Chapter 20 #2
There’s nothing. Nothing at all. I’m simply empty, and something about that scares me.
I’ve been so composed since I walked down the Whitmores’ front steps and Grace shut the door behind me. It felt so surreal to walk back to school in glorious sunshine, the way I’ve done so often the last few years.
It must be the last scrap of common sense within me that carries me to the door at the end of our corridor. I know. I don’t know what I’ll do if he isn’t there, I haven’t thought ahead beyond this moment. Seconds tick away, then the door flies open.
Sinclair looks like he’s only just pulled on his hoodie, and I’m bracing myself for some remark. But he just looks at my face. “What happened?”
Fuck, coming here was a mistake. I can’t speak. Not even to my best friend. I just want to cry until I’m so tired that I fall asleep, so that I won’t have to feel all this anymore.
“Shit, Henry, what’s wrong?” Sinclair repeats, glancing past me. The corridor’s empty. I’m empty. There’s no point to anything. “Is something up with Grace?” he asks, and I don’t get how he does that. How he always knows just what my problem is.
My throat is still choked up as I nod.
“What’s wrong? Is she not well? Come on, say something! What’s—”
“Nothing’s wrong with her.” I get some words out, and my voice has never sounded so weird. Sinclair stares at me, and then I just say it. “It’s over.”
He opens his mouth. “What?”
“We split up. I split up with her. Over. Finished.” I’m raising my voice with every word, my eyes are burning again, and Sinclair understands.
He takes my wrist and pulls me into his room, past the wall by the door, which is plastered layers deep with the Polaroids he started taking in the second form—one of everyone who entered our shared room for the first time.
There’s a picture of me right at the top, next to the ones of Gideon, Omar, and Sinclair. The door shuts, and I just want to cry.
“Oh, boy. OK, come here, sit down.” Sinclair pushes me onto his unmade bed, and I wipe my eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie as he turns away.
He digs around in a drawer, pushes aside a tea caddy with the school logo on it, and reaches behind it.
Before I can ask what the hell he’s looking for, he’s straightened up again.
In one hand, he’s got a packet of Tunnock’s tea cakes, and there’s a bottle of gin in the other.
He raises his eyebrows inquiringly, and I make a grab for both.
I’ve never cared less about breaking the rules. The gin burns my throat. It has to stop. This terrible pain, I can’t bear it any longer.
I split up with Grace. It’s really true.
“OK.” Sinclair sits down next to me, takes the bottle away, and puts it on the desk. Then he hugs me. That’s the moment when I really start blubbering. Not in a cool way. Not cool at all. It’s the exact opposite of cool.
Sinclair doesn’t comment. He just waits till I’ve calmed down a bit. “So you split up with Grace,” he says slowly. “And the reason for that is called Emma.”
I shut my eyes because there’s no point in denying it. “It’s that obvious, is it?”
“Nope,” he contradicts me. “But I’m not your best friend for nothing.”
“I screwed up,” I whisper. “Shit, Sinclair, I’ve—”
“Henry,” he interrupts harshly. “Stop that shit. You haven’t screwed anything up. You’re smart. You’ll have done the right thing.”
“I split up,” I repeat slowly. “With Grace.” And it’s almost as though I hadn’t taken it in until this moment. I had that conversation. I didn’t just think the words, I said them out loud. Words that I can never take back.
“Does Emma know?”
“No,” I say hastily. “Course not. She’s . . . I dunno, but she doesn’t know about it.”
“You have to go to her,” says Sinclair. “It’s important for you guys to talk.”
“I can’t yet. It would look like I was just hooking up with her on the rebound. And don’t you dare say that’s just what I’m doing.”
“Well, in theory . . .” he begins, but he laughs as I glare at him. “I’m joking, Henry.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“I noticed.” He hands me the bottle. “Well, have a drink if you’re not going to talk to Emma today.”
I take it in silence and stare at the Dead Poets Society poster by his bookcase.
Today . . . Right now I don’t feel like I’ll ever be able to speak to Emma again without it coming across in the wrong way. I split up with Grace, and a naive part of me thought that would solve all my problems. But that’s not true. I don’t feel even a tiny bit better.
The gin burns in my throat, but what do I care?
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Henry, enough.” Sinclair takes the bottle away again. “Or you’ll be steaming in ten minutes.”
“That was the idea.”
“We have to go down to dinner.”
“No way am I going down to dinner.”
Sinclair rolls his eyes. “You always were a drama queen,” he murmurs. “Well, at least eat one of these. Here. And now talk about how you’re feeling.”
