Mychelle laughed. “That much is clear. It seems to me Lorenzo was done with you after you bled all over his sheets. Figures you were a virgin.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek and willed myself not to react. Because the only thing worse than Mychelle’s comment would be her knowing how much it stung.
“Isn’t that a lot of effort just to mess with me?”
“I don’t think of it that way. There are rules, Hawthorn. You forgot them. I’m just reminding you of your place.”
“Which is where exactly?”
“Wherever I want it to be.”
I managed to laugh at that one, but only because I knew it would make Mychelle angry. “You know, I can’t wait until we’re out of high school and no one cares about you anymore. It must suck to know that your life is never going to be better than it is right now.”
I saw the flash of anger in Mychelle’s eye.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her grin pulling her skin too tight. “I have no intentions of turning into Lizzie Lovett.”
She turned and left the diner. For a moment, everyone was silent, and I realized how loud we must have been. We’d caused a scene. Then Vernon said, “An’ good riddance to ya!”
There were laughs all over the diner, and everyone went back to eating. Knives scraped plates, coffee mugs were picked up then set down, and bags rustled as people looked at what they’d purchased.
Christa came over to me. “Are you OK?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Maybe you should go home.”
I thought that was an excellent idea.
? ? ?
At first, I was fine. I turned on the radio as loud as I could stand and focused on the road. I tried to keep my mind blank.
But I wasn’t even halfway home when I started crying, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. The road blurred, and I had to pull over. I leaned against my steering wheel and sobbed. I didn’t care if people in other cars could see me, didn’t care if everyone else in the entire world knew that it felt like someone was ripping my insides in half. Everyone except for Mychelle Adler, that was. And Enzo. Weak, selfish Enzo Calvetti. The two of them deserved each other.
After a while, I calmed down enough to drive, though I sniffled the whole way home. I was pretty sure I’d cried more in the past two weeks than I had in my entire life up to then. I couldn’t help it though. Enzo had taken my heart out of my body and was slowly crushing it under his shoe, the way he put out a cigarette. Had he crushed Lizzie’s heart like that too? Did that have anything to do with why she walked into the woods and never came out?
There wasn’t anyone at my house. For once, I wished for family. I didn’t want to be alone. I imagined Mychelle would be smug about it. “See,” she’d say, “even Hawthorn’s family doesn’t want to be around her.”
Enzo, Sundog, even Lizzie in a way. Everyone was leaving me. I felt as alone as a guy in a zombie movie who goes outside to discover his city is ravaged and he’s the only survivor.
Except not everyone was lost to me.
I went to my room and found my phone, which still had a tiny bit of charge left. Emily picked up on the first ring.
“Can we talk?” I asked.
She told me she’d be right over.
? ? ?
I spent a lot of time crying, and Emily spent a lot of time trying to make me feel better.
Eventually, my sobs turned into gasps and hiccups, and I was able to start talking. So I told her everything.
“God,” Emily said, “Mychelle is such a bitch.”
“I hate her.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think she was after revenge. I think she was jealous.”
I wondered if Emily was feeling OK, because she sure wasn’t having coherent thoughts. “You think Mychelle Adler was jealous of me?”
“That kiss. The way you described it. I think it got to her.”
“Why?”
“How many kisses like that do you think Mychelle has had?” Emily asked.
“Like, a million?”
“Yeah, right. Guys kiss Mychelle for one reason, and it has nothing to do with romance.”
It was a little crazy to think about. That while you were envying other people, they could be envying you too. It reminded me of something Connor had said, about life looking different depending on where you were standing.
“What about him?” I asked. “What’s Enzo doing with her?”
“I doubt Enzo could even answer that. He’s so broken, Hawthorn.”
Emily and I sat on my bed and talked and talked, and it was no different from every time we’d ever hung out, every sleepover we’d ever had. Except I’d never been so miserable before.
“You can say ‘I told you so’ if you want,” I said.
But she didn’t. Instead, she talked about how everything was going to be OK. Some of what she said was probably true, and some was probably to calm me down, but I appreciated it either way.
“I feel so stupid,” I said. “She was dead the whole time, Emily. From the very start.”
And then I cried again.
“Look, you made a mistake. Yeah, you should have known better. But it happened, and it’s over, and there’s nothing you can do about it now. You just have to move forward.”
“I can’t. I can’t deal with all of this.”
“You can,” Emily said. “You will.”