Chapter 1 #5
I don’t know if I’m scared to see Blue again or scared to navigate Chase, and the fact that the two fears are competing inside my chest for top billing tells me everything I need to know about the kind of night this is going to be.
Mara opens the front door before we even hit the porch. She comes flying down the steps in a tiny black skirt and a top I would not be brave enough to wear. She throws her arms wide, and her face — God, her face is so genuinely happy to see me that something in my chest squeezes.
“Melly!” She looks at me, and then she registers Chase and Mila behind me, and her smile widens.
“You brought friends! Yes!” She hugs me.
She steals me from Mila with one fluid motion, and she pulls me up the steps, and she leans in close to my ear and says, in the tone of a girl giving life-or-death advice — “If you’re allergic to mango, drink the punch called Lucy’s Juice, okay?
It’s honestly so much better than the other stuff Percy makes.
” She smiles. “I can’t wait to introduce you to the girls. ”
Penelope is waiting just inside the door. She’s changed her clothes since this afternoon — a black silk top tucked into white jeans, a thin gold chain at her collarbone, hair down — and her face breaks into a smile when she sees me, so warm it makes me happy.
“Hi, roomie.”
I look at this beautiful girl who let me move in with her. I look at her warm, soft face, and I think, please be my friend.
“Hi, Penelope.”
“Come in. I’m freezing.”
Mara rolls her eyes. “You’re always cold.”
We step inside. The music is so loud I can barely hear my own breathing, let alone anyone speaking, and the front hall is full of bodies — guys with red cups, girls laughing, somebody on the stairs leaning over the banister with a bottle of beer in one hand.
There’s light coming from the kitchen, warm yellow against the dim of the living room, and the air smells like spilled beer and weed and a candle somebody has lit somewhere, and underneath it all is the deep undernote of a house full of college boys — leather couches, sweat, something else I don’t have a name for.
I’m in this house for the second time in a week.
The last time I was here, Blue Golding stood with a paper bag in his hand and looked at me like I was a ghost.
My eyes are moving before I tell them to.
They’re scanning the room, sliding over faces I don’t know, over hats and t-shirts and the curve of jaws and shoulders, and I am pretending — to myself, to Mila, to Chase, to God — that I’m just looking around, that I am just taking in my new social environment like a normal girl at her first college party.
I’m not.
I’m looking for him.
All the air leaves my lungs when I find him.
He’s across the living room, standing against the wall by the doorway to the kitchen, with a red cup loose in one hand and a backward hat on his head, and he’s laughing at something the guy next to him just said.
I hold my breath.
He is laughing.
The whole room goes underwater.
I cannot hear the music anymore. I cannot hear Mara, who is still talking, still gesturing toward the kitchen, still saying something about the punch.
I cannot feel Mila’s hand on my arm, though I know it is there.
I’m looking at Blue Golding across a crowded room in a house I’m not supposed to be in, and he is laughing.
His head is tipped back a little, and the lines of his face look like pure bliss.
His smile is even more handsome than I remember. I think I could die right now.
He has a whole life.
The thought lands in me, low and hard, like a stone dropped into a deep well.
He has a whole entire life I know nothing about.
He has friends I have not met. He has a couch he sits on.
He has a coffee mug, somewhere in this house, that he uses every morning.
He has a routine, a major, a class schedule, and a favorite sandwich place in this town, and he has built all of it without me, and he’s done it easily.
That’s the part that’s killing me. He has done it easily.
He’s happy.
The boy I have been carrying around in my chest like a small dark secret since the sixth grade is, across this living room, on a Friday night in a backward hat, fundamentally fine.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
I feel my fingers start to shake at my sides, and I close them into fists, and I press my fists against my thighs.
“Melly?” Mila’s voice, far away, at my elbow. “Hey. You okay?”
I look at her, and it takes me a moment to remember where I am.
“Yeah,” I answer, gulping. It’s an autopilot response because my mind is miles back in the past right now, specifically in high school when I’d give anything –– and I mean anything –– for his attention.
“Yeah,” I say again. “I’m good.” My voice comes out level. I’m almost proud of it.
Chase puts his hand on the small of my back. I don’t turn around to look at him.
I’m too busy looking at the man across the room who has not seen me yet.
The worst thing about loving someone who doesn’t want you isn’t the rejection. It’s realizing that they’re perfectly happy without you.