I look down. What’s left of the bruises Donnie gave me are in plain sight. My stomach twists. I roll down my sleeves, until I realize the act of hiding them will inspire more questions.
“Nothing,” I mutter.
“Is that why you were seeing my mom?”
I laugh. “Yeah, totally. I punch myself in the arms a lot. It’s a real problem.”
He doesn’t say anything, and I wonder if his mom actually did see people who punched themselves in the arms a lot, and then I feel really stupid. And then I figure if I feel this stupid, I might as well go double or nothing:
“So can I sit with you at lunch on Monday?”
“No.”
He gets to his feet. The way he moves is so light, easy. I’m jealous of how he walks around school with everyone thinking these horrible things about him, like it doesn’t mean anything. I can barely maintain eye contact anymore.
He grabs the vodka and takes a long sip from it. When he’s finished, he wipes his mouth and contemplates the bottle, and there’s something so beautiful and lonely about it that I almost wish I had a camera. I shake the thought away. He sets the bottle down and returns to his spot beside me. Dips his legs back in.
“What’ll you give me for it?” he asks.
I stare. “What?”
“To sit with me at lunch on Monday? What will you give me for it?”
I flip him off. He laughs. I guess I could hide in the washroom for the rest of the year, but I don’t know. It’d be nice to make Anna think that I had an ally. The illusion of someone being on my side. I reach into my pocket for an antacid and shove it in my mouth.
“What do you want?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe I should stop putting dents in my crappy reputation. It’s bad enough being a waster, but it’s a thousand times worse being a waster who hangs out with Regina Afton, right?”
I ignore that. “You want to know why I was seeing your mom?”
“Why else do you think I let you come here?”
“Guess. If you guess right, I’ll tell you.”
He leans back and stares at the sky. “I can’t. I have you mostly pegged, but I just can’t figure out why you of all people would need my mom’s help.”
“You have me pegged,” I repeat.
He nods. “You’re Anna Morrison’s right hand. That’s the lowest form of life on the highest part of the social ladder. There’s not much to you.” He straightens before I can reply. “Okay, let me try: Your dealer ex-boyfriend got you hooked on Adderall, and shrink visits were part of your recovery process.”
I roll my eyes. “Wow, got it in one.”
“It’s probably something boring like an eating disorder.”
My stomach lurches. I don’t want to talk about this with him anymore. “Forget it. I’m not telling you even if it means I have to sit alone every day for the rest of the year.”
“I’ll walk you to your classes,” he says, looking at me.
I stare at him. He’s serious. He’ll let me sit with him and he’ll walk me to my classes if I tell him why I was seeing his mom. My fingers tingle—some kind of physical response to let me know this is a deal that’s too good to pass up, and before I’ve even really decided to tell him, I’m telling him, just spewing it out: “I couldn’t eat.”
“So I was right.” He sounds disappointed. “Eating disorder.”
“It wasn’t an eating disorder,” I say. He raises an eyebrow and I flush, trying to figure out a way to explain it. “I wanted to eat and I couldn’t.”
Everyone thought it was an eating disorder, at first, and that’s when Kara really started hating me. It drove her crazy every time Anna slid half her lunch to me looking all concerned. When I stopped eating, people cared.
“I went to a bunch of doctors, and they couldn’t find anything physically wrong me …so I started seeing your mom.”
“But you can eat now?”
I think of the pills in my pocket. “Mostly.”
“So you just woke up one day and you couldn’t eat anymore? Really?”
I nod. “Something like that.”
Liz is out. I put my hand in the water and try to ignore that voice in my head. Liz is out. I remember waking up that Monday, sitting down at the table for breakfast, and ending up over the sink, puking. I thought it was nerves. I thought it would go away.
“Why?” he asks. “What was the reason?”
“That’s between me and your mom,” I say, but it’s a lie. I never told her why I couldn’t eat, even though I knew. I just fed her half-truths because she was so warm and I wanted her to like me more than I wanted her to help me. And she would’ve never liked me if she’d known. “So can I sit with you or not?”
“No. But thanks.”
I stare at him. He stares back, a small smile at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re an asshole,” I tell him.
