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Instead, they crept around in my periphery, slapping me with a good dose of feel-like-shit whenever they felt like it, convincing me I deserved the way I felt heavy with regret.
Too heavy to get out of bed—my thoughts, my feelings, every ounce of my body. So, I rolled over, pulled my blanket around me extra tight and settled into a feeling that felt a lot like sadness.
I didn’t make it to school the next two days; rumor had it, Neil didn’t either.
And before I knew it, a few more days had passed before I stepped foot on school grounds again.Oh well.I was here for today—for a project that was due in English class—and midterms next week, and nothing else. Sydney said Neil hadn’t been to school all week either, but I was trying not to think about it. Trying not to think about the fact that he’d never missed a day of school in his life, and now that he had, it was all my fault. Of course it would be my fault. It made me feel even guiltier than I was already feeling.
Especially when he still didn’t show.
I sat there stupidly, staring blankly at his bare desks through three periods. Three periods that felt like an eternity without him sitting there, stealing all of my attention. The empty spaces nagged at me, skipping around in circles with my guilt, pointing and laughing at my misery. An emotion-filled knife stabbing at my insides, letting in even more messy feelings I didn’t think I could handle.
But it was even worse when he did show up on Monday.
Because he might as well have not been there. He didn’t talk to me—didn’t even look at me—and he moved seats in ASB, gutting me further. Though I really couldn’t say I blamed him. Even I didn’t want to be sitting with myself at the moment, or any of these goddamnfeelings.
It sucked, though—fuckingsucked—missing someone when they were standing right in front of you, sitting right across the room from you. There, but not there. Entirely unapproachable. Hating everything they made you feel, while somehow wanting to slip inside their arms and hear them tell you everything was going to be okay all at the same time.
It clutched at every messed-up feeling and twisted them into a tangled knot, shoving them down my throat until I felt like I was choking on them.
Our eyes met only once in the next few days, and he looked as miserable as I felt in that split-second frame of time.
It shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it did somehow.
“Whoa, what’s got you down?” Linda asked, oblivious to the past however many days she’d been here that I’d been walking around like someone had run over my puppy.
“Nothing.” I swirled my soggy cereal around in my bowl. She was the last person I was going to confide in about this. I didn’t need herI-told-you-sopouring salt on my open wound.
“I haven’t seen Neil around lately,” she stated the obvious anyway.
I huffed in response—more of a growl, really.
“Hmm,” she commented. “It’s only for the best, you know. Relationships don’t last—better you find that out now. Men suck.” She shrugged. “That’s why finding the richest and hottest ones and milking them dry while you can is the best move. Then you move on to the next poor soul. Lucky for you, you’re young and hot, so you shouldn’t have a problem working your way up the ladder.”
I scoffed, thoroughly over her shit.
Still, I didn’t have anything to say to her. She had everything completely backward, upside down, and inside out. I’d known that, on some level. I just hadn’t realized until recently how truly messed up it was.
“Relationships, commitment, marriage, they’re for one of two kinds of people, baby,” she went on, ignoring my cues to just drop it. “People like me—and you and Jason, because I taught you better—who know that it’s about a transaction, something one or both parties can benefit from, and then there are the suckers who actually think love is forever.”
My mother, people. No wonder my view on these things had been so thoroughly fucked up.
And here was the thing: Linda had loved my dad once upon a time—actually, genuinely loved him—and then he went and cheated on her and left her and Jason and I, shattering her so bad that her view on love skewed entirely, bordering on completely messed up.
Okay, no.She’d skipped over that line a long time ago.
The things she was saying were only some of countless other ridiculous Linda-isms she’d spewed over the years.
All while obviously (at least it seemed obvious to me), still secretly, and desperately, searching for a love of her own.
It was a toxic mess of skewed views, shoving twisted ideas down my throat, and blatant hypocrisy that left a nasty taste in my mouth.
And I was just…over it.
I pushed my bowl forward until it dropped into the sink with a loudthunkand left the kitchen.
When I got back up to my room—door slammed shut, black curtains pulled closed, bed a mess—I called Sydney. If anyone would get it, she would. On some level, anyway.
“It’s his loss, honestly,” she said in solidarity a few minutes later. I bit at my nails, nodding in agreement even though she couldn’t see it. I wanted to believe it. The problem was, I didn’tfeelit. “You want to go to a party tonight?” she asked. “Find a new distraction?” There was a hint of excitement and a whole plan unfolding in that tone of hers.