“How’s your car been running?” my dad asked, trying to pull me into conversation.
“Fine.”
“No more issues?”
“Not really.”
I didn’t want to talk about my car. I wanted to talk about something that mattered, like why Lizzie chose to hang herself. It was supposed to be a really painful way to die. Since they’d found her, I’d done a lot of reading online. Had she done research too?
I couldn’t shake the idea that she could have changed her mind—but she didn’t. She made a decision and stuck with it. I guess she knew that if she could get through a bit more pain, then all the pain would end forever.
What if someone had stopped her? What if Enzo had woken up that night and followed her? Maybe Lizzie would have only put her suicide off until a later date. On the other hand, maybe he would have convinced her how much she had to live for. Not that Enzo was particularly great at dealing with tense situations.
What if I had been there? If I had just ten minutes with Lizzie, I could have told her how loved she was. That whatever she was going through would pass. That there was help out there, if only she was willing to ask for it. Lizzie would have probably looked at me and said, “Little Creely, you should take your own advice.”
“Why don’t we all say what we’re thankful for this year?” my mom suggested.
That pulled me out of my thoughts and made the rest of the table go silent.
“No one really wants to do that, Mom,” Rush said.
“Don’t be silly. It’ll be good for all of us.”
“What if we’re not thankful for anything?” I asked.
“Come on, Thorny,” Connor said, “It’s not all bad.”
“Lizzie Lovett is dead.”
“You hardly even knew her,” he replied.
I could feel my family go still, probably because they’d all been thinking it but hadn’t dared to say so.
“I wanted to know her though.”
“No, you didn’t,” Connor said. “You wanted to know the werewolf version of her.”
I looked around the table at my family. “I guess I’m thankful that someone I know will actually be blunt with me.”
“Is that what you want?” my mom asked.
It wasn’t about what I wanted. It was about what I deserved. But I didn’t know how to say that, so I went back to poking at my turkey and listening to my dad talk about how he was thankful for his family and that we were safe and healthy and happy—for the most part.
• • •
I’d thought doing research on suicide would make me feel better. That I’d find some answers or at least gain an understanding of what Lizzie was going through. But I’d read everything I could find about death by hanging and didn’t feel any closer to the truth. All I’d managed to do was fill my head with enough gruesome information to last a lifetime.
The worst thing I read was that when a person hangs themselves, they’re making a statement. It’s not fast or painless. It’s not a cry for help. They’re trying to punish themselves or the person who finds them.
I didn’t know if that was true, but it made me shudder. Why would Lizzie have wanted to punish herself? Why did she choose to end her life in such an agonizing way?
After Thanksgiving dinner, while my family and Connor were downstairs eating pumpkin pie, I hid in my room and thought about what it must be like to die, to make the decision to die, to know the exact time it was going to happen, to feel as if the pain of death didn’t compare to the pain of living.
A colorful scarf was sitting on my desk, the scarf left behind by one of the hippies. I picked it up and tied a slip knot, another thing I’d learned while researching. I walked to the mirror and looked at myself. Pale, plain, dark circles under my eyes. I looked as dead as Lizzie. I put the scarf around my neck.
I reached behind me and tightened the noose, just to enough to be uncomfortable. Then I pulled it tighter. It surprised me that I could still breathe just fine. I expected to feel my throat closing, pushing all the air out of my body, but it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, my head started to throb, pulsing in tune with my heartbeat. A warm tingly sensation started behind my eyes, and I got dizzy.
Then my door opened, and Rush leaned in, saying, “Hey, Mom wants to know if—what the fuck are you doing?”
I tore the scarf from my neck, and there was a sudden jolt in my head. “Nothing. Keep your voice down.”
He strode into my room. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I wasn’t trying to do anything. I just wanted to see what it was like.” I rubbed at my neck. It felt sore, and I hoped I hadn’t held the scarf tight enough to leave a mark.
Rush’s voice still seemed very loud. “This isn’t a game.”
“I know. I was just curious. Please don’t say anything to Mom and Dad.”
I could feel a headache starting. Was it from the scarf or the stress of my brother walking in at the worst possible moment?
“Promise me you weren’t trying to hurt yourself.”
“I promise. I just…” I started to tear up. “I just wanted to know what it was like for Lizzie at the end. I don’t want to kill myself. I swear.”
Rush sighed.
“Honest, Rush.”
He held out his hand. “Give me the scarf.”
“It’s mine,” I said, holding it to my chest. My last piece of the hippie caravan. But Rush continued to hold his hand out until I grudgingly passed the scarf to him.
“I never want to see anything like this again,” he said.
“You won’t.”
He looked at me for a long time, like he still wasn’t sure if he believed me. “You take everything too far, Hawthorn.”
That was probably an accurate assessment of my character. Before I could tell him so, my mom appeared in the doorway.
“What are you two doing?” she asked. Then to Rush, “Did you ask Hawthorn if she wants to play Monopoly with us?”
