by Rebel Hart
He shook his head on top of mine, forcing mine to turn along with it and I chuckled. “Nuh uh. I think it’s great! That’s a perfect score for sure!”
“I certainly hope so. This is the only class I’m halfway concerned I won’t get an A in, but if I nail this final, I should be good.”
Tristan wrapped his arms around me and gave me a squeeze. “You killed it. Don’t worry.”
I grabbed onto his arms and held on, giving him a return hug. “Thanks, Tris.”
“Hey guys!”
The voice made me jump sky high. In trying to unwrap myself from Tristan, I slammed myself upward, bashing my head into his chin and sending a wave of pain coursing down my skull. I yelped at the same time that Tristan let out a yowl. I put my head down on the table and tried to breathe through the pain, feeling like I got my bell rung.
“Tristan!” Aria screeched. “Are you okay?!”
“I’m fine,” Tristan responded. “I think I just bit my tongue.”
“You’re bleeding,” I heard Arden reply.
“I’ll go get you some tissue,” Aria said.
“It’s okay,” Tristan replied. “I needed to pee anyway. I’ll be right back.”
A hand settled on my back a second later. “Hannah, are you okay? That looked like it hurt.”
I looked up and Aria was looking down at me. Just seeing that dumb look of concern on her face made me want to scream, but standing just behind her, looking over her shoulder at me, was Arden. It sent me over the edge and I knew that I had to get away from that table as soon as possible. Even if, for the first time ever, Arden wasn’t looking at me like she hated my guts, I wasn’t about to stick around to hear that Aria convinced her to go easy on me or something.
I wanted out.
“I’m fine,” I barked, making no attempt to hide my disdain as I stood up from the table.
“I’m sorry,” Aria yelped out. “I really didn’t mean to interrupt.”
I just ignored her. Anywhere was better than standing there with her when every single day I felt more and more like I wanted to punch her in the face. It was visceral. I just flat out didn’t like her. She made me want to scream.
“Hannah, watch out!” I crashed into someone, before I could stop myself, just barely managing to get a hand out and grab them before they fell backwards. Ceradi looked up at me with a scowl at first, but then she laughed. “Hey, quick reflexes there, Spiderman.”
“Haha,” I quipped.
“Oof, you look like you’re ready to murder someone. What happened?” Subconsciously, I turned and looked over to where Aria was now standing, effectively holding all of my stuff hostage. “Ohh. The cow, huh? Don’t you wish that you could just get rid of her?”
“I really do! It would have been better for me if she had never transferred here to begin with!” I screeched.
“Sure, that too,” Ceradi said.
That was weird phrasing, but I didn’t ask, I was way too infuriated. I just stood there glaring across the lunchroom, watching as Aria slunk down onto one of the chairs and Arden started to console her, patting her back, petting her head.
And something snapped in me.
“I’m going to give her a piece of my mind,” I muttered.
Ceradi patted me on the back. “Do it girl! Go show that fatass who’s boss!”
Ignoring Ceradi entirely, I stormed back across the lunchroom with Aria and Arden dead center in my sights. There were a handful of other students already set up in the lunchroom, and every single one of them picked up on my aggression as I charged up to the other side of the table and slammed my hands on it.
“Hey!” Both Aria and Arden jumped as I did it, but my eyes were focused on Arden. “I’m so fucking sick of you!”
“What did I do?” Arden asked.
“You have been awful to me just because I was afraid to give up everyone and everything for you!” There were tears in my eyes from rage and frustration. “Do you have any idea how much I lo—”
Arden leapt clear across the table and tackled me to the ground. My head narrowly missed hitting the next table over, I realized because Arden cupped my head and pulled it back to protect it. It almost made me more angry. Don’t constantly stomp all over my heart and tackle me to the ground, but then act like she cared about whether or not I hit my head.
“Get off of me,” I grunted.
“Can we not do this here. Do you have any idea what you were about to say in front of all these people?” Arden spat back.
