Page 109 of People Like Us

I could still see her smile in the cafeteria. The way she’d talked about her party. The way she’d looked relieved when I said I’d come, and I had just walked past her.

Behind me, Andy stepped closer. His hand moved from my shoulder and landed firmly against August’s chest, holding him back. “Hey,” he snapped. “Watch it, man.”

August’s eyes dropped to Andy’s hand. Slowly. Deliberately. Then rose back to his face. His expression shifted from a fragile desperation to a meaner one. He slapped Andy’s hand away hard enough for the crack to echo.

“Or what?” he snarled. His voice shook. “You’ll hit me again?” August laughed. The sound was horrible. Halfway between a sob and something feral.

“Go ahead, buddy.” Every muscle in Andy’s body went rigid behind me. “The last time you did,” August continued, eyes locked on his, “your girlfriend felt so bad she let me fuck her on my couch.”

The waiting room vanished around me. Everything narrowed. The bright lights overhead. The pounding of blood in my ears. The sudden ringing silence that followed. My entire body went cold.

“What do you think she’ll give me this time?” August laughed, that manic smile I recognized from the fits my mother used to have grew widely across his blotchy face.

I sucked in a sharp breath.

Andy physically recoiled, not from August. But from me. He turned slowly, looking down at me. It was as if my whole life flashed in front of me—vacation bible school in a church that couldn’t afford AC so we ate popsicles till we were sticky and blue tongued. Playing on the same soccer team in elementary school, and Andy being kicked off the team when he got in a fight with another kid for kicking the ball at my head. Freshman year when he held me when I cried after I lost my virginity to a guy I shouldn’t have. Junior year, when he told me he had always loved me. A month after, when I saw him shirtless for the first time—his body littered with bruises. Football games, and parties, and school dances, and a thousand nights spent in a church counting the minutes to when we could touch each other. Both of us starved for any sort of intimacy.

Oh God. I was going to be sick.

I’d seen Andy angry. I’d seen him jealous. I’d seen him scared. I had never seen him look heartbroken. Not even when I broke up with him, he had looked like he was disappointed, and hurt. But like he thought it was temporary.

Now, his face seemed to collapse inward. Like something fundamental inside him had finally cracked. His chest heaved with a jagged breath.

“Is that true?” The question came out so quietly it hurt more than if he’d screamed.

August laughed again. “Yeah, Lola.” His glassy eyed attention shifted toward me. “Is that true?”

I couldn’t answer. August knew I couldn’t lie with him here. Knew that I wouldn’t. He was daring me—forcing me to hurt Andy in a way I never wanted to. All the secrets I’d spent months balancing so carefully had finally collapsed under their own weight.

I was shaking my head, hot tears streaking down my face as I looked up at Andy. All I could see was that boy from our first time—bruised and vulnerable.

“Or do you even know what the truth is anymore?” August pushed again. I couldn’t look at him, too afraid that if I broke eye contact with Andy that I’d never get the chance to explain.

Maybe I didn’t deserve it. But at that moment, it felt like the only safe thing to hold onto. The smallest of my problems threatening to swallow me whole. One I could solve if I could just say the right thing.

“I’ll give you the truth.” August went on.

I opened my mouth, finally. “August—”

“No,” he cut me off. The word came out sharp enough to cut. “Your perfect little girlfriend has been cheating on you for months.”

The shame hit so hard I thought I might be sick.

I watched Andy absorb the words. Watched his jaw tighten. Watched his eyes glaze over. Watched him begin to understand.

But August wasn’t finished. His grief seemed to spill out of him now, unstoppable.

“Slumming it in my bedroom while you and your friends—who gave my sister a lethal amount of diet pills, by the way—partied across the street.”

There it was. The real wound. Not me. Morgan.

“When she told you she was studying, or sick, or at some bullshit charity thing…” He laughed bitterly. “She was with me.” Every word sounded like it physically hurt him. “Begging me to make her come because you couldn’t.”

I flinched. He said it like he wanted it to hurt. Like he needed someone else to be wounded in that moment. My eyes didn’t leave Andy. My vision was blurry, but I could see him holding back tears.

August moved, stepping closer to me. Andy’s fist balled at his side, his knuckles popping with the tension. August bent his knee, forcing himself into my line of vision. He’d done this a thousand times before, and every time it had sent a thrill through me. But now, it scared me.

Because beneath all the anger there was devastation. “And now…” His voice dropped. After everything we’d shared, after every whispered confession in dark rooms, I’d never heard him sound like that. “So help me God, Lola…” His throat worked. “You promised you’d look after her.”