Chapter 5 #2
“Melly.” Mila steps closer. Her breath fogs between us.
“You get two Halloweens at Camden. Two in your entire life. Are you going to spend one of them in some random house in your hometown with Chase’s friends from high school?
Are you going to look back on this year and tell me that’s what you did? ”
I open my mouth. I close it. I think of Blue’s house. I think of standing in his kitchen in a white dress with wings. I think of being looked at, and of being not looked at, and I don’t know which one I am more afraid of.
“But,” I manage, and then I stop, because I cannot say the rest of the sentence in front of Penelope.
I cannot say, but Blue lives there. I cannot say, but Blue will be there, and I have spent years and years pretending I am over Blue, and I don’t know what I will do if I walk into that house in a costume designed to be looked at and Blue does not look.
I cannot tell Penelope about Blue. Not yet.
Maybe not ever. I’m still trying to hold him in the smallest, most secret part of my chest, away from light, away from air, the way you hold a butterfly because you don’t want to crush it.
Mila grabs me by both arms and gives me a small, fierce shake. “You are going to break up with him this week, Melly. This week.”
The words land in me like a hand pressed against a bruise.
I should’ve been ready to hear them. I have been hearing them, in one form or another, from her for over a year.
I have been hearing them, in one form or another, from inside my own head for longer than that.
But I’m not ready. I don’t know if I will ever be ready.
The idea of breaking up with Chase does not feel like freedom.
The idea of breaking up with Chase feels like standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark and being told to step.
He is the safety I have been holding onto for two years.
He’s the wall I’ve been leaning against. He has been, more than I have been able to admit to myself, the thing that has kept me from having to feel what I feel about Blue, because as long as I have Chase, I don’t have to face the fact that the boy I have loved since I was twelve years old does not love me back.
Keeping Chase keeps me safe from Blue.
Keeping Chase keeps me safe from the rejection that has been sitting at the back of my throat since the day Blue chose Camden over me.
Mila hugs me.
She can probably see it on my face.
She hugs me hard, in the middle of the sidewalk, in the cold, with the streetlamp humming above us and Penelope a step away pretending to look at her phone. Then she pulls back. She takes my face in her cold hands and looks me in the eye.
“This week, Melly. I’m serious.”
“Okay.”
“Say it.”
“This week.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
She has to walk in the opposite direction. She hugs Penelope quickly, and then she turns and goes. Her dark hair swings against her back as she walks, and Penelope and I are left standing under the streetlamp.
We start walking.
Penelope is wonderful for not saying a single word about it. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t probe. She just walks beside me, hands in her sleeves, our breath coming in small white clouds, and the silence between us is the kind I am learning is rare — the kind that doesn’t demand anything from you.
I cross my arms over my chest against the cold, and I think, what is wrong with me?
I have strung a good man along for two years to keep myself safe from the bad weather of a boy who has never once promised me shelter.
It isn’t even the feeling I am running from. I see that, suddenly, sharply, like a light coming on in a dark room.
It’s the rejection.
It’s the fact that if I let Chase go, I will be alone and alone means I will have to face Blue Golding in his backward hat in his kitchen and let him look at me — or, worse, not look at me — and I will know, finally, what it actually means.
Which is that he doesn’t want me.
That is the part that has been keeping me here.
That is the part I have not been brave enough to say out loud.
Behind me, Mila stops at the corner. Her voice comes ringing down the street, half-laughing, half-warning, full of the kind of love that has been carrying me for years.
“You’re doing it!” she shouts.
I turn.
She’s small under the streetlamp, hair flying, one hand cupped around her mouth.
“I’m so serious, Melly!”
I lift my hand, and she lifts hers back, and we stand there for a long moment on opposite ends of the same block, her at the corner under the lamp and me half a street away in the dark, and for the first time in two years, the thought of breaking up with Chase doesn’t feel impossible.
It feels, for the first time, like a thing I might one day be able to do.
I drop my hand.
I turn.
I walk with Penelope to our place through the cold.
I fall onto my stomach on my bed and FaceTime Chase. He picks up almost right away, but he doesn’t look at the phone.
“Hey, babe,” I say into the pillow. “I just got home from the study group. I’m going to go to sleep, so I thought I’d call to say goodnight.”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s in his bedroom. I can see the corner of the dresser, and he’s looking somewhere above the phone. The TV, maybe. His laptop. Anywhere but at me.
