Put Me Back Together(15)

Having no idea what to do next, I turned and walked to the corner and crossed the street without checking to see if he was following me. When I reached the other curb, I looked back. He was still on the other side of the street, looking down at his phone.

“Hey, Lucas,” I called. He looked up. “Thanks for the brownie.”

He smiled and continued typing on his phone. My cell vibrated in my hand and I turned it on.



Lucas: Thanks for today. :)



By the time I finished my classes for the day and was on my way back to my apartment, my mind was a jumble of contradictory thoughts. I remembered my conviction as I’d left for school that morning that I would forget about Lucas altogether. Obviously I’d failed at that completely, but instead of feeling afraid and guilty about it, I could only feel warm and excited. All through my English class I’d kept turning on my phone to check his text—yes, I’d devolved to this kind of high school behaviour—and each time a giddy feeling swept through my body and I had to stop myself from giggling. Then, of course, had come art class, three long hours of me sneaking looks at Lucas only to find that, more often than not, he was looking back. There was still a scolding voice that ran on a continual loop in the back of my head, listing all the reasons why being friends with this boy—and I couldn’t really think of us as anything more than friends without feeling like I might pass out—was the very worst idea, a monumentally stupid idea, the most idiotic idea I’d ever had. For once, that voice sounded muted and hardly worth listening to.

I trudged into my room and threw myself down on my bed, startling the cat, who’d been sleeping on my pillow. Before I could reach out and pet him he’d hightailed it back under the dresser. On another day I might have felt dismayed at the cat’s rejection—he’d yet to show even the slightest interest in me—but right now I could only sit, still gripping my phone, wondering what this carefree feeling was.

Then I realized: I was happy.

My cell made a dinging sound that meant I had a new email waiting.

I clicked on my phone, opened my mailbox, and waited for the message to load, expecting it to be from Em. Probably some ridiculous video of people dancing in the rain wearing fake goat heads or something. She loved it when people wore animal heads for some unknowable reason.

But the email wasn’t from Emily. It was notification telling me someone had sent me a Facebook message.

This was a little odd. I barely used my Facebook page and had only created it in the first place because my little cousin, Harriet, who was nine, had insisted I try it once, just to see if I liked it, then immediately friended me. My profile picture was still blank. The whole concept of social media confounded me. Why would anyone care that I’d had a really great sandwich at Earl’s Kitchen, or that I’d stubbed my toe on the corner of the coffee table and it hurt like hellllll? Harriet and Emily were my only friends on there and neither of them had ever sent me a message before.

None of this really occurred to me as I opened the email, however. My thoughts were elsewhere—on the good day I’d had. On Lucas and the fact that he’d called me beautiful and asked for my number. On the fact that I was happy.

When I glanced down at the message, my face froze in its happy, grinning state, as though it was trying to keep those feelings for as long as possible, as though my face knew before I did that I would never be able to keep my happiness. Happiness wasn’t meant for me.

You’d better watch yourself, Katie Kat.

I remember everything.





5





“Why does your closet think you’re Amish?” Emily cried.

I was sitting crossed-legged on my bed, calmly eating chocolate chips out of the package by the handful as my sister rifled through my clothes, her entire upper body out of sight inside my closet. As I watched, she began throwing my shoes over her shoulder, one “disturbing” sandal at a time.

“Where’s the top I gave you for your birthday?” she demanded.

“That bright pink thing with the sequins?” I asked. “I cleverly hid that abomination away.”

“Don’t talk to me about abominations!” Em said, disentangling her head from one of my dresses, her cheeks rosy red with annoyance. “Your wardrobe is the abomination. What did you and Mom buy when you went clothes shopping for school last fall, anyway?”

“Those shoes,” I said, pointing to a pair of brown ballet flats Emily had rejected only moments ago, “and those jeans.”

She was holding the jeans up in front of her; they were my most comfortable, baggy jeans. The legs were twice the width of her body. She looked up at me in horror as I spoke.

Depositing them on the ground with her fingers as though she thought they might infect her with bad fashion sense, she flopped down on the bed next to me and gave an exaggerated sigh.

“I knew I should have brought some clothes for you to wear. We’re never going to get there at this rate,” she whined.


That didn’t sound too bad to me. In fact, it sounded great. After three straight days of obsessing over that Facebook message nonstop, I was exhausted. The first night I hadn’t slept at all. It had taken me a full hour to get the pounding of my heart under control, and another hour to convince myself to stop checking the chain lock and bolt on my apartment door every five seconds. I’d never thought two sentences could make me feel so unsafe, but they had. As the long hours had stretched toward morning, I couldn’t stop staring at those last two words printed boldly across the screen. It wasn’t that some stranger was threatening me—that wasn’t what had me so freaked. I knew exactly who the message was from.