It petrified me. I was so furious at that moment, that I very nearly screamed that I loved Arden in front of all these people. She didn’t care about people knowing that she was gay, she jumped across the table and tackled me to the ground to prevent me from outing myself. Didn’t she realize how difficult it was for me to align myself when she acted so hot and cold? It was such a self-sacrificial thing to do considering how she’d been treating me lately.
She rolled off to the side of me and I stood up, looking down at her and quietly hissing. “I need to talk to you.” I locked eyes with her and made sure she knew it wasn’t a suggestion. “Now.”
She didn’t argue with me, but got to her feet and nodded. “Okay.”
“Are you guys okay?” Aria asked.
Neither Arden nor I responded to her. I looked over at Ceradi as I passed, and she was looking at me like she was confused and concerned, but I didn’t give her any attention either. I was so close to bursting that if I just didn’t get some things out, I was going to die of an aneurysm. I led the way down the hallway and out of the front door of the school, to where there were study pods outside for small grounds to work while enjoying fresh air.
“Did you hit your head?” Arden asked when we were alone.
I waved my hands through the air. “Don’t worry about if I hit my head or not! You don’t get to worry about if I hit my head!”
“Okay,” Arden said.
She was much less confrontational than she had been during our last fight, but though I didn’t know why, I didn’t care. “You can’t just continue to treat me like I don’t have any feelings!” I snapped. “I don’t like being treated like shit.”
“I don’t want to treat you like shit, but I don’t know what you want from me,” Arden responded. “It’s… hard.”
“What’s hard?” I snapped. “Being around me isn’t awful. I’m not a bad person! I’m sorry that things didn’t work out between us, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish every single day that things hadn’t turned out like that. I’m sorry! I can’t undo time!”
Arden sighed. “Hannah, that’s not fair. I’m the one who got my heart broken. I wanted to be with you. I wanted to do anything to be with you. I’m supposed to just swallow the fact that you just shattered me like that?” She didn’t sound angry, but anguished. “I’ve… I’ve never gotten over that. I’m never going to be the same because of that. I’m allowed to be upset about what happened between us. Just because I understand doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt me.”
“I could say the same to you,” I murmured, and it seemed to strike Arden somewhere meaningful. “I get why you’re upset with me, but I was hurt too.”
“So what do you want from me?” Arden asked. “I’m not trying to hurt you, but I don’t want to be hurting anymore either, so what do we do?”
“I tried asking you to make nice,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” Arden said. “I’m sorry, I know that sounds petty and selfish, but I’m just not capable of that. I can’t just talk to you and be around you like we don’t have the history we have. I’m not that strong, quite frankly. The best I can do is promise not to be nasty anymore.”
“Fine, I accept that, but…” I took a deep breath, my heart pounding as I prepared to say what I was about to say. “I need you to be less… obvious about Aria. I know that you care about her more than you’ve ever cared about me, but it hurts to see. Can we just agree not to deal with new romantic interests until after we’ve graduat
ed? It’s only a month and a few days away.”
“Romantic interests?” Arden’s face screwed up in confusion. “I’m not romantically interested in Aria. She’s straight for one, and she’s with Tristan. She’s crazy about him.”
“I’m not stupid,” I said. “I know what you look like when you’re in love and you’re obviously in love with her. You treat her like the world begins and ends at her feet.”
“Honestly, I kind of think it does,” she retorted. “But there’s nothing romantic about it, I just think the world of her. Besides, you have absolutely no right to ask me that, still being best friends with the guy you cheated on me with!”
“I didn’t cheat on you!” I screamed. “Nothing happened between us before we broke up! I agreed to the date and that was it.”
“Whatever. You treat him like a king, why can’t I treat Aria like a queen? I care about her more than you, what about you? You still don’t have an explanation for why, what was so hard to do with me, was so easy to do with him.”
