19. Megan
CHAPTER 19
MEGAN
I t took every bit of self-control Megan had not to reach across the table and punch Charlie in his stupid face right there in the café.
“I knew you’d be angry,” he said.
“Then why did you do it?”
“I told you. I didn’t see a way out.”
“No, not that.” She stood, and he flinched. “Why did you lie to me? Why did you let me fight and stress out for no good reason? Do you have any idea how much sleep I lost?! I worked so hard! I made sacrifices. So did my mom. You saw me every day. There was no chance you didn’t see what I was going through, but you decided to keep it from me anyway. You could have told me the truth. You could have told me it was useless. Then at least I could have gotten some god damned sleep!”
Megan didn’t know what kind of reaction it was she expected out of Charlie. She hadn’t really thought her words through. They were just an angry impulse, but that didn’t make them any less true. Regardless, what she saw in him now would have been the last thing she would have predicted, given the opportunity.
He looked miserable. He looked like he was holding back tears. Part of her wanted to comfort him — the stupid part, she told herself. Why did she even feel sorry for him? He had everything. He didn’t have to work for anything, really. He could only fail up. The fact that Megan had to fight and claw just to avoid moving backwards made her want to scream.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was a woman from a poor family, and she could so easily lose everything after one thoughtless outburst. For all the freedom he claimed he lacked, Charlie never even considered her carefully balanced position, how one strong breeze could knock her down, and she would never be able to make her way back up to where he sat so easily.
Megan nodded to herself, having made the decision to retaliate the only way she really could. “No, I’m happy for you. Really. And I feel sorry for you, too. You’ll never know whether you would have gotten the fellowship on your own merits. But you’ve got it, and as long as that’s all that matters to you, you’ll probably be fine. Oh, who am I kidding?” She folded her arms. “You’re always fine. Anyway, we should reevaluate our agreement since we’ll be working at separate hospitals. You’ll probably need someone else to help relieve your stress. So we should end our arrangement to tie up any potential loose strings.”
“Loose strings?” If she thought he looked miserable before, that was nothing compared to now. All the light seemed to have gone from his eyes at once. “Are we breaking up over this? I thought we agreed?—”
“Don’t be silly, Charlie. You have to have a relationship in order to break up. As far as I can tell, we never did.” With that last cut, she walked out of the café without a single glance back.
She made her way to her locker to pack up and go home. She needed to take the rest of the evening to process what she’d just experienced, and the fact that her heart was breaking over it. No matter how tough she pretended to be, or how much she wanted to slap the man who had done this to her, she still cared about him. She still had all those happy memories of getting to know him, sneaking off with him, and going through the same stressful situations with him.
She had thought he was sharing the stress of the fellowship with her, which was why she’d been confused when he dealt with it the opposite way he’d been dealing with all the rest. Apparently, instead, he’d been dealing with the stress of lying to Megan, which made spending time with her the opposite of relaxing.
Megan slammed her locker shut, and turned to see Kayla standing behind her. “You made the right decision,” Megan said, “not bothering to apply for the fellowship. It was fixed from the start. The rest of us never stood a chance.”
It took Kayla a few seconds to put two and two together, but she did — far more quickly than Megan had in the end. “The Sullivans threw their weight around, didn’t they?”
“You could say that.”
Kayla sighed in sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Megan. I know how hard you worked for that.”
“And all for nothing,” Megan added with a grimace. “Charlie and I are through. There’s no point in seeing him anymore anyway. He’s not the person I thought he was.”
Kayla sat down on one of the benches. “He’s an asshole,” she said. “But I think he was probably pressured into taking it. His family is all about medicine. I doubt he was ever even allowed to consider another line of work. If he rejected a fellowship his dad secured for him, he’d probably get forty lashes or something. You have to feel a little sorry for him.”
“Well, I don’t,” Megan said.
“I’ll feel sorry for him for both of us, then, so you can be as angry as you need to be for as long as you need to.” She stood and hugged Megan goodbye. “Take it easy tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow. I just wanted you to know that it probably wasn’t malicious. He doesn’t hate you — he’s just afraid of his own family. I don’t know if that makes it better for you, but it would for me. Seriously, he’ll be punished for this. He’s probably already punishing himself. He’s going to hate it the whole time.”
Megan smiled a small smile. “He did look pretty miserable when he told me.”
“See?” Kayla grinned. “He’s suffering already. Karma’s a bitch, and you can take comfort in that. He’s going to hate this fellowship and wish he’d never taken it.”
“One can hope.” Megan patted Kayla on the shoulder, feeling a little better already, and headed out to get her bike.
She barely remembered the ride home. It was so full of overthinking and overanalyzing her situation that the ride itself was almost automatic. That was very unlike her. Normally, she used her bike ride home to decompress, get a little of the stress out, but this time it seemed to build with every mile. By the time she walked in the front door, she was shaking with a mixture of exhaustion and rage.
Her mother was already in bed, and Megan was grateful for it. She didn’t want to have a conversation with her mom right now. She didn’t want anyone to tell her to look on the bright side. For once in her life, she wanted to wallow in her own misery. Not only had she lost probably the biggest career opportunity she would ever have, she’d lost the best boyfriend she’d ever had along with it — that is, if he was even half the man he pretended to be. Megan wasn’t a person who dated around. On the whole, she just didn’t have time. So, far from a planned and calculated relationship, this one had felt so natural. But it had been a mistake.
She buried her face in her pillow and let herself cry when she thought about all she would be missing. And then she cried harder when she realized that she would have given up the fellowship in a heartbeat if it meant she got to stay with Charlie, but he hadn’t been willing to do the same thing for her in the end. Why did she always wind up loving people more than they loved her? Her mom was the only exception to that, and that was the relationship she should have stayed focused on. People like her didn’t get involved in romantic entanglements. People like her had no time for it. Every ounce of energy had to be put toward her goals. At least now she knew the game was actually rigged.