Chapter 18 #2
He discusses the morning after, how we parted ways with a kiss, and spends what are definitely too many words on my morning breath. In the story, I come across as almost desperate, asking for assurance that he’ll text me. He swiftly decides not to text me.
Then it morphs into almost a horror story. A week later, Garrett shows up in Valery’s class—a studio art course, not creative writing, because the surface-level changes include making Valery an artist, not a writer, and Garrett pre-med, not pre-law.
Afterward, she accosts him in the hallway and assures him that she didn’t know he was in the class. He’s disturbed by the sentiment because that thought hadn’t even crossed his mind until she mentioned it. Now Valery begins to wonder—is she stalking him?
He isn’t sure what to believe, and he’s forced to confront the reality of his ego, because if she is stalking him, he’s at least a little bit flattered by it.
She always stared at him in class, though Valery was self-aware enough to know that the only reason he knew she was looking at him was because he was looking back.
And the story ends. It fucking ends on that sentence.
I can’t think. I mean, I can think, but every thought is coated in a thick layer of molten-hot anger. Before I know it, I’m standing in front of a dorm—and it’s not Alex’s.
I haven’t been here in over a decade. Did Ellie and Patrick live in room 345 or 543? I know it was something sequential, easy to remember. And yet I seem to have forgotten.
I slip into the building as two students exit, get in the elevator, and go with my gut, hitting the third-floor button. When the doors open, muscle memory takes over, and I find myself at Ellie’s door.
Am I really doing this?
Ellie thinks I’m pathetic and obsessed with him. Showing up at his dorm unannounced plays directly into those perceptions.
But if I don’t tell him how I feel right now, I probably never will. I’ll have to sit in class, mortified, unable to say anything about it without making it obvious to everyone that the story is about me. If it isn’t already obvious.
I pound on the door. The next few seconds are excruciating.
As I stand there listening to the ambient college-dorm sounds—students laughing, TVs playing, the faint hum of music—I have that sinking, panicky feeling I always got at work after I sent an email I had proofread only twice, wishing I could go back just two seconds and unsend it, clicking over to my outbox to reread it more carefully despite the fact that if I found something, it was far too late to fix it.
It’s too late to go back now.
Time stretches on, and I have a fleeting sense of hope. Maybe Ellie isn’t home. Maybe I get to have my brave stick-it-to-him moment without having to actually, well, stick it to him.
I hear shuffling inside. The murmur of voices.
The urge to flee overwhelms me, but before I can act on it, the door swings open.
Ellie frowns, adopting what I’m sure is supposed to be a casual stance. He glances back inside, then steps out into the hall and closes the door behind him.
“Joey,” he says, surprised. He stumbles on my name as if he’s nearly forgotten it.
As if he’s been thinking of me as fucking Garrett.
“What are you doing here?” he asks after a long pause.
I shove my phone in his face and demand, “What the hell is this?”
He squints at the screen. “That’s… is that my short story?”
“What the hell is this shit?”
“You came to my room because you didn’t like my story? I’m kind of busy—”
He tries to brush me off, but I don’t let him.
“This is me. This is us. You wrote about me—and then you sent it to our class?”
“Look, I’m sorry, Joey—”
Once again, he stumbles on my name. I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to scream.
“But that’s just a story. It’s fiction. I don’t know why you think—”
Holy shit, he’s really going to play dumb here. He’s gaslighting me. A strong word, but that’s what it is. I feel sick all over again, because the Ellie I knew—the Ellie I left behind the night I died—would never have done that.
Would he?
“Oh, bullshit. Garrett is me. You even gave her a fucking boy’s name. The things she says—the way she looks. We’re identical.”
“She has brown skin and brown hair. You hardly have a monopoly on those features—”
Specifically, she’s described as having caramel skin and chocolate hair—by far the worst writing in his entire story.
“She uses my words. You stole my words and put them in your fucking homework assignment.”
“I may have borrowed some stuff,” he finally concedes. “That’s not stealing.”
“You can’t just take real life, change the names, and call it fiction,” I exclaim, ignoring the hypocrisy of my own plagiarism—I don’t fucking care right now.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ellie tells me, his voice hushed.
“I want you to apologize for taking an intimate shared experience and turning it into fodder for our classmates’ analysis.”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie mutters, not sounding sorry at all, “but no one will know it’s you.”
