Scene One
I wake up before my alarm. All night, all weekend, I’m actually not sure I have been sleeping at all.
I’ve been in and out of consciousness, hoping for something to change but knowing it won’t.
My chest hurts, or is it my heart? It’s hard to tell.
People are always throwing around the term “broken heart,” but this is physically painful.
So much so that as I lie in bed, waiting for the buzzer to sound, I press my hands over my heart, like if I apply enough pressure, I can keep the pieces from drifting apart.
“Charlie’s here,” my mom calls.
“I’ll be right there.” I leap out of bed and throw on yesterday’s jeans. I pull on a white tank top and a blue cardigan that’s dangling over my desk chair.
I’ve been avoiding Charlie’s calls and texts.
Olivia’s, too. I don’t really know what to say to them, and I don’t feel like hearing how sorry they are for me.
Especially since I haven’t heard it from Rob.
He hasn’t called me or come over. Which makes me feel like he isn’t going to apologize, because whatever happened Friday night is just the beginning of something else.
The worst part is, I’m not even sure he was home once this weekend. I stayed up Friday night, almost until morning, just to see if he got in. He never did. No tires on the gravel. No bedroom light. Nothing.
“Everything okay?” Mom asks when I come trudging into the kitchen. I know I probably look like a mess. I haven’t washed my hair since Friday, and I didn’t even bother trying to find my makeup bag this morning.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You sure? You’ve been really quiet.” She puts her hands on her hips and peers at me, the way she does when she knows I’m not telling the whole truth. I’m surprised she even noticed. She and my dad have been locked in his study whispering for most of the weekend.
I perk my voice up and give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” My dad is sitting at the kitchen counter, and he taps his cheek with his index finger.
I go over to him, and he pulls me into a hug.
“Knock ’em dead, cookie,” he whispers to me.
There’s no reason for him to say that today, but I’m not surprised.
He has always known when something’s not right, and how to make it better.
And today, more than anything, I wish I could go back to being a little kid, when my dad calling me “cookie” could turn back time and erase anything that was wrong.
Instead I put on a smile, steal a sip of my dad’s coffee, and head out to Charlie’s honking car.
Olivia is in the back, her arms looped around the front seat. Twice in a week. We’ve definitely hit a new record.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry I’m late.” I slip in and click my seat belt into place. Maybe if I act normal, the world will play along.
“How are you?” Charlie asks. She’s turned to me wearing this grave expression, her features all set in a row. I expected her to be pissy about my being nonresponsive all weekend, or at least about my being late this morning, but if she is, she’s not acting like it.
“Um, fine. Are we going?”
Charlie glances back at Olivia.
“He’s an asshole,” Olivia says.
“She’s a traitor,” Charlie says.
I shrug. “It’s fine.”
“It is not fine,” Charlie says. She has that tone she uses with Jake when they’re about to get into a fight. I suddenly have the intense desire to bolt from this car. To run back into my house, curl up under my covers, and just never come out.
“It’s not like he was my boyfriend or anything,” I say.
“What?” Olivia interjects. “That’s so unfair.”
“It’s true,” I say. “We weren’t together together.
And she was his date and all.…” My voice trails off, and I look out the window.
We’re rolling out of my driveway. In the rearview mirror I can see my parents in our doorway.
My dad is reaching up to the light fixture on the porch, and my mom has a hand on his back, holding him up for balance.
I purposefully keep my eyes trained on my house as we pull away. I don’t look to the left, to Rob’s.
“I mean, I thought she was awful for asking to go with him,” Olivia says, “but this is too much. Kissing him? She’s your cousin.”
They kissed?
“We’re aware,” Charlie says. I can feel her glance at me, but I keep my eye trained on the passing trees.
Of course they kissed. They were practically glued together when we left.
But the thought of his lips on hers makes me feel like someone is trying to suck my stomach out through my belly button and shove the whole thing back down my throat.
“It’s fine,” I force myself to say. “Honestly.”
None of us says much more after that. We drive in silence, aside from the music that creeps steadily from the stereo. Something low and dull that I don’t recognize.
