’re performing in the middle of the library.
“Are you kidding right now?” he asks with ice in his voice, raising his eyebrows.
“No! You’ve been—”
The librarian glares at me and raises a passive-aggressive two fingers. (When the faculty want us to quiet down, they have this infinitely irritating peace-sign gesture that means “quiet,” occasionally supplemented by the specific and immensely irritating phrase “Heads up, hands up.”)
I lower my voice incrementally. “You keep jerking me around. And I’m not just talking about the past couple of weeks. You’ve been trying to play both sides for a really long time, and I can’t just keep sitting around waiting for you to choose me, Gideon.”
He glances around wildly, his face bright red, as if we are in a scandalous French sex farce where he is a common waiter and I’m a married duchess who just took my boobs out.
“Why . . . dude, why are you bringing this up now?”
“This has been going on for too long,” I hiss.
“I don’t even know how to feel about any of this.” He gestures at his computer screen, where the last chapter of the thing I wrote glares mercilessly at me. “You don’t see how this is weird for me? At least I try, Scarlett. I mess up, but I try to talk to people and be open and see where they’re coming from.”
“By making fun of the losers and the fat kids, right? Wow. That’s amazing.”
“As opposed to you? You just cross your arms and judge everybody else and just—sometimes it’s like you suck the air out of the room.”
I look down, pushing my hand against my forehead, feeling like my brain could explode at any moment.
He lowers his voice. “How could you write that stuff about me? About my family? I just—I can’t believe you’d do something like that.”
He’s shaking his head, horrified, like I’m Frankenstein’s monster, refusing to even look at me.
“I’m sorry, I really didn’t—”
“It’s like you’re always testing me or something.”
“I don’t mean to.” My voice comes out small.
“Well, if it matters now, I, um . . . I thought I did like you. Or, I think I do. I don’t know. You just make it so hard.” He X-es out of the browser and stands up, grabbing his book bag and storming off.
“What makes it so hard?” I ask as he walks away.
He comes striding back and gets really, really close to me and says, “You can’t have an inferiority complex and a superiority complex. Just pick one.”
Then he does actually storm off.
I feel the tingling in my arms and legs that I know means the beginning of a panic attack, and I barrel into the girls’ bathroom by the band hallway. I brace myself against the sink and stare into the mirror, trying to tell the anxious girl reflected back at me that everything’s going to be fine. The more I freak, the weirder I’ll act, and the worse it’ll be.
I’m reaching for the emergency Xanax I keep rolled in a plastic bag in my pencil box when I hear a sniffle from the handicapped stall. I glance over and see a plume of smoke drifting from above the chipped iron walls. I clear my throat.
A familiar, tearful whine: “Who’s out there?”
“Ashley? Is that you?”
Silence.