Chapter Thirty-Seven
OfficialEndeavourHigh: Seniors: is anyone else just straight up not having a good time rn
The midday light shines through my gauzy curtains, and I roll over so I’m facing the wall. I pull the hood of Hayes’s sweatshirt over my head to block out the rest of the light. It smells like him, and that helps.
I took a mental health day. It’s the first time I actually put my own mental well-being over my possibly obsessive desire to be perfect at school.
My mom was terribly proud. She’s been drilling this into my head for years, that I’m more important than my grades, that I need to take care of myself, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t her affirming words and years of emotional support that made today happen.
I couldn’t tell her it was someone else’s vitriol.
I haven’t told her what Lowry said. I haven’t told anyone.
It was bad enough breaking down in front of Hayes yesterday.
I thought about telling Esha or Piper or, hell, even one of my brothers.
But every time that mental video started to play, they each reacted with intense anger.
It’s anger on my behalf. Maybe even warranted.
Probably warranted, I can admit, but I can’t handle it.
I can’t imagine handling someone else’s anger on top of all of my own feelings.
But this day isn’t about wallowing in feelings, my own or anyone else’s.
It was a practical decision. To spare me from going back into that building.
I just couldn’t do it. Not yet. That place was home, and now every time I look at that sunlit bench near the windows, I’ll think of my own heartbreak.
I’ll go back tomorrow, but I couldn’t do it today.
What if Lowry really does get me in trouble? What then?
Esha and Piper have both been texting me sporadically throughout the day.
Just saying the things they would’ve had they passed me in the hall.
Luke asked if I needed him to beat anyone up.
I shuddered at the thought. Hayes hasn’t said much since I told him I wouldn’t be at school, maybe sensing that I’m overstimulated.
I thought I would enjoy spending the day in bed, but it’s too quiet in the house and my mind keeps replaying those harmful words over and over again like a broken record.
I run my hands through the mountain of blankets I’m buried under, trying to find my phone.
By the time I find it tucked under my pillow, I’ve decided I’m understimulated. So I text him.
Do you want to do something? I ask. After school, I mean.
Sure, he responds almost immediately. History is boring as fuck.
Why do you have such disdain for the humanities? I ask him. Even having the ability to joke right now feels like a miracle.
I don’t. I’ll have you know the girl who sits next to me in English has changed my view of the entire subject.
I want to be flattered by that, but my ability to cut up has fled as quickly as it appeared.
And what if she’s changed HER view on the entire subject? I ask.
There’s a period of silence long enough for me to look out at the window and watch the birds gathered around my mom’s feeder. I pick at the skin around my nails. When I glance back at the screen, I watch those three dots show up and then disappear. They show up again.
She hasn’t, he says in one message. Then: I bet I can prove it.
My eyes roll, and I start to respond when the dots appear again.
If I prove it, I win, and you have to go on a date with me.
We’re dating, and I literally just asked you if you wanted to do something, I fire back.
Yes, I’m trying to be funny, he sends.
So how do you plan to prove that I haven’t given up? My eyes drift to my overcrowded bookshelves. To the pictures of Darcy and Lizzy on my wall. If I really have given up, this room is going to need a makeover. My whole life will need a makeover.
Do you want to go to the bookstore? he asks.
Obviously, I type back reflexively, without considering the implications. Damn it. But that doesn’t mean anything. Normal people go to bookstores. Not just people who devote their lives to the study of literature.
I’ll pick you up in 30.
After those minutes pass, he greets me with that smug grin. And his glasses. Ugh. I wish his face wasn’t so precious to me. I would appreciate a warning next time he’s gonna break out those very cute glasses.
I walk up to where he stands beside his car, and I put my hands on his shoulders and stand on my tiptoes to kiss him.
“You’re late. That was thirty-two minutes,” I say against his lips.
Hayes smiles, and there are so few things I love more than feeling that expression on his mouth against mine. I go to pull away, and he doesn’t let me. His arms stay wrapped around my waist, and his fingers dig into the fabric of the hoodie he still hasn’t realized I stole.
“I don’t know what she said to you.” He sounds low and close. “But it can’t be enough for you to give up on yourself.”
I extricate myself, because I need some space from the conviction in his voice. He lets me go, but I think that’s only because connected like that, we can’t maneuver into the car.
