My hand flew over my lips; they trembled under my fingertips. I wasn’t going to be able to hold back the tears for long; my throat burned intensely.
Rachel slowly rose up from the bed. It didn’t matter to me that Isaac was fully clothed from the waist down; just seeing her half-naked in a pair of pajama shorts and nothing but a bra, told me all I needed to know. I couldn’t understand. I tried. I tried so hard, but there was no other explanation.
The room was uncharacteristically hot and sticky. I didn’t know if it was simply because of the nearby burning furnace, or because my blood was on fire.
“What?” said Rachel, “you thought he was yours, didn’t you?”
Isaac seemed to be asleep, but his eyes cracked open and he barely looked at me. They were full of nothing warm, his eyes. They seemed darker, more perilous and cold.
“He would never want you,” Rachel went on, mocking me, making me feel like the total idiot I knew I was.
The first of many tears streamed down my face.
“You’re nothing,” she said, “You’re a weak, ghastly freak of a girl with a fantasy.”
Rachel then leaned down and started kissing him.
I saw him kiss her back.
I ran out of the room, tears barreling from my eyes and I dashed down the stairs as fast as I could, almost tripping halfway down when Zia came running up and caught me.
“What are you doing here?” she shouted. She wasn’t being rude, but she was genuinely concerned. I didn’t care. I was crying and Zia knew that I had seen something. She knew I saw the one thing that I did not want to see.
I hated her for it, for knowing all along, but never discouraging me from Isaac. No, Zia had tried to push Isaac and me together. And for that, Zia was as guilty as he was.
“Leave me alone!” I pushed my way past her. “Harry! Harry! Let’s go!” The tears choked me.
Harry came down the stairs after me. I didn’t have time to ease the utterly confused look on his face yet. I just wanted to get out of there and as far away from the Mayfair’s as I could.
“Adria,” Zia shouted, “You don’t understand!”
I ran toward the front door and then heard Isaac shouting my name from the stairwell. “Wait, Adria!” he said, his voice hoarse probably because he just had Rachel’s tongue down his throat. “It’s not what you think! Please wait!”
How dare he give me that cliché line.
I ran right out the door and jumped in Harry’s car. Harry followed and tried to get me to calm down, but I would not have it.
“Please, just take me home.”
Without another word, my best friend lived up to his title and we sped away.
9
I DIDN'T TELL HARRY what I saw until much later. The one time I really did want him to just leave it alone, Harry was sure to pry it out of me.
“That’s harsh,” he said, “but you have to see it from Isaac’s perspective.”
My lips parted in disbelief. What happened to my best friend whom I could confide in and I could trust to be on my side? And then I realized, he was the ‘guy perspective’ and that I could confide in and trust him more than anyone. Harry was not telling me what I wanted to hear, he was telling me what I needed to hear.
“You’re not his girlfriend,” Harry said plainly. We were sitting on the hood of his car in my driveway. “I admit, he could’ve been a little more clear about his intentions, but you two weren’t an item, so technically he didn’t do anything wrong.”
The truth stung.
“He hurt my feelings,” I said simply.
Harry nodded, agreeing. “True, but you did go to his house uninvited and you did go into his room, uninvited. I’m sure he didn’t mean for you to catch them.”
Needed to hear it or not, I wasn’t buying it yet.
“But he held my hand,” I argued, “and he put me in his lap. I didn’t instigate any of those things.”
Harry leaned his back against the car windshield. I did too. The freezing glass penetrated straight through my coat in seconds.
“Didn’t you tell me before that the first time you went to their house there were girls all over him?”
“There were,” I said, “but he wasn’t into them. It was weird....”
Harry hesitated in a long, brooding pause as if trying to get over the unforgivable fact that I seemed to be making up excuses. We both looked up at the star-filled sky. It was just the way it used to look back in Georgia. I used to sit out in that barren field around our house and gaze up at the stars for hours. To think, if I had only done that instead the night Alex and I saw what we saw, none of this would have happened.
“I hate to say this,” Harry went on, “but it’s your own fault for falling for someone who made a bad first impression to begin with.” I could see him shaking his head from the corner of my eye. Harry was straightforward and cruelly blunt, but I one hundred percent respected him for it. “If I saw Zia in a situation like you saw Isaac, there’s no way I could ever be attracted to her.”
I looked over at him defensively. “But Harry, I told you it wasn’t like that.”
“Are you sure?” He looked right back at me harshly. “Don’t make excuses for him, Adria. Unless you can really find a reason to back them up.”
I could find no reason to back them up.