“I can’t talk about how I’m feeling.”
“Henry, that’s my bit. You can, and we both know it.”
I peel the foil off one of the tea cakes. “No, you’re right. Talking about feelings stinks.”
“But you feel better afterward.”
“It was a mistake, wasn’t it?” I blurt. “It was a mistake, right?”
Sinclair leans back against the wall and hands me the bottle again. “Does it feel like a mistake?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“No.” I sigh. “Stop it. Not that . . .”
“Henry, answer my question.”
“I don’t know, OK? I don’t know a single thing anymore.” I gulp. “I had everything. Fuck, why am I like this? Everything was perfect the way it was, wasn’t it?”
Sinclair shrugs his shoulders. “Was it?”
“Stop asking all my questions back at me.”
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s driving me nuts.”
“Because you have to face the truth,” he corrects me. “And that hurts. It’s OK, Henry, that’s what the gin’s for.”
I drink because it’s all pointless. “It was perfect,” I say in the end. “For a long time, it really was perfect, but it wasn’t enough. It was good, it was nice, and I had no idea that that isn’t everything. D’you understand? It was like driving down the motorway with the hand brake on.”
“Not good for the gears,” he remarks.
“What’s that got to do with the gears?”
“Well, the engine then, whatever. Either way, it wasn’t good.”
“It really wasn’t good,” I mumble, taking another swig. “Or, yes, it was good. But underwhelming-good.”
“And Emma’s overwhelming-good?”
“Emma is . . . No idea.”
“She’s hot, that’s for sure.”
“She’s not hot, she’s beautiful,” I say.
“Henry, stop drinking, you’re getting sentimental.” Sinclair goes to grab the bottle, but I pull it away in time.
“It’s true,” I insist. “Have you ever looked at her, Sinclair?”
“You’re in lust with her.”
“I’m afraid it’s more than that.”
“Have you shagged her?”
“God, no,” I retort hastily. “I’d never . . .”
“Yeah, fine, you have principles, got it.”
“Think of Grace,” I mumble, letting him take the bottle this time. “How shitty would that have been of me?”
I don’t know if I’m imagining the bitter twist to his lips as he drinks. “Pretty shitty.” When I don’t say anything, he raises his head. “What? Don’t look at me like that.”
“Are you thinking about Tori? She’s dating Valentine these days, right?”
“The guy’s a tool, but I guess she knows that,” he says curtly. “And stop changing the subject. We’re talking about you and Emma.”
About me and Emma. I don’t know why, but at that second, I allow myself to think it for the first time. Emma and me. The two of us. I want that so badly.
“You have to go to her,” Sinclair says at the same moment I think, I have to go to her.
“I can’t,” I mumble. “Not now. I have to get this right, you know?”
“You’re Henry, you get everything right.”
I laugh miserably and reach for the bottle.
“No, no, I get it,” he says. “So wait a while, then.”
I want to go to Emma right now. More than anything. I want to be rash and impulsive. I want to kiss her and . . . Shit. I really do want to shag her. But with feeling. Hard but with feeling. God, Sinclair’s got to take that gin off me. How is it possible that the bottle’s almost half empty?
“We almost kissed,” I say. “Me and Emma. Yesterday, when we were in Glasgow. She met someone important to her there and afterward . . . It almost happened but I pulled away at the last moment. Not because I didn’t want to. Because of Grace. But Emma . . . I think she took it totally the wrong way.”
“Man, of course she did. How else would you have taken it?”
As a brush-off. Obviously. I pushed her away.
“I’m such an arsehole,” I mumble as I think about the hurt expression in Emma’s eyes.
“A supersensible arsehole.” Sinclair shrugs his shoulders.
“I have to talk to her,” I announce, and I’m about to stand up, but Sinclair pulls me back down to the bed.
“You’re drunk, Henry.”
“Don’t care.”
“I do, though. And so do you. You want to be sober when you tell Emma you love her.”
I groan. And I’d like to press pause. I’d like to stop being so confused. I’d just like to do the right thing. But instead, I’m leaving Grace—because I can’t see any future with her—for Emma. And I don’t have any future with her either, because she’s leaving in a year. What’s the point?
At that moment, I understand. There is no point in love.
There is just the heat in my belly and the fluttering in my chest the very first moment I saw her.
At the airport, when I didn’t know who she was but was sure I wanted to find out.
And I tried not to let myself get involved with her, I really tried, but the truth is that I want to kiss Emma Wiley.
I want her in my bed. I want to be the guy she tells everything to, whose arms she falls asleep in.
And I’m not prepared to deny that any longer.