“What did you think was going to happen? I hate going to school and you’re the reason why. Just think about that for a minute and then tell me if you’re still shocked.”
“It didn’t have to be like that for you,” I snap. “You think about that.”
“I’m so sorry that I came to Hallowell and forgot to genuflect in front of your best friend,” he snaps back. “Not that it makes a difference. Liz Cooper was on her knee for Anna all the time, and it didn’t do her any favors in the end, right?”
“Shut up.”
“But don’t you want to talk about Liz? Don’t you want to talk about that time you sabotaged her homework? Broke into her locker? Trashed her things?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “Michael, stop—”
“Started that rumor campaign about her? Hey, remember you told Duane Storey she was a total dyke when she was really into him?”
“Michael—”
“And I’ve been dying to know…was there actually a weekly ‘Make Liz Cooper Cry’ competition, or did it just turn out that way?”
“Liz was the reason I saw your mother,” I snap. It catches Michael off guard. His eyes widen, just a little. “You don’t have me pegged.” I bite my lip. Hard. “And I liked Liz. I didn’t get off on watching Anna torture her every fucking day. She was my—”
“Friend?” he finishes in disbelief.
Once upon a time. Once upon a time, I really, really liked Liz. Total girl-crush. Being around her was so easy. And Liz liked me too. A lot. That was the problem.
She’s pulling you away…
“Okay, wait, so you fucked her up,” Michael says slowly. “And you went to my mom because you couldn’t eat because you were fucked up because you fucked Liz up?”
“Something like that, yeah,” I mutter.
Somehow this new piece of information only makes him hate me more. “Always the victim, right? Liz tried to kill herself, and I’m supposed to sit here and feel sorry for you because you feel guilty about it?”
“She tried to kill herself?” I whisper.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” He nods. “Took a bunch of pills over spring break at her grandparents’. Her grandmother found her.” I shake my head slowly. “And she still came back to school. That’s amazing, isn’t it? And that whole time you were ruining my life in the morning and seeing my mom in the afternoons….” I press my hand against my mouth. “What do they say, again? You reap what you sow.”
I didn’t know she tried to kill herself.
“Then this should make you feel good,” I say. “Donnie Henderson? I totally didn’t have sex with him, but not for lack of him trying really hard—” My voice breaks. “I even have the bruises to prove it.”
Silence. He gets it, and for a second he almost looks sorry, sick. “Regina—”
“Tell Liz,” I say, “the mean girl totally got what she deserved in the end.”
This was stupid, coming here. I turn away from him, make my way across the concrete to that small strip of grass that will lead me out. I’m almost there when he calls my name, and then I stop and he says, “Nobody deserves that.”
My house is quiet. Empty .
My parents work. They work and work and work. Except there’s no work in Hallowell, so they go to the city, even though they’re too old for the hours and commute, but that’s okay with me because otherwise we might have to talk.
I sit at the kitchen table and press my face against its cold wooden surface. I stopped crying between my house and Michael’s, but I could start again, so I just want to stay here and not move. I am not moving. Everything is fine, just so long as nobody moves me. But then the sun goes down and the room gets dark and I haul myself up from the table and shuffle to my room. I turn on the light and sit on the bed. Nobody deserves that. I imagine the words coming from Anna’s mouth, Kara’s, Josh’s mouth, and then I do cry. One stupid tear after the other. My stomach doesn’t feel so great, so I take an antacid and then I take another one. Nobody deserves that.
But I’m starting to wonder.
To: Regina Afton
From: The YourSpaceTM Team
Subject: You have been invited to join the IH8RA group on YourSpaceTM!
Dear Regina,
You have been invited to join a fun new group on YourSpaceTM! Click the link to sign into your YourSpaceTM account and find out who wants YOU to be a part of THEIR group!
Regards,
The YourSpaceTM Staff
It’s probably from some band. No one I know e-mails me anymore.
But it’s fun to pretend to be wanted.
I click the link and I’m sent to a page that prompts me for my username and password. I type them in and wait for the browser to load.
A few seconds later, this pops up:
You’ve been invited to join the IH8RA group on YourSpaceTM. If you would like to join this group, click ACCEPT. If you do not want to join this group, click NO, THANKS (the group will not be notified).