When Charlie broke up with Matt, her sophomore-year boyfriend and the first guy she slept with, it was bad.
She listened to crappy R&B love songs on repeat for, like, a week.
And she didn’t even love him, I don’t think.
Once, she said she liked that he wanted to be a doctor, but that was the only time she talked about anything besides the way he looked in a sweater.
The truth is that I feel humiliated and betrayed.
How could Rob have been standing there, holding her, when just a few nights ago he was holding me?
The entire school saw them together, dancing and kissing, and now I’m what?
Yesterday’s hookup? The idiot who believed her best friend wanted to be her boyfriend?
And who trusted that her cousin wanted to be a friend, rather than a backstabber?
When we get to upper, I try hard not to look for Rob’s car.
I don’t want to see him. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll either fall apart, beg him to change his mind, or say something that will cut him out of my life forever.
I want him gone, but I also want him here.
That’s the worst part. The fact that I want him to make this better.
That I need him to make this better. He’s the only one who can fix it.
Whenever there’s a problem, Rob’s the one that handles it.
I need him to handle this, too. For him to call himself a jerk, maybe even punch himself in the face, and then bring himself back to me.
Olivia makes a move to head over to Ben, who has driven her car and is now waiting for her, but Charlie grabs her by her MIAMI book bag, and the three of us make our way down to assembly with Ben trailing behind.
But we’re late, of course, because of me, which means assembly has already started and there is no way for us to get to senior seats.
We actually have to stand in the Trenches.
We’ve never stood here, not once, and all of the things that are wrong with this day sort of congeal into the fact that I don’t have a seat.
That I’ve been kicked out of my whole life.
I see Rob in his usual spot on the far side, and my stomach flips so badly, I think I’m going to be sick.
I hate myself for still thinking he looks perfect.
Jeans and a green T-shirt, the one with the tree on it that I love, and for a second I think maybe he wore it for me, that when he was picking out his clothes this morning he saw it and thought of me.
That he wanted to be wearing it when he tells me Friday night was a mistake, that he was only humoring Juliet, and where did I disappear to after we danced.
But then I know that is never going to happen, because sitting next to him, in a black skirt and pink candy–colored tank top, is Juliet.
Charlie puts her arm over my shoulder. Olivia stands on the other side, arms crossed, Ben behind her. They’re flanking me, like human pieces of armor.
Rob can’t see me from this angle, which is worse than if he could, because it means I can stare as hard and as long as I like.
He whispers something to her, and she laughs, then brings her finger to her lips to tell him to be quiet.
But it’s in that cute way certain girls have that lets everyone know they don’t really mean it.
That she wants him to go on bothering her forever.
Even while turning him down she’s inviting him.
Forget the lip biting. This is definitely her power move.
He’s leaning so close to her that it takes everything in me not to run right over and tear them apart.
And part of me wants to. Part of me wants to fight.
To tell him to pick me. To beg him to stop what he’s doing, erase the last three days, and just come back.
But I’m already fading into the background, like a house in the rearview mirror.
I can feel myself getting smaller and smaller, shrinking, so that when Mr. Johnson says, “Have a great day, everyone!” I think I might have just disappeared.
And then assembly is over and students grab their bags and descend from the bleachers. We start getting trampled, jostled to the side. Olivia yells, “Owww!” pushing back against the crowd, but I let it shuffle me outside.
I feel like a pebble in the river—small, smooth, and sinking. I don’t even have enough weight to settle, though. I’m just kicked forward by gravity.
Someone’s hand is on my shoulder, and I turn around.
It’s Charlie, and she buries her chin into my hair and whispers, “She is so going down. Don’t worry.
” I wish there really was something we could do to fix this.
That girls didn’t have to play these kind of games.
That ostracizing Juliet would in some way keep them apart.
More than that, though, I just wish this wasn’t happening.
That she’d never invited him. That he’d never said yes.
And that it hadn’t taken me so long to realize he was the one I wanted to be with.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It is not fine,” Charlie says again.