“I did.” Rush gave me a look. “She said she’d love to.”
Chapter 34
Weak, Selfish, Broken
The day they found Lizzie’s body was the worst day. But the day after Thanksgiving came pretty close to beating it.
Christa and I were both working. Even Mr. Walczak was there to oversee the diner. He seemed to be expecting a big lunch rush, like people would be craving scrambled eggs from the Sunshine Café after they finished their Black Friday shopping. That didn’t exactly happen, but to his credit, we were busier than usual.
In between waiting tables, Christa told me all about her family’s Thanksgiving. Her younger sister got into a huge fight with her fiancé about the wedding cookie table, and their grandfather got drunk and kept saying the food was overcooked, which made her mom cry, and her youngest cousin announced that she was dropping out of school and moving to New York to become an actress. It seemed chaotic in a totally normal, comforting way.
“And then,” she said, as we passed each other in the kitchen doorway, “my sister said maybe she should call off the entire wedding, which made my mom just about lose it.”
I laughed and carried food to an elderly couple in the dining room. As I was asking if there was anything else they needed, the bell on the door jingled. I turned to greet the new customers, and for a second, it was as if the whole world stopped.
Mychelle Adler walked into the café, her shark smile on her face. And two feet behind her, sheepish, hands in his pockets, was Enzo.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Christa come out of the kitchen, tray in hand. She stopped too, her mouth an O of surprise. Even Vernon seemed alert in his place at the counter, waiting to see what would happen next.
Then the world rushed back to life. There was movement and sound, and I knew Christa was starting to tell me she’d handle it, but it was too late. My feet
were already moving in their direction.
“Mychelle,” I said, sounding calmer than I felt. “I didn’t think you ate at this sort of place.”
“I make exceptions sometimes. And I know Lorenzo enjoys eating here.” She reached behind her and grabbed Enzo’s arm, pulling him next to her.
“How nice of you to look out for Lorenzo’s feelings.”
“We shouldn’t have come,” Enzo mumbled, and I didn’t know if he was talking to me or Mychelle.
“Nonsense,” Mychelle said. “I’m sure Hawthorn’s been dying to see you.”
Enzo shifted his gaze to me, and I looked back. I wasn’t about to duck my head or scamper away.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“OK. You?”
“OK.”
And that was it. After everything that had happened between us, that was all we had to say to each other. I was sad in a way I’d never felt before, like part of myself was being torn away violently.
For the past few months, I’d spent almost all my free time with Enzo. I’d told him everything I was thinking and feeling and obsessively looked for clues about what was happening in his mind. Enzo made me happy and angry and relaxed and frustrated and every other emotion that one person could make another person feel. Sometimes, I hated him, and sometimes, I thought I could love him. He gave me the only perfect-fireworks-movie kiss I’d ever had. I gave him my virginity. And now he was standing in front of me with my nemesis hanging on his arm and acting as if he never knew me at all.
“I guess we’ll seat ourselves,” Mychelle said.
Enzo pulled his arm out of her grip. “We should go.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“I’m not,” Enzo said. “I’ll wait in the car. Later, Hawthorn.”
He walked out the door, already pulling his tobacco out of his pocket.
“Well,” I said to Mychelle after the bell jingled again. “Did you accomplish what you wanted to?”
“I guess I did.” Mychelle grinned at me, and for the first time in my life, I had to restrain myself from throwing a punch.
“So someone upsets you, and you steal their boyfriend to get back at them. I guess the joke is on you. Enzo and I weren’t dating.”
Mychelle laughed. “That much is clear. It seems to me Lorenzo was done with you after you bled all over his sheets. Figures you were a virgin.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek and willed myself not to react. Because the only thing worse than Mychelle’s comment would be her knowing how much it stung.
“Isn’t that a lot of effort just to mess with me?”
“I don’t think of it that way. There are rules, Hawthorn. You forgot them. I’m just reminding you of your place.”
“Which is where exactly?”
“Wherever I want it to be.”
I managed to laugh at that one, but only because I knew it would make Mychelle angry. “You know, I can’t wait until we’re out of high school and no one cares about you anymore. It must suck to know that your life is never going to be better than it is right now.”
I saw the flash of anger in Mychelle’s eye.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her grin pulling her skin too tight. “I have no intentions of turning into Lizzie Lovett.”
She turned and left the diner. For a moment, everyone was silent, and I realized how loud we must have been. We’d caused a scene. Then Vernon said, “An’ good riddance to ya!”
There were laughs all over the diner, and everyone went back to eating. Knives scraped plates, coffee mugs were picked up then set down, and bags rustled as people looked at what they’d purchased.
Christa came over to me. “Are you OK?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Maybe you should go home.”
I thought that was an excellent idea.
• • •
At first, I was fine. I turned on the radio as loud as I could stand and focused on the road. I tried to keep my mind blank.