“It’s… it’s just different,” I said.
“You’re being a hypocrite,” Arden snapped. “I’m not changing my relationship with Aria to make you feel better just because you’re too insecure to understand the difference between friendship and something romantic.”
“Insecure?!”
“Yeah!” Arden was back to screaming now. “You’re insecure, Hannah! Why else would you have these fake nails, and wear clothes I know you think are uncomfortable, and your fucking eyes!” She scoffed. “Your brown eyes are so beautiful. Why do you wear contacts? Your friends and parents aren’t okay with you showing the eye color you were born with.”
“You’re getting off topic,” I whimpered.
“No I’m not!” Arden ran her hands through her hair. “I can’t do this. Talking with you is so frustrating to me! You…” She looked at me sadly. “You were so perfect to me the way you were.” Silence fell between us and we both just stood there not knowing what to say or do. “I won’t be mean so long as we don’t talk,” Arden said. “That’s the best I can do.”
“Fine,” I whispered.
“Bye, Hannah.”
Arden walked away, and all I could do was sink down onto the ground and bury my face in my knees to hide my tears. That wasn’t at all how I expected that conversation to go. It felt like every time I tried to make a point, Arden twisted it. At the end of the day I just wanted her to know I was in pain because I still loved her. Why was that so hard for her to see?
“Hannah?” I lifted my head and looked over and Ceradi was walking across the grass to where I was. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure how much Ceradi had heard, but I was praying not much. “Not really.”
“It’s Aria, huh? You’re upset that her and Arden stole Tristan from you?”
I nodded, knowing I couldn’t admit the truth. “Yeah.”
“Aw, boo.” She sank down next to me on the grass and wrapped her arm around me. “Don’t worry, babes. You and me, we’re gonna get that cow back for stealing Tristan from you. Just you wait.”
15
Arden
“This is so painfully cute, I could cry.”
Tristan laughed at my comment, but seemed emboldened nonetheless. “Yeah? You don't think it’s tacky?”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, no, it’s completely tacky. That doesn’t mean that it’s not cute or she isn’t gonna love it.”
I held Tristan's graduation party invitation out to give back to him where he’d used clippings of notes that Aria had written him throughout the duration of their relationship to design it in secret homage to his love for her. It gave the entire invitation a sort of ‘ransom note’ appearance, but that was sufficiently quelled by how adorable it was that he felt he had to make this declaration in the first place.
“Oh, no. That one is for you,” he said, pushing the invitation back at me.
I looked down at it again, a little surprised. “Uh, oh…”
He snickered. “Did you think I wasn't going to invite you to my party?”
Slipping the invitation into my backpack, I tried to shove away my initial shock. “I guess I hadn’t really thought about it. You know, for like three whole years you were Mr. Unattainable Popular Guy to me, so I never really considered what would happen if we ended up becoming friends.”
“It is kind of unexpected, I'll give you that. I'm happy about it though, aren’t you?” he asked.
Aria had once described Tristan to me as a puppy who runs around the house trying to impress the big dogs, and even the cat. Though he’d come a long way in terms of his self-consciousness regarding being liked and popular, he still occasionally sought validation from anywhere he could get it, all while being as adorable and innocent as a puppy.
“Totally,” I confirmed. “You are so much cooler than I thought you were, and I’m glad that we get along, for Aria’s sake, as much as our own.”
Tristan’s happy expression turned sad at this. “Yeah. Me too.”
On the other side, with his best friend, Tristan wasn’t having that much luck. Apparently Hannah had been harboring less than positive feelings towards Aria, and I couldn’t help but feel particularly responsible. Ever since our little “exchange” at the beginning of the month, Hannah pretty much stopped coming around, sticking mostly with the popular kids and Ceradi. She stopped trying to hide her disdain for Aria, and though she and Tristan were still friends technically, they hadn't seen one another much, which was heartbreaking. I never meant for my past with Hannah to interfere with her friendship with Tristan, but there was only so much I could do. My feelings for Aria weren’t romantic, so if Hannah was committed to hating on Aria for that reason alone, then things were just bound to be problematic.