Helen knew it was me. “Unless they find out we slept together,” I say, “in which case it might be obvious by the fact that she has a fucking boy’s name.”
“That’s fine, because no one’s going to find out.”
“Is this your way of silencing me? You want to make sure no one finds out we slept together, so you write it into a little story so I’m too ashamed to admit it because if I do, people will realize exactly what you thought of the experience?”
His eyes widen, and he stares at me with alarm. Wariness. A cautious distance in his eyes.
Like I’m a stranger.
It hurts because those eyes once looked at me the way a guy looks at his best friend.
And the irony of the whole fucking thing is that I thought it was painful to be looked at as only a friend by the person I was in love with. Now I know how much worse it can get.
This is not my Ellie, I realize. This boy is a stranger to me.
“I’m not trying to silence you.” Ellie sighs. “I didn’t know she’d send this to the class.”
“Well, she did.”
“And I’m sorry for that. But I already told you—my story isn’t about us. The characters might be… inspired by real life. But it’s completely different.”
“Let’s see. Two people meet at a party—check.
They bond over their names—check. They sleep together, and it’s awful—check.
The girl switches into one of the boy’s classes—which, news flash, is a pretty fucking identifiable detail.
Our classmates wouldn’t have to know we slept together to put two and two together.
“The only thing that differs from reality is that your story assumes I switched classes because of you. Because you think you’re a fucking main character, but the reality is that you’re nothing more than a little boy who hasn’t read enough cautionary tales to know that stories like this”—I shake my cell phone—“get writers sued all the fucking time. It’s called libel and defamation and an invasion of fucking privacy—”
I’m on a roll, no intention of stopping, when Ellie interrupts me. “You’re threatening to sue me?”
I roll my eyes, tempted to let Ellie stew in fear—but he looks like he might cry, and now I remember that he’s so young, a detail that has never been more apparent.
“I’m not going to sue you. I just want—”
But I never do get to tell him what I want, because the door behind him swings open, and a familiar voice asks, “Is everything okay out here? You’re starting to get loud—Joey?”
“Madison?”
I glance from her to him and back, frowning.
“I thought you were on a date. Where’s Patrick?”
And then, from the guilty look on her face…
I want to throw up.
“Your date’s with Ellie?”
As I begin to spiral, Madison remains calm.
“I meant to find a good time to tell you.”
Madison and Ellie?
“How long has this been going on?” I ask them both.
“It’s new,” Madison says.
“About a month,” Ellie says at the same time.
They share a loaded look, both of them seeming to take issue with the other’s answer. But I don’t care. I don’t care about the details. All I care about is that my best friend is dating the guy I was in love with for nearly half my life.
Was.
As in not anymore.
I’m not, I realize. Haven’t been for a while. Was I ever? And still—
“How dare you,” I cry, betrayed.
Do I think Madison will back down or cower or even apologize? If so, I’m sorely mistaken.
“How dare I?” she says. “Excuse you, how dare you? I don’t owe you anything.”
“We’re supposed to be best friends,” I remind her.
“You’re not my best friend, you’re my roommate. I barely know you.”
The shock coursing through my body is so heavy, I feel it like a physical presence. I feel like I’m underwater, drowning in it.
And that tone—she’s never used such a cold, distant tone with me.
“What are you talking about? Madison, of course we’re friends.”
“For months, you’ve been blowing me off to hang out with that Alex guy or that girl from your class, Heather.”
“Helen,” I correct quietly.
“And now you come running over here, crying like some aggrieved party. You don’t get to obsess over two guys and act like you’re a victim when I develop feelings for one of them. I didn’t betray you. Get over yourself.”
Madison and I aren’t friends. How could I have missed this?
“You’re supposed to be with Patrick,” I whisper, not really intending to be heard, just trying to figure out where the hell I went so wrong.
“What is with your obsession with Patrick? You’ve never talked to him.”
I ignore her and turn to Ellie. “You didn’t put this in your story,” I say. I turn back to Madison. “Do you know about that? Do you know what he wrote? Did you two read it together and have a laugh?”
“Of course not—” Ellie begins, but Madison cuts him off.
“What are you talking about?”
I laugh. I sound hysterical, even to my own ears. Ellie looks like he’s going to be sick.
“Your new boyfriend’s an asshole. But I hope he sees you as more than just a character in one of his self-indulgent stories.”
I don’t wait for a response before I turn and walk away.
I manage to make it out of the building before breaking down in tears.