by Nicole Thorn
Cathy got my attention back in a moment. “Breathe. Don’t have a panic attack, and listen to me.” Her eyes stayed on mine, with more focus than I thought she would have. “Not. Everyone. Is. Peter. Not everyone leaves people, and they’re not always so cruel about it. Poe has known from the beginning that you’re hurting, and fucked up. We both watched you break down when you beat the hell out of those boxes. We knew what we were getting with you, and guess what?”
I said nothing.
“We stayed. I can’t speak for Poe, but I can promise you that I’m not going anywhere. No matter what happens, I’ll be here, and you can talk to me. You’re not alone, and you won’t be again. Take a second, and let that make you feel better.”
I tried, but I didn’t believe her. “How long do you think you’ll want to deal with this from me? How many times can you watch me have a breakdown over someone who I shouldn’t pay any mind to? How long can you watch me flip flop like a crazy person?”
Instantly, and with certainty, she said, “For as long as you breakdown, and as long as you flip flop. If I thought I wouldn’t last, then I wouldn’t have tried to start with.”
I stared at the neutral pattern of her bedding, not wanting to have to look at her face. “Peter said I was too much to take care of.”
“Yeah, well he didn’t actually take care of you. His opinion doesn’t matter. I’m here. Poe is here. We’ll give you what you need.”
I needed a moment, so I ran my fingers through my hair, and watched my heels click together as they hung off the edge of the bed. While I didn’t think Cathy lied to me, I had that voice in the back of my head that told me I wasn’t worth the effort. If Peter loved me and couldn’t handle it, why would anyone else have done better?
“I won’t tell you what to do about Poe,” Cathy said. “Because I think you need to decide for yourself, and you shouldn’t be pushed. But while I want you to know that I wouldn’t judge you for anything you chose, you shouldn’t reject Poe because he’s got issues. That’s not fair to him.”
No, it wasn’t fair to him. It didn’t change the facts. “What am I supposed to do here? Two sad people don’t make a good couple.”
“Says who?”
“Says everything I’ve been through.”
Cathy scratched her temple, her expression a thoughtful one. “Poe is hurting, but in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t really let that touch you and me. Save for a few pouty days, which you’ve had too, by the way.”
I knew that already. “Peter had pouty days too. Days where I had to walk on eggshells, and I felt useless because I couldn’t do anything.”
“That’s fair,” Cathy said. “But what happens when Poe is upset? Think about it for a second.”
I did, because the answer popped up with ease. The last time I remembered Poe being especially melancholy, I’d sat down at the lunch table with him. He took my hand, and smiled anyway. He was hurting, but tried to act normal despite that. I didn’t know if I could count that in the good or bad column.
“He tries,” I said. “Tries to ignore it.”
Cathy lifted an eyebrow, and Cujo rolled over again. “You don’t know that’s what he’s doing, and you don’t get to assume as much. Just because he doesn’t focus all his energy on being sad, like your pussy ass ex, doesn’t mean he ignores it. It means that Poe wants more from his life than to dwell in the things he can’t fix. That’s a good thing.”
I nodded, and took a breath. “I guess I have some things to figure out.”
“You don’t have to do that today. Take your time. Poe won’t mind.”
Of course he wouldn’t have minded. That boy was more than I deserved. Still, proving it further, I said something awful. “I thought I would be with Peter for the rest of my life. I can’t get past that.”
Cathy nodded. “I know.”
***
I knew I couldn’t have escaped it, so I didn’t bother trying. I sat at our normal table on Monday morning, and Poe found me only a minute later. He set my phone on the table, and sat down.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I responded.
What did you say to a guy you made out with? There wasn’t a good choice, and I had a hard time looking at his face. The problem being, I would have liked to kiss him again. I wanted lots of things, and I could only think about what I’d spoiled, and lost. Poe probably wouldn’t hold my hand anymore, or want to give me rides home. We wouldn’t spend time together, and our friendship would only feel weird. I waited for him to tell me we shouldn’t see each other anymore. It seemed fair. Or, I could get lucky and we could pretend the kiss never happened.
“I’m into you,” Poe said, literally out of nowhere.
All I could do was stare at him with wide eyes.
“In case you needed to hear it. Cathy warned me that you’ve got that thing in your brain that tries to convince you that no one actually likes you. I do. A lot. As a friend and in the other way. I wanted to lay that all out there.”
I opened my mouth to say something similar, but I stopped myself when I heard a voice. Happier without you. How long would it take before Poe realized that I was a waste of time? Forever doomed to be miserable, and not fit with everyone else? I didn’t want to be another lead weight on someone I loved, and especially not on him. I didn’t want to hear the words happier without you leave his mouth. I wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told him.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Poe promised. “You don’t have to give me a reason you don’t want to be with me. No hard feelings.”
“No!” I said quickly. “It isn’t…it’s not like that.”
“Would you mind me asking what it is then? Because you can imagine what’s been running through my head. Ya know, other than being pretty happy that I finally got to kiss you. God knows I’ve been trying.”
My eyebrows popped up. “Have you?”