But it didn’t matter to me that it was my fault for letting down my guard, that I got my hopes up too quickly, or that I read too far into a situation and twisted the events to make them something in my mind that they weren’t. Isaac Mayfair still led me on. Subtly I know, but sometimes subtle can be more powerful than straightforward flirting. This was one of those times.
Well, I was definitely not going to let it happen again.
When I was alone in my room that night after Harry had gone home, I had time to reflect. Or rather, I had time to see just how embarrassed I was by what happened and I didn’t know how I was going to show my face at school for the next day or two, or at Finch’s Grocery when Nathan could show up there. I was sure the whole Mayfair house was buzzing with rumors about how I ran away crying and that I was such a dumb girl to think Isaac was ever interested in me. I can’t think of anything more embarrassing than that.
All day Sunday, I dreaded Monday. Still mad at Zia, the last thing I wanted to deal with was having to avoid her at school.
To my relief, Zia was absent on Monday.
And she was absent on Tuesday.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
I was getting worried, and the school was starting to talk.
“I bet she dropped out like Julia Morrow,” said a girl in the hall between classes.
“That girl’s a freak show,” Tori said at lunch while passing me alongside her new friends, so that I would hear her.
“What if she was kidnapped like Sebastian?” said Harry.
We were in Geometry and Harry was whispering into the back of my head again.
“I’m really worried,” he said, “I haven’t heard from her at all. I even tried calling her landline last night, but no one answered the phone.”
It was strange. There were only two hundred people living in that house and for not one person to answer just didn’t seem right.
By the time I got home from school, I was prepared to dismiss everything. No one had reported Zia abducted like they did Sebastian, and it was true that Zia had a problem with keeping school hours before I ever met her.
Things weren’t so strange after all, I thought. Until Beverlee came home from work and I overheard her talking to Uncle Carl about how Nathan had not been back to work since Friday night.
I lay in bed staring at my cell phone that contained Isaac’s number, which I had never called. I thought about calling a hundred times, but all I had were a bunch of lame excuses I knew anyone would see right through. Isaac never told me I could just call him. He only gave me his number in case Alex ever came home.
But I didn’t want to talk to him anyway.
I tossed the phone on the end of the bed a little too hard and it bounced off and clunked against the hardwood floor. I curled up on my side with my pillow and fell asleep crying and angry. Only crying now because I was angry.
The knock at my bedroom door scared me awake. My eyes flew open and I lifted my head from the pillow.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” said Beverlee peeking around the door. “Zia’s downstairs and wants to talk to you.”
I lifted quickly, my mind still trying to catch up to being awake and I looked over at the clock on the nightstand. I thought it would be much later than nine. I felt like I had slept for hours.
I forced myself the rest of the way awake, but with incentive. I could only wonder why Zia would be at my house. Now I just had a few seconds to decide how I wanted to act toward her: still angry about the Isaac thing, over the Isaac thing completely, or just glad she was okay and full of questions about where she had been.
“Thanks,” I said to Beverlee, “can you send her up?”
Soon, Zia was knocking lightly against my opened door. She came inside; smiling cautiously, but there was also an apologetic glint in her eyes.
“Hey girl,” she said.
“Hey.”
She came over and stood near the bed, picking my cell phone up from the floor on her way.
“I really hope you don’t mind I’m here.”
I looked down at the swirly colors on my bedspread.
“No, I don’t mind,” I said and then I stared up at her, subconsciously trading the subject before it was too late, with a less embarrassing one. “Where have you been? Harry and I have been worried.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” She looked away briefly. “Isaac was really freakin’ sick with pneumonia and then Nathan got it, along with Dwarf and me. It sucked hardcore.”
“Pneumonia?”
Zia smiled softly as if there was some kind of hidden meaning behind it that I should know. “I’ll have tons of homework to catch up on.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” I said, “and Harry’ll be relieved to know. I’ll have to call him later. Soon. Soon, but later; I mean after you leave.”
Zia stopped my babbling. “I just don’t want you to be mad at me.”
The more embarrassing subject was inevitable. I just wished it held off a bit longer.
“I’m not mad at you,” I said, sitting up the rest of the way while for the first time realizing that was the truth. “Look, I know what Isaac does isn’t your fault and since you’re living with his family, you can’t necessarily go around telling his secrets, or he’d probably kick you out.”
Zia shook her head. For a second, it seemed she wanted to say something and I guess I was kind of expecting her to explain herself, but she just looked away from my eyes.
I sighed.
“I would’ve done the same thing though,” she said finally, “if I were in your shoes.” But I got the feeling those were not the words she had wanted to say. They felt more like a tradeoff.
“So then what happened?” I said.
Zia went over to my vanity then and ran her fingers through her short, spiky bangs. Her reflection looked back at me through the mirror. “I told you why we’ve been M.I.A for so long.”