“So, how was school?” I ask as I buckle my seatbelt. It’s a poor attempt at a subject change, and it makes me sound like his mom picking him up from kindergarten, but it’s all I’ve got.
“Weird without you.” He allows the verbal pivot as he backs out of the nearly empty driveway. “As I’m sure you already know.” He heads toward the highway, and I enjoy the passing scenery for a moment.
“On a Wednesday? With our class schedules? You probably wouldn’t have even seen me.” That’s an intentionally pessimistic take, but true nonetheless.
“I know, but”—he shrugs—”it was still weird. I kept thinking you’d be there every time I walked past your spot.”
I shudder at the thought of that bench. “Maybe I need a new spot.”
He rolls up to a stoplight, and he looks over at me with one eyebrow raised. “You don’t like change, and I’m supposed to believe that you just want to become a whole new person?”
He’s right; I do hate change. I despise it. But I hate failure more. I’d rather be a whole new person than a failed prodigy who is in trouble with the administration of a college and a high school.
We continue in silence, the car moving us forward but our conversation stalling. There’s really nothing else to say.
He’ll get used to the new me! As soon as I do, I suppose! Maybe I can get really into rollerblading!
After we park and meander into the mall, he holds the bookstore door open for me.
I certainly don’t relish the smell of new books.
It’s inconsequential. And the sight of those fancy, leatherbound classics absolutely doesn’t soften my heart at all.
Not even a little. The fact that a new edition of Poe’s poetry is standing face out, like it’s staring at me, doesn’t stop me in my tracks in the doorway. No sir!
I walk toward it, despite telling myself rather aggressively not to.
My fingers run over the rich leather spine, then run over each letter of the title impressed on the cover.
I admit that rouses something in my soul.
It pinches a very specific part of my chest, some part Hayes probably knows the anatomical name for.
If I don’t try anymore, I won’t fail anymore. And if that means giving up the way those pages feel under my fingers, then so be it.
I dash away.
I end up in front of an endcap that’s all detective fiction. I wouldn’t have any reaction to that at all, except I happen to remember Edgar Allan Poe basically originated the detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I stomp away.
Rounding another corner, I arrive at the children’s section.
The colors are all bright and fun, and the bookshelves are half my height.
There’s a tiny armchair in the corner that’s made for a tiny person, but I sit in it anyway.
My knees have no place to go but propped up right below my face, and I rest my chin there.
“The internet makes a lot of jokes about losing people like you in bookstores, but I actually did.” Hayes appears and leans against a half-height bookshelf.
“People like me?” I question.
“People that belong here.” He sits down on the floor next to me, on a carpet that looks like a rainbow.
“I very clearly do not belong here.” I gesture to myself, stuffed in a way-too-small chair made for a child that’s probably not old enough to read by themselves.
“What did she say to you, Novella?” He sits with his legs crossed underneath him, and he leans forward with his hands folded in his lap. I have his utmost attention like this, and I feel the weight of that.
“She told me I don’t belong.” I look at the yellow stripe in the carpet he’s sitting on.
I don’t know why I focus on that instead of the others.
I don’t really even like yellow. “There were a bunch of other things, but she said this is her world, and I’m just …
an outsider. Socially inept. Poor parents.
Weird. ‘Fragile.’ She actually said ‘fragile.’ And … other stuff.”
Those words feel like acid in my throat. There’s a baking soda volcano in my chest, and it’s trying to erupt out of my mouth.
“You have to know that’s all bullshit.” He stares at me like we’re discussing statements of fact and I’m misunderstanding. Like I just said the sun doesn’t rise in the east and the Titanic never sank.
“Is it?” I shrug. We’re not discussing facts. We’re talking about how the Titanic’s sinking could’ve been prevented by never sailing in the first place.
“Nova.” He moves closer, close enough that I’m almost forced to look him in the eyes. When I do, I relax just the slightest bit. He’s not furious. He’s determined. “It can’t be the first time someone’s gotten pissed off by how smart you are.”
He chuckles, and I feel the rush of air on my chin.
That was a joke, and I get it, but it’s not funny, because it isn’t the first time.
This is always happening. Maybe not quite to such an extreme, but I’m always doing too much or saying too much or feeling too much or being too much.
People don’t handle me well. So I should change.
It’s not the first time, but it’ll be the last.