People Like Us(53)

“And that bullshit message you left on my door.” Her eyes well up, and it feels like a knife twisting in my chest. “That’s not you.”

“It is.” Now my eyes feel hot and prickly. “It’s not her fault. She wasn’t even there.”

“What the hell is going on with you, then?”

I slide the skintight pajama pants off and pull on the track pants Brie brought me. I shake my head, unable to offer an answer, and reach for my coat, but it’s still wet. Brie shrugs her own coat off and hands it to me, and that’s the thing that breaks me. I sit down on Nola’s bed and shove my face into my hands. “I don’t know,” I choke.

I swipe at my face with a handful of tissues, but I’m awful with crying. It takes me forever to stop once I’ve started, and sometimes it escalates until I lose control of my entire body in spasms of bursting, pulsing sorrow—grief that runs through me like shock waves. It’s the most terrifying feeling in the world. That’s why I decided to never do it again, why I designed the room with the thick ice walls. To keep me from losing myself inside myself.

“Let’s not talk about this here,” Brie says. “I got you Nyquil and orange juice. Can you make it back to my room?”

I nod. I don’t want Nola to see me cry again, anyway, and I still feel weird about last night. I walk back to Brie’s room with my head cast down so that my hair completely covers my face. There’s no need for it, I know. People expect me to be crying, and Brie, too. One of ours is dead. I wish I could call Tai and Tricia. Even Cori. We should be together right now. But I can’t be the one to make the call. I have to be the one to answer it. I really hope I get a chance to.

When we get to her room, she takes her coat back and hangs it up neatly, and puts my wet clothes on her radiator to dry. Then she pours me a cup of orange juice and dosing cup of Nyquil.

“Are you sleeping over?” she asks.

“Are you going to abandon me while I’m sleeping?”

She gives me a horrifically disappointed look. “Really?”

“I’m sorry. My brain is scrambled. I’ll go if you want me to.”

“I’d rather keep an eye on you, to be honest.”

That stings worse than anything else. I take the Nyquil and wash the nasty taste down with the juice. “I’m sorry. For the note and everything else. I haven’t been myself.”

“That’s a cop-out thing to say,” she scolds. She sits down next to me and looks me in the eye. “Are you and Nola sleeping together?”

I feel guilty for some reason, which is completely irrational. “Why would it matter?”

“Because I’ll be pissed off if I’m not the first to know. And because I don’t like her.”

“No, we’re not. But she did kiss me.”

Her eyes widen. “Bad idea, Kay.”

“I forgot. I’m Soccer Spice. You’re Gay Spice.”

She looks hurt. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You’ve completely blown me off since I told you what I think of her.”

I stand. “Do you really think I’ve been avoiding you because of Nola?”

“Why else?”

“Because I found out what you did,” I snap.

“What did I do?”

“You threw her at him.”

Brie freezes, her body statuesque. She is so still that the sound of my own breathing begins to make me feel uncomfortable. “Kay, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The eminently unfaithful,” I say. “He chose to cheat. That’s on him. But you wanted it to happen. You helped.”

Brie reanimates and her face turns red. “Kay, you’re freaking me out. You’re not making sense.”

“Unbelievable.” I grab my clothes off the radiator and she stands in front of the door, her arms crossed, her face crumbling.

“You can’t just mess with people’s hearts, Kay.”

I feel like the world is spinning in the wrong direction. I don’t know anything or anyone anymore. Brie is the one who didn’t want me. It was the first time I recognized having feelings for a girl, and they knocked me out like a tidal wave. She was this amazing person, the best friend I was lucky to have, breathlessly gorgeous. Everything about her was warm and I wanted to be near her so feverishly badly—when we sat next to each other, my skin went electric and I buzzed with life. I loved being close to Spencer, but Brie was next level. Compare a magnet to a collapsed supernova. It was amazing and terrifying and I could only stand it because I was so sure it was mutual. There was so much flirting, so much teasing, I didn’t have the humility to doubt there would be a kiss at the end.

But then there was the Elizabeth Stone incident. Elizabeth wanted on the tennis team and started following Tai around everywhere for weeks and it was unfortunate, but pathetic. When I called Tai out for letting Elizabeth drool all over her, she said I was worse, hanging all over Brie like a rejected lesbian rescue puppy. I said if anyone’s a lesbian in this scenario, it’s Stone, because she has the haircut, the man hands, and smells like a volleyball team.

It was a horrible thing to say and at least once a day it pops into my head at some point just to remind me what an irredeemable person I am.

But everyone laughed. Almost everyone. Brie looked at me like I was a stranger she didn’t want to meet. I hadn’t thought before I’d spoken. She hadn’t come out yet, but I knew how I felt. But when I finally got up the courage to slip her a note (so pathetic, so pathetic) asking if she wanted to go to that year’s Skeleton Dance with with me, she wrote back no. Just no. And we never talked about it again. She took, of all people, Elizabeth Stone. They dressed as Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly and they were hot and amazing. I borrowed Tai’s Tinker Bell costume from the previous year with zombie makeup and went as a death wish.