But I wasn’t even halfway home when I started crying, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. The road blurred, and I had to pull over. I leaned against my steering wheel and sobbed. I didn’t care if people in other cars could see me, didn’t care if everyone else in the entire world knew that it felt like someone was ripping my insides in half. Everyone except for Mychelle Adler, that was. And Enzo. Weak, selfish Enzo Calvetti. The two of them deserved each other.
After a while, I calmed down enough to drive, though I sniffled the whole way home. I was pretty sure I’d cried more in the past two weeks than I had in my entire life up to then. I couldn’t help it though. Enzo had taken my heart out of my body and was slowly crushing it under his shoe, the way he put out a cigarette. Had he crushed Lizzie’s heart like that too? Did that have anything to do with why she walked into the woods and never came out?
There wasn’t anyone at my house. For once, I wished for family. I didn’t want to be alone. I imagined Mychelle would be smug about it. “See,” she’d say, “even Hawthorn’s family doesn’t want to be around her.”
Enzo, Sundog, even Lizzie in a way. Everyone was leaving me. I felt as alone as a guy in a zombie movie who goes outside to discover his city is ravaged and he’s the only survivor.
Except not everyone was lost to me.
I went to my room and found my phone, which still had a tiny bit of charge left. Emily picked up on the first ring.
“Can we talk?” I asked.
She told me she’d be right over.
• • •
I spent a lot of time crying, and Emily spent a lot of time trying to make me feel better.
Eventually, my sobs turned into gasps and hiccups, and I was able to start talking. So I told her everything.
“God,” Emily said, “Mychelle is such a bitch.”
“I hate her.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think she was after revenge. I think she was jealous.”
I wondered if Emily was feeling OK, because she sure wasn’t having coherent thoughts. “You think Mychelle Adler was jealous of me?”
“That kiss. The way you described it. I think it got to her.”
“Why?”
“How many kisses like that do you think Mychelle has had?” Emily asked.
“Like, a million?”
“Yeah, right. Guys kiss Mychelle for one reason, and it has nothing to do with romance.”
It was a little crazy to think about. That while you were envying other people, they could be envying you too. It reminded me of something Connor had said, about life looking different depending on where you were standing.
“What about him?” I asked. “What’s Enzo doing with her?”
“I doubt Enzo could even answer that. He’s so broken, Hawthorn.”
Emily and I sat on my bed and talked and talked, and it was no different from every time we’d ever hung out, every sleepover we’d ever had. Except I’d never been so miserable before.
“You can say ‘I told you so’ if you want,” I said.
But she didn’t. Instead, she talked about how everything was going to be OK. Some of what she said was probably true, and some was probably to calm me down, but I appreciated it either way.
“I feel so stupid,” I said. “She was dead the whole time, Emily. From the very start.”
And then I cried again.
“Look, you made a mistake. Yeah, you should have known better. But it happened, and it’s over, and there’s nothing you can do about it now. You just have to move forward.”
“I can’t. I can’t deal with all of this.”
“You can,” Emily said. “You will.”
“Lizzie couldn’t. She gave up.”
“You’re stronger than Lizzie.”
That seemed absurd. How could
I be more anything than Lizzie? Lizzie was perfect. Lizzie had everything. She was everything.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked quietly.
Emily shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
“It’s weird. After all this time searching for her and trying to understand her life, I still don’t feel like I know her. Everyone I talked to saw her as a totally different person. And I thought it was intentional. Like Lizzie changed personalities depending on who she was with. But now, I don’t know.”
Emily thought about it for a moment. “Maybe people saw her the way they wanted to see her. Maybe that’s how it always is.”
If that was the case, I wondered how people saw me. How many different versions of Hawthorn Creely were out there in the world, living in people’s heads? How close were any of them to the actual me?
“If that’s true, then no one ever really knows anyone else. Not completely.”
“Maybe that’s OK,” Emily said.
Maybe. But maybe if someone had known Lizzie, really understood her, maybe she could have been saved.
“It’s so sad,” I said. “Lizzie had, like, a billion people who loved her and wanted to be around her. But in the end, she was as alone as the rest of us.”
Emily laughed. “Hawthorn, you’re not alone.”
I looked at Emily. As always, she was right. When I needed her, all I had to do was pick up the phone and call. Emily didn’t share all of my interests or condone all of my actions, but that didn’t make her any less of a friend.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“For being here.” I paused, thinking of what Emily had said to me during our fight. “How have you been, Em?”
She tilted her head and gazed at me like I’d asked her a trick question. “I’ve been good,” she said cautiously.
“What’s been going on with you? I want to know everything I missed.”
“Even the stuff about Logan?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Especially the stuff about Logan.” I grinned. “Has he talked you into any tattoos yet?”
Emily laughed and threw a pillow at me.
“Come on,” I said. “Certainly something fascinating has happened in the past few weeks.”
The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett Page 26