Poe squinted at me. “I tried to kiss you in the ice cream shop, first off. I was under the impression that you saw past my pathetic excuse, and took pity on me.”
I shook my head, unable to keep from smiling. “No, wouldn’t have assumed you actually wanted to kiss me.”
Poe rolled his eyes. “I’m not surprised. Nevertheless, I was hoping you would go on that date with me.”
Oh my god, he’d asked me out on a date before, and I seriously didn’t put together that he liked me. Moron didn’t cover it. “You want to date me?” I hadn’t been positive, but assuming might have been stupid.
“You seem surprised,” Poe said. “Which only makes me want to assure you even further how much I like you. I’m open to heading back to my place for more making out.”
The idea of ditching school to go spend time together sounded utterly wonderful, but I’d made this choice already. “I’m a mess,” I admitted. “My head is all fucked up with things I can’t get past. Like how Peter and I made all these promises to each other. They all fell through. I know I’m supposed to love someone else one day, but it’s so hard to picture. I feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
Poe swallowed, but nodded. “I understand.”
“Really? Because it doesn’t make sense to me. I fucking hate him right now, but it’s stuck in my head. I don’t know how I can feel secure in anything anymore. The surest thing in my life fell apart, and everything I had planned, is gone.”
My hands started shaking again, and I gripped the bottom of my sweater to keep them steady. It didn’t work, and I felt my whole body trembling. Poe put his hands on my thighs, just above my knees. He told me to breathe, and I got really sick of everyone saying that to me.
“You’ll be okay,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel like anything is going to be okay. It wasn’t to start with.”
“I know. Believe me anyway.”
Cathy appeared before I could say anything, but she sat down silently. Poe let go of me when I went to stand up. The room started fill
ing with more students, and I got uncomfortable with the touching. People flooded through the hall and into the seating area, many of them already at the tables.
“Are you leaving?” Poe asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t want to be here anymore. Can someone take me home?”
Both Cathy and Poe jumped on it, and I didn’t want to say no to either. Maybe they would have been willing to take me together, and stay for a little while. Such an odd feeling, wanting to be alone, and terrified of it at the same time.
Poe picked up my backpack for me, and I got up from the table first. I got a single step in before I saw a boy coming toward me. I didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean much with a school that size. I thought he needed to get past me, so I wanted to move out of the way and avoid confrontation. I was not in his way.
Half a second before I could take a step, his fist connected with my face.
Chapter Twenty: So Very Willing to Not Help
Tweetie birds spun around my head as my awareness took a break. Everything felt like flashes of reality. Or like I flipped through the TV channels, getting a piece at a time.
Cathy caught me as I went down, cutting her scream short. She touched me, and her hand came back bloody. Surely couldn’t have all come out of me. She shook. Or I shook. I couldn’t tell, but the world looked blurry around the edges, and I heard another pained sound.
A boy limped away as Poe dropped down to me, and the room sounded so quiet. That didn’t last long, and then the chatter started up. People wanted to know what happened, and none of them seemed to have seen the boy hit me. No one had been looking until it was too late.
“Are you okay?” Cathy asked me. “Say something.”
I blinked, and then might have passed out.
The next thing I remembered was being picked up, and cradled as I moved past a crowd. I buried my face against the body that held me, realizing quickly that it had to have been Poe. I let it happen, and felt guilty about the blood I got on his shirt. I knew he wouldn’t have minded.
Someone tried to pull me away, and I heard a low growl. Then Cathy’s voice, but soft, “He bites. Best let him keep her.”
A woman spoke, and she sounded irritated. “I need to get a look at her. Put her on the bed.”
Poe sighed, and Cathy said, “You gotta, babe. She’ll forgive you later.”
I got laid on something soft, but paper crinkled against my back, and I flinched when I wrinkled my nose at it. Liquid heat leaked out of my closed eyes, and the metallic sting of blood sank into my tongue. A hand touched my forehead a moment before lips did.
Someone not as gentle as that, started poking at me. They held my face, shined a light at me so bright, that it made me wince, even with closed eyes. “What happened?”
“Some fucker punched her in the face,” Cathy hissed. “Came up to her and assaulted Clover while she was walking away. I want him found and hanged.”
“Miss…”
“What?”
Footsteps joined us, and the voices that followed sounded husky. They also asked what happened, but this time, Poe answered the men. He told them the same thing Cathy said, only not as hostile.
“There wasn’t any reason,” he said. “Clover wasn’t feeling good, and I was going to take her home. Then the guy came up, hit her, and then ran away in the chaos.”
One of the men said, “Something had to have started it.”
“It didn’t,” Poe hissed. “Clover didn’t say a thing to him. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t earn this, and I don’t appreciate that you’re insinuating she did. She’s five goddamned feet tall, and that asshole was six foot three.”
“Calm down,” the other man said.
“I won’t calm down until you find the guy who did this and have him thrown out of this school.”
I couldn’t hear the rest of the fight, because my head pounded, and my face ached with every touch from the nurse. Cathy scolded her each time I winced, and she got threatened to be banned from the room on three separate occasions.
