by Siera Maley
“You didn’t tell me you knew her,” Skylar argued. “You were the only one who knew that, and you agreed anyway. I wouldn’t have asked you to do it if I’d known.”
“But not because of how it’d affect me,” I said. “Because it might mean that we’d actually start liking each other. Remember what you said? You were worried I’d like her. I’m not saying I’m perfect; I screwed up, too. But this isn’t all my fault.”
“And I was right to worry, wasn’t I?” she shot back. “You’re so obvious. You’ve been so obvious, but I just didn’t want to believe that my best friend could betray me like that. I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, just like I’ve been doing ever since last fall.”
“Chelsea’s been so much nicer to me than you’ve been these past few weeks,” I said, shaking my head. “She actually cares about me, and she listens to me, and seeing me happy makes her happy. How can you say you’re my best friend when you’ve been pushing me to make myself miserable?”
“How can you say you’re my best friend when you’re off trying to date the girl who completely screwed me over? I stuck by you when no one else would,” Skylar snarled. “I let myself feel sorry for you. I should’ve known better. You and Chelsea deserve each other, so how about you two have a nice time at Prom and run off into the sunset together and live happily ever after?”
“Maybe we will,” I bit out.
“Then do it.”
“Fine.”
I wiped at my eyes as Skylar turned and stormed back to Devon’s car with a sharp, “Come on, Alex.” She opened the door, but Alex didn’t move to do the same on the passenger’s side. In fact, she took a step back and glanced toward me anxiously, like she knew that her decision was going to get her into trouble.
Skylar just shook her head at Alex and mumbled a short, “I’m shocked,” then got into the car and drove away. I lowered myself to my knees when she was gone and placed my palms on the asphalt, worried I was going to throw up. I heard footsteps and then Alex was at my side, rubbing my back.
“I’m sorry about Wes,” I told her.
“He’s an asshole,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”
It felt strange having Alex in my room again. The last time we’d been here, we’d had a sleepover, just the two of us, and we’d fumbled for each other in the darkness and tried our best to be quiet so that my parents wouldn’t hear. A week later I’d broken up with her in her own room.
She studied her surroundings like she’d never been here before, and I watched her take in the ways it had changed; the new pictures on the walls and on my dresser and the new desk I’d gotten for Christmas. She sank down onto my bed when she was done and just looked at me, and I felt the words on the tip of my tongue slip out before I could stop them.
“I’m really sorry.”
She nodded shortly and didn’t seem to know what to say for a moment. Then she opened her mouth to speak, but the words died in her throat and she changed her mind. I sat down opposite her in my desk chair, watching her fold her hands in her lap, and finally, she spoke. “Skylar dumped all of this on me today at school. I still don’t know what to think.”
“But you spoke to Wes?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I knew pretty quickly what to think about him. He’s not as dumb as you think he is, Zoey. You never hid how much you cared about all of us, especially with how your parents are. I know he knew you’d do anything not to lose that.” She pursed her lips. “I hope he can still have kids after today.”
I winced when I realized what she was implying. “I never meant to ruin your friendship,” I told her, and she laughed.
“Yeah, I think he did a pretty good job of that on his own. You know he actually tried to argue today I was wrong for ‘friend-zoning’ him in the first place? God, you ruined us for that, Zoey.” She looked at me forlornly and I swallowed hard.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Skylar said this Chelsea thing’s been going on for almost eight weeks now,” she said. “You have to stop doing this, Zoey.”
“I know.” I nodded at her. “I have to tell her the truth.”
“You’re right, but that’s not what I meant,” she clarified. “You have to stop being so loyal to people who aren’t loyal to you. I know Skylar stuck by you after we broke up, but that doesn’t mean you owe her for life. The way she’s been acting, she doesn’t deserve it.”
“I thought she was your friend,” I said.
“She is. Or maybe she’s not now, but…she screwed up talking you into doing this. Wes isn’t dumb and Skylar isn’t either. She knows how much her friendship means to you. You have to stop letting people use you.”
I closed my eyes and felt tears leak out onto my cheeks. “I’m not innocent, either. She’s my best friend’s ex. I shouldn’t have let it get this far.”
“I know. But you can’t change that now.”
I sighed. “I just wish everything could go back to how it used to be. With the four of us.”
She nodded her agreement. “Yeah. I was really happy last semester, too. But things don’t always work out that way. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes life just goes on.”
“What about us?” I asked her, opening my eyes. She took a deep breath and for the first time I saw her let her guard down, and I then I could see clearly in her face how much she was hurting.
“I was so in love with you,” she told me.
I nodded, wanting her to know that I knew. “Me too. I loved you so much, too.” My voice cracked and then I was crying again. “I messed up.”
I moved to join her on the bed and hugged her, and we both just held each other and cried together for a few minutes, and it felt strangely cathartic when it was all over. She wiped at her eyes and told me, “If you really meant what you said about Chelsea, you should tell her. Don’t make the same mistake with her that you did with me.”
“I know she’s going to hate me,” I said. “Even if Skylar never says anything, I can’t just not tell her the truth.”
