Page 138 of Hate Me Like You Mean It

“It’s not about the media, Alice!” Adrien snapped. “That’s not—Jesus Christ, I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind here! How is no one else saying anything?” He spun around, throwing a round of accusatory glances at Gampy and my parents. “You’re all okay with this? Are you serious?”

My dad scratched the back of his head, glancing down. Mom took the reins. “Honey, it’s not up to us, and it’s not up to you. She’s an adult. The only thing we can do is see what they have to say and try to understand where she’s coming from.”

“You’ll want to hear them out on this one, Addy,” Gampy chimed in coolly.

All of their heads turned at the same time.

“You knew?” Adrien asked.

“For a while now,” Gampy admitted. “Let’s go sit down and talk. Trust me.”

Dominic stepped forward. “Listen, I know I don’t deserve?—”

Adrien held up a hand to cut him off. “You… you don’t get to talk right now. You don’t get a say in this. You wanna know why?”

Dominic said nothing.

“Because you weren’t there, asshole. You and Rosie left. You blocked our numbers. You shut us out, and you weren’t there to see the damage you caused.” There was a long pause, and then Adrien pointed a finger in my direction. “She stopped talking at one point, did she tell you that?”

My pulse gave a start. “Adrien!”

“I’ll take that as ano,” he said. “She wasn’t sleeping. Stopped going out. Wouldn’t eat. It got so fucking bad that there was a four-day period where she couldn’t muster up the energy totalk, Dominic.”

Bile was starting to pool over the back of my tongue. Dominic’s head flicked in my direction. I kept my gaze fixed on my brother.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about the articles you put out. If I did, I would have sued your ass for defamation the second your team hit publish on the first one. I took it, because if your focus was on me, you were leaving her the fuck alone. And while you were busy buying up these companies like a little kid in a candy store,Alice—” He cut himself off, taking a moment to breathe through his nose, his teeth clamped tight. “You want to know why I was promoted so early? You were there, you knew what the plan was. I wasn’t supposed to take over for another five years, and you, shithead, you and Alice were supposed to come work with me while you saved up enough money to start your gaming company, remember that? That was the deal. But you left, and it fucking broke her, so Dad decided to retire early and follow her to the other side of the fucking country when she started college because she still hadn’t fully recovered, and leaving her alone in that state wasn’t a fucking option. Iwasn’t ready, everyone fucking knew it, and you popped outta fucking nowhere, bought 6Queue just so you could add jet fuel to the fucking fire, and almost burned whatever happiness she’d managed to gain back to a fucking crisp. So I don’t give a flying fuck what your excuse is, Dominic. You don’t deserve her.”

With that, he turned around and walked off.

My lungs burned, my blurry gaze smudging over the details of the scene as I fought to stay in control of my reaction. Ria squeezed my arm, shooting me a conflicted, almost apologetic look before following her husband.

“Well,” Gampy eventually said, “that went about as terribly as expected.”

43

Everyone at school today was talking about how Finley and Alice are dating now. They were holding hands and stuff during lunch and all the girls were squealing about how cute it was but I don’t really get it. I personally found it more nauseating than anything else.

Finley is the captain of the soccer team and I think maybe that’s why Alice likes him. Because he has no other redeeming qualities as far as I can tell. And his family is really rich which I guess is really important to her because her family is also really rich and so now there are two cottages they can go to during holidays.

Me and Mom didn’t really have our own house before Mr. Cloutier hired her. We were living with my aunt because Mom was having a hard time finding a job for a whilebecause of her disclecsia and she used to cry about it a lot. Now we live on their estate in our own house. It’s really really nice, but I guess it’s not the same. I’ve heard other kids talk about it and it’s not always nice things. But I don’t care.

I scored number one in our class again. If I want to be rich, I’ll just do it when I grow up and start my gaming company. I doubt it’s hard. Most of the people I’ve met with money are really stupid.

Update: I told Mom about my decision to be rich when I’m older and she told me I’m not allowed to call people stupid anymore.

Alice

I should have known better.

Maybe I’d been delusional, thinking we could talk our way through this with my family and ride off into the sunset as though none of the bad stuff ever even happened.

Perhaps I should have understood that no amount of planning or strategizing could accomplish the only thing that could truly fix this: turning back time.

Sometimes, you had to recognize that you were fighting a losing battle and call it, because deep down, you knewhow pointless it would be to keep going. Moronic, even. Self-sabotaging. Unhealthy. Foolish. And the biggest favor you could do—for both yourself and everyone else involved—was to call it.

Knowing when to end things was a major part of growing up. And as much fun as we’d had revisiting some of those memories over the last two months, we weren’t kids anymore.

“Oops, sorry.” I eased back the ice pack when Dominic winced, my lips jerking into a small smile. “Big baby.”