CHAPTER 3 #2
Which was funny because I rarely drew him in a happy scenario. Sometimes he was bleeding to death, or sometimes he was missing limbs, or sometimes he was in a car about to veer off a cliff.
Mrs. Tubs would’ve had a field day with me if I hadn’t stopped going to therapy.
But Kit was invincible. I’d always put him in life-or-death scenarios and drag him through my dark feelings, but he would never actually die. Something about that made me feel better.
I sketched him in a very much alive scenario now, with his slender, long limbs, jagged hair, and even sharper eyes. I drew him leaning against a brick building, eyes shifting sideways as people walked past him.
Maybe I’d draw a piano about to fall on him. Or a venomous snake at his ankles. It was still up in the air.
Part of my NYU dream had always included Kit.
One day, I wanted to create a graphic novel with him as the main character.
I’d spent all of high school practicing by drawing him over and over, waiting until college—until my skills were finally good enough—to start it for real.
Jamie had promised he’d help me write it.
Back when NYU still felt certain for both of us, he’d called it our future project.
Another dream abandoned, but not just by him this time. By me.
My music suddenly cut off as a call came through, and I picked my phone up from where I’d set it on my desk to check the caller ID. Quickly, I pressed answer, readjusting my headphones. “Hey, girl.”
“Hey,” Nellie responded, but there was no hint of a smile in her voice. “I can’t believe you let me go to school alone today. I expected as much from Jamie, but from my best friend?”
“Nell, I love you, but going to school for you? That’s crossing a line.”
“You should’ve seen it. Oh, it was so awkward.
” The last word came out almost like a wail.
“I was the only one in all the classes, and since we’re already done with exams, there was nothing to do.
It was basically seven hours of me just chatting with the teachers.
Mrs. Houser even started showing me her vacation pics from Hawaii. Horrible, Daisy. Horrible.”
“That’s what you get for being a good student. You could’ve had ice cream, but instead, you chose to bond with Mrs. Houser.” I couldn’t even imagine being in her shoes. I would’ve faked sick at the nurse’s office. “Wait. I thought you were grounded. You have your phone?”
“I’ve paid my penance.”
“More like your parents took mercy on you and felt bad for grounding their golden child.”
“Jamie would take offense to that, but I agree.” Nellie chuckled, but the sound quickly melted into something more complicated. “Jamie said you two got ice cream. He also said… Well, he mentioned that—um, that—”
“That Dalton showed up?”
Nellie was quiet, and I sat back in my seat, staring at Kit’s half-drawn face.
Nellie, Jamie, and I had been best friends since the start of freshman year, and while we were the kind of friends that shared practically everything together, feelings were usually exempt.
At least in the romantic sense. For example, Nellie never really told me what happened between her and the bad boy she’d been friends with four years ago, and I never really told her why Dalton and I had broken up.
“What is it with all the ghosts coming back from the past?” Nellie muttered, and I knew she was talking about Beckham Jennings. An ex-friend instead of an ex-boyfriend, but with a history just as tangled. “Now that he’s back, we should TP his house. Or egg his car.”
“He’d just pay someone to clean it up.”
Nellie grumbled on the other line. “Jamie said Dalton acted all nonchalant. Like no time had passed.”
The image of Jamie relaying everything to Nellie made me feel nauseous. “He’s making it sound more than what it was.”
“I’d hate to see you get hurt again, Daisy.”
“Please, me? Hurt? Psh. I’m over him, Nell. Swear to God. I was totally fine when we saw him.”
“Throwing your ice cream on him doesn’t sound fine,” she said gently, clueing me into just how many beans Jamie had spilled. “Not that I’m complaining! I wish you’d have gone for his face, and taken a picture so I got to see.”
Nellie and Jamie had been on the front lines during the Dalton Fallout.
It’d been the last week of summer vacation, and I’d spent the entirety of it crying in either Nellie’s bed or Jamie’s, because I couldn’t go home and worry the kids.
They’d taken turns watching them for me while Mom had been at work, and whoever wasn’t with the kids was with me.
That week before school started blurred together, but I could still remember lying in Nellie’s bed with Jamie kneeling on the floor beside it. His eyes had been glassy.
“Why are you crying?” I’d asked him in a voice thick with tears.
Jamie had looked shattered. “Because you are.”
“I still think that fake dating idea was a good one,” Nellie said, drawing me back from the memory. “Hire a guy for the summer to hold hands with and rub Dalton’s nose in the fact that he lost you.”
“He didn’t lose me.” More like he threw me away. “Besides, it’d be too suspicious. I suddenly get a boyfriend when he gets back into town? And hiring someone, Nell? What, should I find one on an escort service?”
That made my best friend laugh. “I’m sure there are guys from school who will take one for the team.”
“Yeah, and who will be quiet about it?”
“Jamie would.”
“Jamie is…” Wrong, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Anyone would look at Jamie and me, though, and see the platonic bond as if it were a red rope tied around us. Friends. “We already talked about this. I need a Mr. Darcy type, not—Sydney Carton.”
“Who?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. Just… not Jamie.”
Nellie let out a breath on the other end of the phone, and I pictured her sitting on her bed, tipping the crown of her head against her headboard. “Be honest with me, Daisy.” She paused. “You don’t still have feelings for Dalton, do you?”
The oxygen in my lungs shriveled. The question was direct. Very Nellie Brighton. Unavoidable, unless met with a lie. “I am being honest. I’m over Dalton Giovanni.”
The strong declaration was true… enough.
I was over him in the sense that I no longer fantasized about what it’d be like if he climbed the tree right outside my window, knocked, and begged me to come back to him.
I no longer imagined hearing the words I’d been waiting nearly a year for. “I made a mistake.”
But maybe I wasn’t over him in the sense that if he did climb my tree, knock on my window, and beg for me back right this very second… I wasn’t sure what I’d say.
Nellie didn’t need to know that, though.
“He’s no good for you,” Nellie said. “Jamie agrees.”
“Jamie’s there, too?”
“He just came in to drop off one of my socks. It got mixed into his laundry.”
I felt weird thinking that he might’ve heard me reject the idea of fake dating him, but more importantly, I felt angry. I sat up in my desk chair, pencil nearly flying from my grip. My voice was eerie. “Put him on the phone.”
It only took a second for her to pass her phone over. “Jamie speaking.”
“Snitch,” I all but growled. “You didn’t have to tell Nell that I panicked over seeing Dalton.”
“I didn’t tell her you panicked,” he said calmly, inadvertently relaying it to his sister. “I told her you threw your ice cream on him.”
“Same thing!” Nellie heard the extreme reaction and assumed… something. Something I didn’t need her assuming. “Maybe I should tell her about how you’re in the market for a girlfriend. Put her back on. Maybe she and I could see if Raelynn’s still interested—”
Jamie didn’t pass the phone back to Nellie. Instead, he hung up.
Now that the call was over, music blared back through my headphones, nearly shattering my eardrums before I could scrape them off my head. The song still played, but the mood to finish Kit’s face was gone. The mood to strangle the life out of Jamie had taken its place.
I grabbed my phone and opened a text thread.
I’m going to wring your neck the next time I see you
Jamie
You can’t even reach it
;)
I all but threw my phone onto my desk, flopping dramatically back into my chair, now glaring up at the ceiling. I was certain of two things in that moment.
One? I meant what I’d told Nellie. I was so over Dalton Giovanni. Or I would be.
Or, I mean—I was. As far as Jamie and Nellie were concerned, I totally was.
Two? James Brighton was dead meat.