“All you can do is try,” Alex said. “If she feels the way you do, maybe she’ll be willing to listen.”
I nodded shortly and looked at her again, and she pulled me in for another hug. We clutched each other for another long minute, and I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, letting myself pretend I was a few months younger for just a moment again. I’d missed her so much, but it just wasn’t the same.
She pulled away and pressed her lips to my cheek for several seconds too long, and I knew instantly that something was still there between us for her, and that she was trying her best to put it aside for me. The thought put a lump in my throat.
“Can we be friends again, eventually?” I asked her when she finally pulled away. She wiped at her eyes and gave me a watery smile.
“I hope so, Zoey. I’d like to, but I’m worried it might hurt too much,” she said, and then she squeezed my hand and said goodbye.
I agonized for hours over what to say to Chelsea that night. I wanted to see her in person to tell her everything, so I knew that it’d have to wait until tomorrow. But I was so deeply dreading it. Everything between us was perfect. We’d been through so much together and in an instant, I was going to destroy it and then beg Chelsea to pick up the pieces with me. If she hated me ten times worse than Skylar did after all of this was over, I’d deserve it.
I was just settling on simply telling her that we needed to talk tomorrow when a text came in on my phone. It was from Skylar, and it was a video that was nearly five minutes long. There was no message to accompany it, but the preview image looked eerily similar to the parking lot of the park near Chelsea’s house. I could see a baseball diamond in the background, past a car I instantly recognized as Chelsea’s. It was dark outside, like it had been filmed in the evening maybe an hour or two ago. I held my breath and pressed play.
Skylar was filming this herself, I knew, because a moment after the video began, she called out too sweetly, “Thanks for meet
ing up again. Especially on short notice.”
The camera panned past Chelsea’s car and there was Chelsea, looking a little nervous as she closed the car door behind herself. She was wearing the same outfit I’d seen her in earlier today. “Of course. I owe you.”
“You might change your mind about that,” Skylar told her, laughing a little. I felt my blood turn to ice.
Chelsea looked confused as her gaze dropped to the phone in Skylar’s hands. She looked directly at the camera and asked, “Are you filming this?”
“Hold on, I want to make sure I get a good angle.” Skylar took a step back until all of Chelsea was in frame, then proudly declared, “There. We have so much to catch up on, Chelsea.”
“Why are you recording this?” Chelsea asked her.
“It’s for a friend. My best friend, actually. You might’ve heard of her.”
“You bitch,” I whispered, my vision going blurry with tears. I wiped them away aggressively and forced myself to keep watching.
“What are you talking about?” Chelsea asked her. “Look, I’m okay with talking, but this is weird. Can you just turn it off and we can go sit—”
“Her name’s Zoey Seever. I’m pretty sure you two know each other, right?”
Chelsea froze in place and stared at her, open-mouthed. Then she said, “I never told you her name. How did you know that?”
“Haven’t you been listening? She’s my best friend. Or at least she was. Things have been stressful lately. We had a lot of fun planning this together, though. She tells me all about the stuff you guys do.”
Chelsea shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Skylar sighed heavily and said, “Alright, I guess I’m really going to have to lay this out for you. You dumped me at Prom. I have a hot friend, so we came up with a plan to get back at you. Then she seduced you.” She paused, giving time for the words to sink in. “We planned all of it.”
“She would’ve told me if she knew you,” Chelsea protested, but I could see the panic on her face. It was obvious her mind was working overtime to go back and relive every second we’d spent together. “And she wouldn’t do that.”
“Fine. It was all real and I just found your girlfriend’s name and then just started making this whole thing up. How do you think she knew where to find you in the first place? I told her you go to parties. You saw my brother there, right? He gave her a ride. And at your birthday party…whose idea did you think was to give you that bracelet? Hers? I picked it out.”
Chelsea jumped on that in an instant, and I could hear the relief in her voice. “Zoey didn’t give me a bracelet for my birthday. She gave me a coin; she remembered I collect them.”
“Really?” Skylar didn’t hide that that’d caught her off-guard. “Wow, she’s full of surprises. I guess she did take a little creative license, but that’s what makes her so much better at this than I would’ve been. See, my original idea was that she’d just keep you wanting to hook up with her until it was time for her to dump you, and then maybe you’d be a little embarrassed, or a little broken-hearted if we were lucky. But then she had this genius plan to open up to you and really make you fall in love with the real her. And that was when we really got going. I bet she really made you feel like she was letting you in.”
Chelsea stared at her for a long moment, looking visibly sick. Then she declared, “I don’t want to talk to you. Just go.”
“What, you don’t want to hear the rest? It was her idea to bring Cole in, too. He was the one who told her what you said about her at that party. Which was great, by the way; it was just more proof you were exactly the same person who dumped me on Prom night. She was so upset over that one because it meant that her plan hadn’t been working as well as she thought it was. So then she really had to step it up. It was my idea to use her parents.”
“Shut up!” Chelsea interrupted. She started to cry, and I knew I was crying with her. My vision blurred all over again until I couldn’t even see the video anymore. “Stop lying to me.”