“It’s not broken,” the woman said. “Your friend is lucky.”
“Lucky?” Cathy deadpanned. “She got socked in the cheek. Her nose almost exploded. How is that lucky?”
“Because it didn’t break.”
More footsteps, and it sounded like a trade. Someone left, and someone came over to me. When I felt a cold, damp cloth on my face, I opened my eyes. The brightness burned, but I saw two blurry and comforting faces watching me. Cathy tried cleaning the blood from my face, and Poe had my hand in both of his.
“I’m gonna kill a bitch,” Cathy promised me. “Tell me you saw the fucker so that I can get a positive ID.”
I shook my head, though it was a mistake. “I didn’t really get a good look at him. I don’t know who it was.”
Cathy cursed. “So he just gets away with this?”
Poe gave her a look. “I don’t know about that. I kind of sliced up some of the muscles in his limbs.”
Our friend grinned, and smacked his arm. “Lovely! Defending your lady. You’re a good man.”
Poe took the cloth from her, and started back on my face without commenting. He had to get another one to clean all of the blood, and neither of them let me see my face. I assumed I looked like, well, like I got punched in the face.
The security guards that Poe glared at, came over to ask me the same things that they asked Poe, and then Cathy. I knew even less than they did, but it didn’t keep them from asking the same questions three different ways. I told them I didn’t know the boy, and I’d never spoken to him a single time in my life.
“I think he’s one of the lacrosse guys,” Cathy sighed. “Those jock dicks think they can do whatever they want. He probably thought this was funny.”
The younger guard gave Cathy a look. “I played lacrosse when I went here.” He looked at her like he’d expected an apology for her misspeaking, but he obviously didn’t know Cathy.
“Good for you,” she said. “How about you go get that guy and have him expelled.”
The other security guard sighed, and then scratched his head with the pen in his hand. “We’ve chatted with some of the kids that were out there when this happened, and none of ‘em saw a thing. No one could tell us who hit your friend.”
Poe shot him daggers. “There were three hundred people in that cafeteria.”
“And no one was looking. Sorry.”
It made me feel insane, thinking about how little these people cared that I’d been assaulted in front of a crowd. I did nothing to deserve this, yet, my face felt like someone took a sledgehammer to it.
“What happens now then?” I asked. “I’m out of luck?”
The first guard shrugged. “We’ll do all we can, but I think you just need to do your best to stay out of trouble. Best not get anyone mad at you.”
So it was my fault, and the person who hit me, didn’t matter. I got punched, so I must have done something to tick someone off. I guess I would have assumed something like that, because it didn’t sound sane that someone would hit a person for no reason. Only, they had. I’d been feeling sick, and someone hurt me for no reason. Someone bigger than me, and who I stood no chance of defending myself against. One of the lacrosse guys.
A paranoid thought came to mind, but the approaching nurse pushed it aside. “No one answered when I called your emergency contact,” she said. “Do you have another one?”
Of course, Dad didn’t pick up. He was probably out shopping or something. Mom would have been at work, and bothering her right now didn’t seem like a good idea. They wanted me to stay out of trouble, and this wouldn’t have looked good on my already blemished record.
“Nope,” I lied. “Sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cathy said, cutting me short. “We’re taking her home. If you people can’t do anything for her, then I will.”
The nurse didn’t move. “I cannot condone you leaving school early.”
Cathy stood, and cocked her hip. “Fine then. Officially, we aren’t ditching school. We’re going to all go back to class and be good little children.”
“Thank you,” the nurse said, and she went back into her little office on the other side of the room.
Poe put his hand on my side, and the other on my arm as he pulled me to my feet. The world spun a little, but I had Poe to brace myself on. Ugh, his shirt looked a mess, with blood smeared across a cartoon car filled with cartoon people. It looked like he went all From Dusk Till Dawn on someone.
“Sorry,” I said.
He scoffed at me. “Shut up. Can you walk?”
“Yeah.”
No one else came to talk to me about what happened, and I assumed it left me SOL. With no witnesses coming forward, it wasn’t anything that could have been fixed. So my friends brought me to Poe’s car, and I got to sit in the back with Cathy while he brought us to my house.
We parked in my driveway, and Poe turned the car off before looking over his shoulder at us. “All right, call me crazy, but I say—”
“That crazy bitch Tammy,” Cathy said. “Who the hell else would want Clover punched in her pretty face?”
“Kelly maybe,” I suggested. “She’s very unhappy that Peter is still interested in my friendship.”
As we got out of the car, Poe hurried to catch up with me, leaving Cathy one step behind. We went into my empty house, and then room before we went on with the conversation.
“I don’t think it was Kelly,” Cathy said. “It seems like a big step to go from telling you to stay away from Peter, to telling someone to assault you when you haven’t even gone near the boy. I mean, other than for that fight.”
“True,” I began. “But what if she found out about the fake letter?”
Poe thought. “Wouldn’t she come to you first? She seemed reasonable last time you talked. She could have snapped in a moment of fury, paid this guy off, and then had her little cheer team pretend they didn’t see anything. And it’s not like the lacrosse players would rat him out.”
