Put Me Back Together(23)

This last question she directed right into my ear, then looked at me worriedly as Anita and Melissa danced a circle around us. Em couldn’t always read my moods, but she sure as hell knew I didn’t like facing a nightclub alone, especially when she’d been the one to drag me there.

“Where were you?” I asked with more venom that I’d meant to, only now realizing how angry I still was at the way she’d left me alone. I watched her take a step away from me and lower her eyes to the floor.

Right away I regretted my outburst. How could I blame Em for not babysitting me the entire night? She was entitled to have her own fun. But before I could tell her this, Anita interrupted us.

“Did I see you holding hands with Lucas?” Apparently Anita’s reaction time was on a drunken five-minute delay.

“Oh my God!” Melissa cried. “Did he rescue you?”

“Did he dance with you?”

“Did you guys make out? Tell me you made out. You totally did. You made out, right?”

I didn’t answer any of their questions. I could still feel his fingers in my hair.



We left about an hour later. Sally was so drunk both Melissa and Anita had to help her to the car, her arms around their shoulders as she shouted obscenities at the beefy guy and his whole group of friends. None of the other girls seemed to know what had gone down between them, and I, for one, didn’t want to know. It seemed that Sally was a fun drunk right up until she got really loaded. Then she became a scratch-your-eyes-out-for-no-reason drunk.

“I’m gonna rip your head off and feed it to my snake!” she yelled as Melissa stuffed her into the passenger’s seat.

The beefy guy made a rude gesture back.

“Does she even have a snake?” I asked as Anita leaned on the car door to close it. We were all reluctant to get into the car with Sally.

“You think she has the ability to take care of a snake?” Anita asked.

“Don’t be mean,” Emily said. “Just because she goes a little nuts when she’s drunk doesn’t make her an idiot. She’s planning on going to law school after she’s done—”

At this moment Sally rolled down the window and threw up onto the street right beside my sister’s shoes.

“Puking,” Em finished.

We all piled into the car and Melissa eased us out into the non-existent traffic. I was impressed to find out she’d volunteered to be the designated driver and had stopped drinking two hours ago. Point one to Melissa. Sally was currently at point negative forty-two.

Emily put her head on my shoulder. She was always the most affectionate when she knew I was pissed at her. “So what really happened with Lucas?” she asked.

“Um,” I said, hoping Sally would scream out something else and I wouldn’t have to answer.

I couldn’t tell her the truth, of course. How could I when I hardly knew what the truth was? He’d rescued me from a panic attack and taught me to dance? I thought of his honey-coloured eyes. I’d stared at them for so long now I could picture perfectly how they were rimmed with dark gold and the exact way they’d stared into mine when I’d told him I could only feel that way with him.

My secret made me smile so wide I had to turn my face toward the window.

Melissa stopped the car at a light and that’s when I saw Lucas sitting on a bench by the curb with a girl. They weren’t touching, but they were sitting very close together. She had long blonde hair that stuck out of the hood of her winter coat. They were turned toward each other and she was talking animatedly with her hands. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but as the moments passed I could tell she’d started yelling. Lucas looked distraught. He covered his face with his hands. And then he looked up at her and reached a hand out to touch her face, brushing his thumb across her cheek. He seemed to be about to speak when the light turned green and we drove on.

Emily repeated her question.

“Nothing,” I said, turning away from the window. “Lucas and I are nothing to each other, and we’ll never be anything more. End of story.”

She stopped asking after that.

Just then my phone buzzed in my pocket with a text message. I dug into my jeans to pull it loose, hoping against hope it would be Lucas and that somehow he’d intuited that I’d seen what I had and he’d explain it and everything would be fine.

But it wasn’t Lucas, and nothing was fine.

There were three messages from an unknown number.



Unknown: You’ll never get away with it.

Unknown: You’re about to get what you deserve.

Unknown: I’m coming for you.





7





If there was one thing I was good at, it was pretending. Actually, that’s not true. If there was one thing I was good at, it was complete avoidance and denial—which counted as one thing in my mind because I never did one without the other—but pretending definitely came in a close second. For the next few days I put all my years of practice at pretending to very good use. As I walked to class I pretended that it didn’t matter that Brandon had tracked down my cell phone number, which was unlisted, and that he was somehow sending me texts when I was fairly certain he didn’t have access to a cell phone. I pretended it didn’t bother me that his texts had gone from subtle to aggressive threats. I pretended I wasn’t concerned by all the evidence that someone out in the world was helping him harass me, and that I wasn’t at all worried that this someone might come after me for real. By the time it occurred to me to change my number—the pretending was really slowing down my brain—I’d already received enough threatening texts to last a lifetime. Though Emily accepted my “lost phone” story without question, I was pretty sure the message I’d left on my parents machine would elicit a string of questions all leading back to Brandon.