“Chase?”
He looks at the camera.
His face is etched with annoyance, and as soon as I see it, my stomach starts to fold itself up under my ribs.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
He shifts. The phone moves with him. He’s walking. He crosses his room, and he sits down on the edge of his bed, and the camera resettles. Now I can see his whole face.
“You tell me, Melly.”
“What?”
He sighs deeply. “What are we doing?”
My stomach twists.
“Well.” I try a small smile. “I’m calling to tell you goodnight.”
He shakes his head. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
I do.
I do know what he means.
“I mean,” he says, “you moved out of here, Melly.” His voice is even.
He isn’t yelling. “You —” He pauses. He stares at something I can’t see.
“I drove ninety minutes to hang out with you, and instead, we go to a party where we don’t know anyone, and then when we get back to the house, you make me sleep on the floor. ”
This is it. I feel myself start to tear up. I press my face deeper into the pillow because the pillow is hiding most of what my face is doing. I try to suck the tears in.
“I was really drunk,” I say, like that erases what is actually going on.
“Mila has her own place,” he says. “But you insisted she stayed.”
“I —”
“I just don’t know what we’re doing anymore, Melly.”
The line goes quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
It’s the only thing I have to offer.
He rubs his face with his free hand. He looks tired. Maybe he’s just tired of me.
“I’ll let you get some sleep,” he says. “We can talk later.”
I nod into the pillow, and then we get off the phone. I lie there for a long minute in the dark and think about the fact that I haven’t brought up Halloween. I’ve committed, in front of five other girls, to spending the weekend in a pair of feathered wings at the Hawthorne House.
I close my eyes and fall asleep eventually.
On Sunday, Penelope and I go out to lunch and study together in the afternoon.
Chase and I barely text.
I sent him a good morning at ten. He sends one back at three. The two messages sit on top of each other in our thread like two strangers.
Monday comes.
No good morning from him.
No good luck on my midterm. He knows I have one of my midterms today and he doesn’t text. I don’t have the energy to text him first. I go to my midterm. I ace it.
I tell Mila in the dining hall.
She doesn’t say great job.
She says, “Have you broken up with him yet?”
I shake my head, but I feel it coming.
On Tuesday, I walk out of Hayworth’s quiz with my pencil still in my hand and my shoulders up around my ears. Mila is on the curb of the building waiting for me.
“Lunch,” she says. “Dining hall. Pen says she and Lucy are coming.” She loops her arm through mine. She walks me toward the dining hall. “How did you do?”
“I did good. You?”
She grins. “I know I got a few wrong, but I’m not worried about it.”
The dining hall is loud. We get our trays and find a table by the window. Mila is on the topic of Chase, and I’m barely listening. Penelope is already at the table when we sit.
“Don’t let this drag out until Halloween, Melly,” Mila is saying. “You absolutely need to do it tonight.”
“Do what tonight?” Penelope asks.
“Break up with Chase,” Mila says.
Penelope looks at me. I look at the table.
Penelope lets me off the hook. “Lucy is meeting me here. She should be any second.”
Two minutes later, Mila is still going, and Lucy arrives.
“Hi,” she says, soft, the way Lucy says everything.
“Hi,” we say back.
“How are you?” I ask, grateful for any subject that isn’t the subject we’ve been on.
She smiles. “Good. I have one more midterm after this.” She checks her phone. “Benson should be coming out of his Stat 217 in like two minutes.”
As if she had scheduled him, Benson walks through the door behind me. He’s grinning as he crosses the dining hall. He bends down behind Lucy’s chair and kisses her cheek. His whole body is in it, all of it.
“I aced it, baby,” he says, and he’s looking at her mouth and then her eyes and then her mouth again.
Lucy goes pink.
She pulls him into a hug. “I’m so proud of you.”
Gianna walks in behind him and clears her throat. Benson ignores her. He pulls Lucy closer.
“How did yours go?” he says into her hair.
“I probably aced it.”
Stanley comes in behind Gianna and claps once, loud enough that two girls at the next table look over. “Ladies and gentlemen, holy shit.”
Gianna scoffs. She drops into the chair next to me. “No kidding.”