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“I was trying to turn over a new leaf.”
She glanced at Henry. He’d dumped the rest of the Doritos out onto the floor and was arranging them in a pattern discernible only to him. He was making an unholy mess, but if she wanted to talk to Jamie, this was the only chance she’d get.
When she looked back at her brother, he was shaking his head. “No, you were trying to give yourself an excuse to get closer to him, because getting closer to him scared you, but you wanted to do it anyway.”
Yeah, that was pretty much what she’d been doing.
“Have you figured out you’re in love with him yet?”
She flopped back onto the bed, letting her legs dangle over the side. “Yes.”
“So you’re at that stage.”
“What stage?”
“The stage where you know you love him, and you think he loves you, but you’re totally convinced it’s over for some lame reason you can’t even articulate, so you go around all mopey and heartbroken until you get a Frisbee in the face and realize you’re being an idiot.”
Ellen actually had been hit in the face with a Frisbee once. She’d sat up just as someone threw it over her head, and it had smacked squarely into her eye socket, giving her a shiner that turned black, purple, and blue before fading to a sickly greeni
sh yellow a week later. Jamie had thought the whole episode was hilarious, and he still brought it up as often as possible.
“That’s a stage?” It didn’t feel like a stage. It felt like the end. Irrevocable. Miserable.
“That’s totally a stage. Want me to be the Frisbee?”
She put her forearm over her eyes. “I don’t need a Frisbee. This isn’t funny.”
Jamie patted her on the knee. “I only think it’s funny because I already got my black eye. Why don’t you try telling me why you and Clark can’t be together?”
“He knew this photographer was a felon and a threat to me and Henry, but he didn’t tell me, and Richard let the guy take Henry’s picture.”
“Wait, is this the one Caleb had arrested over at Maureen’s house?”
“Yeah. How’d you know about that?”
“Breckenridge gives me updates. So that’s what you argued about? Because he didn’t tell you?”
“Sort of.”
“But he’s not supposed to tell you all that stuff. He’s just supposed to deal with it. That’s his job. He took care of it, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No, wait, listen. Breckenridge knows all kinds of stuff about my security they don’t tell me. I get stalkers and really freaked-out, weird e-mails, sometimes even death threats. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t need to know.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
Because I was sleeping with him. Because if he’d cared about me, he’d have told me everything.
But she cared about him, and she hadn’t told him everything. She’d told him next to nothing. And as much as she resented Caleb’s decision to keep what he’d known about Weasel Face from her, she understood why he’d done it, and she knew she’d blown it out of proportion. She’d used it as an excuse, one of half a dozen ready options she’d latched onto because she couldn’t handle feeling like her life was spinning out of control.
“I rejected him,” she said, and the words came out weak and despairing.
“So un-reject him.”
“I can’t. He’s cold with me now.”