“I mean, her parents’ reactions were real, but you’re naïve if you don’t think she used it.”
“You have no idea what that was like. What happened that night,” Chelsea insisted through tears. “She wouldn’t have…we wouldn’t have if…she wouldn’t have taken it that far.”
I heard Skylar let out a short, shocked laugh, and I could picture the disbelief on her face. “Wait…did you two sleep together?” she asked, dumbfounded. I could hear the hurt in her voice, but she recovered quickly and then her false bravado was back. “Wow. Talk about commitment. Even I didn’t know she had that in her.”
“She doesn’t. I know her. Whatever you think she was doing, she wasn’t. I know she wasn’t.” Chelsea set her jaw and shook her head, but I could hear in her voice that the damage had been done. She believed Skylar. “And we’re done here.”
“Jesus, she really has you so convinced. I mean, you haven’t even heard about the best part yet.” She lowered her voice to a stage-whisper and declared, “She’s going to dump you at your Prom!”
She started laughing and the camera swung away from Chelsea, and I heard the slam of a car door closing and an engine starting. Chelsea sped away and Skylar turned the camera on herself. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’re welcome, bestie,” she said, and the video went dark.
I waited for Skylar at her locker the next morning, fully intending on earning a several-day suspension when I saw her, but Alex walked by before Skylar ever did, and when she spotted me, she took notice of where I was and then came and grabbed my wrist, trying to tug me away. “You don’t want to do this,” she said, and I fought back for only a second before I let her pull me down the hallway and into the girls’ bathroom. I set my jaw and tried to hold back tears. Alex turned to me and told me, “I saw the video. She sent it to me, too.”
“Why?” I breathed out, and she sighed.
“She said I wasn’t getting the full story. I told her what she’d done was horrible. But that doesn’t mean that I want to watch you two have a fistfight in the hallway.”
“She did that so that I couldn’t,” I said. “She wanted to make sure everything with Chelsea was ruined before I could try to fix it. She just…lied to her. So much of that was just lies, Alex. You have to believe me.”
She nodded at me, her expression soft. “I do. And just because Skylar got to her first doesn’t mean that you can’t still give your side of the story. Have you tried talking to her?”
I took out my phone and showed her the lone message I’d sent to Chelsea last night: “Please talk to me, Chelsea. Let me explain.” She’d never replied.
“Then you’ll have to do it in person,” she said. She reached up to wipe tears from my eyes and added, “Just keep away from Skylar these next few days. Skip your classes with her if you have to. Focus on Chelsea.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked her.
She sighed again. “Honestly, because I wish I’d handled things with you differently. I’m not saying that what you did to Chelsea was right, but I don’t want to watch you screw up another chance with a girl you like because you can’t say what you feel and she doesn’t want to hear you out. If you can get her to have that conversation, you should. Even if it happens when you least expect it.”
I heard back from Chelsea that evening, but it didn’t even sound like Chelsea. It sounded like someone texting me for her. That just made me feel even worse.
“Explain what? I know you rushed out the other day, but it wasn’t a big deal. I can show you the rest of those messages later. I’m really excited for Prom this weekend; I’ll be busy for a lot of this week, but we’ll be there to pick you up on Saturday. We’re going in a limo with Ian, Sab, Gina, and Marie. Should be a ton of fun! XO - Chelsea.”
“Thanks for the update, Gina,” I mumbled, reading the text for the third time as though some secret message would suddenly reveal itself. Of course, there was no secret message, and whether she’d sent t
he message herself or not, Chelsea seemed content to ignore me and pretend like everything was fine. She still even wanted to go to Prom, and that confused me most of all. Being anywhere near me should’ve been the last thing she ever wanted to do again, but if it gave me a chance to talk to her, then I’d act however she needed me to over text until I could speak to her in person.
Uncertain, I sent back a short: “Okay, I’ll see you then.” I set my phone aside and then wondered what Skylar would think if she knew that Chelsea and I were still going to Prom together. She’d probably wish I were the one getting dumped at Prom this time.
I let out a groan of realization and collapsed back on my bed, clapping a hand to my forehead. “Of course,” I said aloud. It made sense. Chelsea didn’t know that Skylar had sent me that video, and now she and her friends were going to turn the tables on me at Prom. I was sure of it. If I went to Chelsea’s Prom, I was in for the same exact sort of public humiliation she thought I had planned on doling out to her.
My first instinct was that I had to find a way to get out of Prom, or at the very least to find a way to explain myself to Chelsea before Saturday. But the longer I thought about it, the longer I considered that maybe letting Chelsea take revenge on me for everything I’d done was for the best if it helped her feel better somehow.
I still wanted to fix everything. Maybe the first step to healing was getting what I deserved.
16
My mom made sure she wasn’t around when the limo pulled up on Saturday night. I stood outside with my dad and together we watched Sab, Ian, Gina, Marie, and Chelsea pile out one by one. Chelsea had picked an elegant, cream-colored dress that matched mine, and her hair had very obviously been done professionally. Hoop earrings dangled from her ears and I noticed with muted surprised that they weren’t clip-ons. She’d pierced her ears, and she looked beautiful.
