The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(64)

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It was late when Connor took me home. He insisted on walking me to the door, and I grabbed on to his arm as I stumbled up the driveway, my fancy shoes hurting my feet. I wondered how we would look to someone who didn’t know us. Like a couple coming back from a party, I guess. Like normal people.

We were a few feet from the porch steps when I saw Enzo sitting there in the dark, hunched over in his thrift-store suit.

I stopped abruptly and dropped my hand from Connor’s arm. “Enzo.”

“Hey.” He stood up and looked at Connor, then back to me. “Your brother said he didn’t know how long you’d be gone, but I waited anyway.”

Was I supposed to give him an award or something? Wow, Enzo, so great of you to wait around for a bit after totally ditching me.

“Did he tell you how long I waited?” I asked coolly.

“Yeah. He did.”

There was a long silence, and Connor stared at Enzo, and Enzo looked at me apologetically, and I just wanted to take off my shoes and change into comfortable clothes.

“Are you going to give me some sort of excuse?” I asked.

Enzo glanced at Connor. “You think you can give us a minute alone?”

“Ask Hawthorn, not me,” he said, and I was surprised by how annoyed he sounded.

Two sets of eyes stared at me. I felt like I was onstage, in the spotlight, and they were waiting for me to say my lines, only I couldn’t remember them.

“Uh, yeah, I guess that’s OK,” I finally said to Connor. “You don’t need to stick around.”

Connor hesitated. He looked like he had something to say but then thought better of it. He stuck his hands in his pockets and started to back away.

“OK. Well. Have a good night, Thorny.” He nodded curtly at Enzo, then took off toward his car.

The moment he left my side, I wanted to shout for him to come back. Or even better, I wanted to jump back in the passenger seat of his car and speed away from my house. My life. At the very least, I wanted to thank him for the pizza and for saving me from pathetically sitting on the porch like I had nothing better to do when Enzo showed up.

But I didn’t do any of those things, because acting so gushy would have embarrassed me, and besides, I had to deal with Enzo.

“Who was that?” Enzo asked.

“Why? Are you jealous?” I regretted it the second the words were out of my mouth, because he probably wasn’t jealous, just making conversation, and I sounded presumptuous, as if I was expecting him to get jealous over me, which was silly, given he’d totally ditched me earlier.

“You’re angry,” Enzo said.

“Well, yeah. You could have called. Or just not said you’d go to the dance with me in the first place.”

“I wanted to go to the dance. Really. I was planning on it. But then I was painting and lost track of time, and then I had to wait for the late bus.” He held up his hands in an I tried, but what can you do? gesture.

“You still could have called. I don’t care about the dance, but it wasn’t cool to leave me waiting like an idiot.”

“Looks like you found something else to do anyway,” Enzo said. I listened for bitterness in his tone and was disappointed there wasn’t any.

“This whole conversation is stupid. I’m going to bed now.”

I clumsily pushed past Enzo and up the porch steps, cursing myself again for wearing heels.

“Hawthorn, wait,” Enzo said as I opened the front door.

I turned back to him. Our eyes met. I held my breath, hoping that he could say something to magically fix the tension between us, to make me forget all about the dance.

“The, uh, the buses don’t run this late.”

“So?” I said. The buses were pretty much last on the list of things I cared about right then.

“Do you think you could give me a ride home?”

His request was so absurd that I thought he must be kidding. He wasn’t.

“No,” I said. Just no. No apology or explanation. It wasn’t the response that Enzo expected.

I went inside and shut the door behind me, feeling the tiniest bit of satisfaction.





Chapter 26


Howl

I used to think not being asked to dances made me a social outcast loser. That was before I’d been stood up for a dance. It was pretty much the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to me.

I was an idiot.

I should never have gotten my hopes up.

I shouldn’t have let myself think my friendship with Enzo was anything more than that.

A guy held my hand, and I decided it meant something, that he must like me, that there must be chemistry between us, that I must like him too, that a relationship was pending. Really, he’d just been scared.

I had turned into one of those stupid girls. A girl who obsessed over every little thing a guy did and thought it was all about her.

“Do you think I’m self-centered?” I asked Sundog.

He laughed. “Every teenager is self-centered.”

“Some of them don’t grow out of it,” I said, thinking about Enzo. Thinking about the promises he couldn’t keep, because his stupid art was all that mattered to him.

I wondered if he’d ever stood up Lizzie.

What had she seen in him?

At first, I’d wanted to find Lizzie to prove that werewolves were real. I didn’t realize how many more questions I’d eventually have for her. If I could sit down and talk to her, just for an hour, my problems might be solved. If I knew what Lizzie really felt about Enzo, maybe I could figure out what I felt too.