The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(78)

? ? ?

I was pretty sure I’d never been so happy to have a day end. Until I remembered that I either needed to walk home or take the school bus. Which meant I was walking.

I sighed, shifted the weight of my backpack, then started heading in the direction of home.

“Hawthorn!”

I looked up to find Enzo hurrying toward me. Enzo. At my school. For a second, I thought that I was seeing things, that I’d fallen asleep in my last period class and was having some sort of very realistic dream.

Before I could ask what he was doing here, Enzo’s hands were on my shoulders, holding me too tight. “Is everything OK?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?” I twisted away from his grip.

“Why wouldn’t it be? Are you serious? I go outside, and your car is sitting in front of my apartment, and you aren’t with it.”

Oh. That.

“It wouldn’t start last night,” I explained.

“Do you think you could have let me know?”

“I thought you’d figure it out.”

The worry on Enzo’s face had morphed into relief but was starting to become anger. “Well, when your last girlfriend disappears, it’s not really comforting to see your new girlfriend’s car abandoned in a parking lot.”

For a second, the entire world tilted. I tried to care about how annoyed Enzo was, but I could only concentrate on that one word. Girlfriend.

I swallowed hard and did my best to speak levelly, to not let on how much a stupid word had affected me. “So I’m your girlfriend now?”

“I don’t know what you are. That’s not the point.”

It was for me. He’d said it so casually, as if the title didn’t mean anything at all. As if it was a simple transition to make. One second, someone is your friend; the next, they’re your girlfriend.

“Sorry I freaked you out.”

“Just think before you do something like that again.” Enzo reached into his pocket and pulled out his tobacco, so it seemed OK to move the conversation in a different direction.

“I need to get my car towed. I was gonna call from home and have one of my parents drive me over to unlock the car and stuff. But I could just go there with you now.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Enzo said. He put his cigarette between his lips and flicked his lighter to life.

“OK then.”

“I rode the bus here,” he said with his cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“I figured.”

So we turned in the opposite direction and walked toward the bus stop together, which was pretty lame but not nearly as lame as the school bus would have been. At least I wasn’t alone.

We didn’t talk much on the way to Enzo’s apartment. But in my mind, I was asking him if he really thought of me as his girlfriend. And then I asked myself if that was something I wanted.

? ? ?

The guy who answered the phone at the towing company said it would be at least an hour before he arrived. So I settled myself on Enzo’s bed, prepared for the long wait.

“How will you get home?”

I shrugged. “One of my parents. Or I can get a lift to the mechanic’s from the tow truck guy. The auto shop’s not far from my house.”

“I can’t believe you walked home last night.”

“It was pretty stupid,” I admitted, my mom’s list of worst-case scenarios still fresh in my mind.

“It was.”

I lay back on the bed and crossed my arms behind my head. The night before, I’d had sex right there. The sheets were back on, so I guess Enzo had washed them.

He hesitated, then lay down next to me, mirroring my position but still distant. He made sure not to get close enough that we would touch. There was no risk of one of us breathing too deeply and our skin briefly coming into contact.

“Should we talk about things?” Enzo asked.

“Which things?”

“Us. Last night. All of it.”

“No,” I said. I rolled onto my side, facing Enzo. He looked over at me. “There’s nothing to say. Let’s just, I don’t know, be.”

“Yeah, OK. We can do that.”

And then we were good. Enzo rolled onto his side too, and we stayed like that, talking for a long time about stuff that didn’t matter, like the cartoons we loved the most when we were kids and the best flavor of ice cream and if there was any chance of astrology being real.

I relaxed. It made me think of when we went to the abandoned house in the woods and how, for a little while, we were just hanging out, making up a story, and nothing else mattered. Maybe that’s what it would be like if Enzo and I actually dated. Not all of the angst or unhappiness. Just us enjoying each other’s company, being friends.

“Tell me something fascinating,” I said when there was a lull in conversation.

“About what?”

“Anything.”

I watched Enzo think. He had that faraway look in his eyes that he got when he was concentrating. He hadn’t cut his hair since I’d met him. I wanted to reach over and run my fingers through it. When he spoke, I let my eyes drift to his mouth, watched his lips form the words.

“There was this psychologist in the sixties who thought he could cure people with delusions by making them confront paradoxes. So he found these three guys who all believed they were Jesus Christ and had them meet, thinking it would snap them out of it.”