She Drives Me Crazy(37)

I glare at her. “My heart feels mixed emotions.”

“Like?”

“I guess you could say there’s a tiny part of my heart that feels bad for subjecting you to Charlotte. And maybe my heart feels guilty about it.”

Irene squints across the haze. “And here I thought you couldn’t admit to being wrong.”

“I guess you made an incorrect assumption, then, huh?”

The ghost of a smirk flits across her mouth. I think we’re going to leave it at that until she says, in a reckless sort of way, “You know I was lying in that video, right?”

We blink at each other across the roiling, gurgling water. I hesitate, knowing it’s risky for me to call her out. I take the plunge anyway.

“You had feelings for her, didn’t you?”

The way she tightens her mouth tells me everything.

“But she didn’t like you back…,” I say, putting the pieces together, “and she’s obviously a sociopath, so she knew how to use it against you … Let me guess: Did she make out with you ‘for fun’ and act like you were crazy for reading into it?”

Irene’s expression darkens. Her chest rises and falls beneath the water. I force myself to keep my eyes above her neckline.

“The first time we hooked up was the same night she took that video,” Irene says.

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not.”

“So you knew she was filming you?”

“I was too drunk to care.” She pauses. “I drank a lot back then.”

“And now you don’t.” It’s not a question. I’d inferred as much after watching her sip water all night.

She turns away and glances up at the dark skylight. “Did you and Tally sleep together?”

The question knocks the breath out of me. For a long beat, I can’t answer. “Now who thinks they’re entitled to personal history?”

Irene doesn’t laugh. Her eyes burn into mine. “Did you?”

I look away from her. “Yes.”

We’re silent. The Jacuzzi bubbles simmer and pop.

“Did you and Charlotte sleep together?”

Irene brushes a finger against her chin. “Only when we were drunk.”

“And she has the nerve to pull that shit on you tonight?”

Irene is quiet. Then she says: “Charlotte hates me because I loved her.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Says the girl who can’t figure out whether she wants to bone or murder her ex-girlfriend.”

I fall silent.

“Charlotte is the reason I have this scar.” She touches her eyebrow, smoothing it over like one day she can make it full again. Even in the dim light of the hot tub, I can see the break in her skin.

“We went to this Candlehawk party last year,” she continues. “It was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen. Pills everywhere you looked, girls feeling each other up while people watched, some guy sobbing in the corner because he was so tweaked out. All I wanted was to go home and be together, just the two of us, but Charlotte caught a glimpse of Prescott from across the room, and that was the end of it.”

Prescott. The Candlehawk boyfriend. The pompous jerk who assisted Charlotte tonight.

“She asked him to drive us to her house. He was so wasted he could hardly stand up straight. I refused to get in his car, or to let her get in his car, but Charlotte was so messed up she started fighting me. She kept yelling about how I was in love with her but could never have her, and I was a jealous loser, and that it was totally pathetic and—” she cuts herself off. “I tried to grab her, but she shoved me off. I smashed into this huge cabinet and cut my face on the corner.”

I think of the lore surrounding her eyebrow scar. She got too drunk at a party. She swam into the side of the pool when she was wasted. She fell off the bed when she was having crazy, anonymous sex. What a cruel, bastardized version of the truth.

And then I remember the many times I wanted to thank the person who put that scar there. It makes me sick to my stomach.

“Charlotte’s an asshole,” I tell her. “She should be thanking her lucky stars you stopped her from getting into that car.”

“But I didn’t,” Irene says. There’s a tinge of regret in her tone. “I was drunk, too, and all I could focus on was my face bleeding. I let her go off with him and he got pulled over a mile from his house. He should have gotten a DUI, but his parents were friends with the Candlehawk police chief, so they let him go with a warning. Charlotte was escorted home, her parents freaked out and told Coach Banza and the other soccer coaches, and she got benched for the first five games of what was supposed to be her big debut year.”

“And she blames you for this?”

Irene smiles wryly.

“But you tried to stop her!”

“She thinks I should have tried harder. And I don’t know, maybe I should have. But sometimes it just hurts too much.”

I let the story settle around us. “I’m sorry I made you go tonight.”

Her eyes take me in. “You didn’t make me do anything. I knew what I was stepping into.”

“Still. I’m sorry I didn’t take it seriously when you told me how toxic it was between you.”