Complete Nothing (True Love #2)(18)

“Why not? It was going to happen anyway, right? Now you can go hang out with Lance as much as you want and practice for your big audition,” I blurted. “Princeton calls!”

“That is so not fair,” she said through her teeth. “You know there’s nothing going on with me and Lance.”

“Yeah. Not yet, maybe,” I said. “But you can’t tell me you don’t think about it—what it would be like to go out with a guy like him. Somebody with a brain, somebody who likes the same things you do, somebody with a future.”

“You could have a future!” Claudia shouted, holding the stack of brochures up. “You just don’t want to be bothered. You’re so pathetic sometimes, Peter. For the great big football star, sometimes I swear you’re like some scared little boy.”

And there it was. What she really thought of me. Pathetic. She thought I was pathetic.

A few freshmen laughed into their hands, and my face burned. She shoved the stack of brochures at me but stood her ground, lifting her tiny chin, which, I noticed with a pang, was quivering awfully. At that point, though, I was too pissed off and humiliated to care. If that was what she really thought of me, then maybe I was doing the right thing.

I took the brochures and threw them into the bottom of my locker with a clang. This time when I slammed the door, I made sure it stayed shut.

“Well, I know one thing for sure,” I said. “My pathetic future is not with you.”

As she crumbled into tears, I turned around and speed-walked toward the gym.





CHAPTER EIGHT


Claudia


What just happened? What just happened?

I couldn’t breathe. I could barely see. Everything was a blur. The blue-and-white locker doors. The shred of paper on the floor. The yellowing caulk around the windows. I tipped my face up and tried to stop the flow of tears. The Marrott poster I’d toiled over yesterday afternoon glinted in the sun, mocking me.

Had Peter really just dumped me? Had he just called me a nag, accused me of liking someone else, said I couldn’t wait to get away from him?

Had I just called the guy I loved pathetic?

Oh God, oh God, oh God. This couldn’t be happening.

My hands shook. Slowly my gaze traveled along the faces around me. Most of them turned away as my eyes met theirs, as if that could make them invisible, erase the fact that my humiliation had come with an audience. The pulse in my wrists fluttered like the wings on a dying bird. Dying. I was dying. I was going to die. I wiped my face, then turned and slowly walked through the library entrance across the hall and over to the table where my chemistry notes were laid out neatly, ready to be organized into a lab report.

Are you breaking up with me? my tremulous voice repeated in my head.

Why not? he blurted in reply. Why not? Why not? Why not?

It was like I didn’t matter to him one bit. Like breaking up with me was nothing. Did he really think I wanted someone else? Someone like Lance? Did he think that I thought I was too good for him?

“No.”

I said the word so loudly I startled a girl reading a romance novel near the windows.

“Sorry,” I said, shoving everything haphazardly into my leather backpack. “Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Tears filled my eyes, and I felt snot forming inside my nose. I took a deep breath and blinked rapidly. I had to get out of there. Now. My knees shaking beneath me as if I’d just done five hundred first-position deep pliés at the barre, I somehow made it out the door.

There had to be some kind of mistake. Peter wouldn’t just break up with me out of nowhere. We were fine. We were happy. We were a perfect couple. We’d never fought in the fifteen months, three weeks, and three days we’d been together. Not once. Yes, he’d been snapping at me here and there, acting impatient, but that was different. That was a phase. Not a cause for a breakup. There had to be some kind of mistake.

I repeated this word to myself over and over again like a mantra as I walked toward the locker rooms just outside the gym.

Mistake mistake mistake.

Mistake mistake mistake.

Why not? Whynotwhynotwhynot?

No.

Mistake mistake mistake.

Mistake mistake mistake.

A twittering klatch of freshman girls stood near their lockers gossiping and messing with their hair. God, how excited they’d be when they heard that Peter Marrott was single again. I felt an ache in my heart that seemed unsurvivable, but yet, I kept walking.

Mistake mistake mistake.

Mistake mistake mistake.

I got to the door of the boys’ locker room. Only then did I realize I could follow Peter no farther. Inside, I heard boy laughter, the kind that normally made my heart quicken because it was just so male, so mysteriously carefree. Now I wanted to slam my hand against the door and scream. Were they laughing at me? Was he telling them he’d finally dumped the bookish bitch they couldn’t stand? I could see Lester doing a happy dance, whooping it up over my misery.

One humiliated tear spilled down my cheek, and then my teeth clenched. No. He loved me. He might never have said it, but he did. Or at the very least, he respected me. He wouldn’t talk about me behind my back. He’d never do that. I turned and walked through the doors of the always ice-cold gymnasium, then out the back door, where the football players would eventually emerge from their locker room. The JV girls’ soccer team was gathered into a huddle with their coach under a copse of trees, and that True girl sat on one of the metal benches, watching Gavin and Orion chat by the door with Mitchell Ross.