Still, it didn’t ease my guilt in feeling like I was part of the reason Tristan was losing his best friend. “I’m, uh… I’m sorry."
Tristan looked over at me as we walked, his expression quickly twisted into confusion. “Sorry for what?”
“All of the Hannah stuff,” I said. “Maybe if I’d just swallow my pride and played nice she’d still be around and you guys would be doing better.”
Tristan shook his head. “Oh… No. I don’t think so. It’s not all about you guys’ history, Hannah just struggles with Aria in general. She’s so used to being around fake, superficial people that being around someone as genuinely incredible as Aria really throws her off. And I mean, you know, Aria is sickeningly perfect.”
I snickered. “Sickeningly.”
It wasn’t entirely a compliment when he said it or when I agreed. Though we both loved Aria to death, she had this way of making everyone around her seem like a mortal in the presence of a god. It wasn’t something she did intentionally, it wasn’t even really her fault. The woman literally was just good at everything.
Aria had faults, and those who were close enough to her got to see them in a way that made her seem even more human and incredible, but she did a good job of hiding them. For someone like me who played at high-roller tables with no money, or Tristan who battled with facing himself in the mirror every morning, someone like Aria who seemed to walk the line without issue and feel totally secure about herself could earn the slightest bit of contempt, even from us.
We knew and loved Aria far beyond those things, but for someone like Hannah who had more self-confidence issues than you could shake a stick at, I supposed it did make sense that her and Aria would just be a chemical mismatch. Hannah probably felt like dirt on the ground in Aria’s presence.
“I tried just about everything I could to embolden her confidence, but nothing took. She’s so convinced that Aria just means more to me than her that she can’t see me kicking and begging and screaming for her to just not worry about Aria and be my friend. Nothing has to change, but her insecurity is suffocating her.” He looked over at me. “Has she always been like that?”
“No,” I said. “Right before things went ass up with her family, she was so l
aid back. Sure, she was a little dorky with her braces and old style, but she was still her. Hannah’s naturally beautiful.”
“She really is,” Tristan agreed. “I’ve seen her without all the makeup and her contacts and I don’t quite get what she's trying to hide. Don't get me wrong, if Hannah likes all the makeup and fancy clothes, then more power to her, who am I to tell her not to do it? But I get the feeling she doesn't like it.”
“No. She hates it, at least she did when we were kids. Her mom would force her to sit down and have these makeup sessions where she taught her how to do her makeup and she used to complain for hours on end about them. At the end of middle school, Hannah’s wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans, comfy sweatshirts and cool kicks. Vans, Converse, whatever. She’s a bit of a sneaker head.”
A warm smile came across Tristan’s face. “Really? I didn't know that!”
“Oh yeah.” I fell out laughing. “She once dragged me with her to this lottery for Jordans I think. It was all these grown ass men, mostly of color, and then two mousey, white teenagers. Someone would have thought we were lost.”
Tristan’s jaw dropped. “I would pay to see that.”
“I've got my guard up, you know? Typical unnecessary white fear, but here goes Hannah diving in, having full conversations with these guys. Like geeking out, showing one another pictures, straight up bonding.”
“Hannah?!” Tristan said. ‘No.”
“Swear to god. We had to stand in this line for like three hours, and even then the only reason she got the shoes was because no one there was looking for a women's size six!” I swiped tears from my eyes laughing so hard at the memory. “We ended up having to convince a cop that this big, black dude was my fucking uncle because Hannah wanted to have lunch with them and, well, a whole bunch of like twenty to thirty-plus-year-old men sitting down for lunch with two fourteen year olds doesn't necessarily look great from a distance.”
“No.” Tristan was laughing so hard he was doubled over. “Wow. I never knew that about her.”
