Page 54 of Revenge Cake

Past—The Confession

Logan

To say the last two months have been rough would be an understatement. It’s incredible how something that seemed so untouchably perfect could crash and burn in a flash. Just two months ago I had her.

Now she’s gone.

Oh, she’s there in body, but the Lani I met and fell in love with is somewhere faraway, buried in a vessel that barely resembles her. She even looks and talks different. That blunt, self-assured voice is a whisper now. Her almost unnaturally straight dancer posture and intense eye contact are now a distant memory. She hunches, and her eyes seem vacant.

Just this morning she confessed that she’s not even going to graduate school next fall, that she canceled all of her interviews. I could hardly believe it. She’s been talking about graduate school since we met, as if it’s a sure thing, as if she wasn’t even nervous about getting accepted. Why would she be nervous? She’s Leilani Girard. A mortal graduate school would never have the audacity to turn down an all-knowing goddess.

Where did my brash, know-it-all girl go?

I need to fix it. I just wish I knew how.

“Are you okay?” Keira asks. I jerk my gaze up from the grass, realizing I almost forgot her presence. We’ve been meeting here between classes for the past week or so, alternating buying each other coffee. She even has my order memorized. We don’t usually talk about serious stuff, but her presence calms me.

I’m hesitant in answering her question, caught by a gnawing fear that it might start something from which there’s no going back. But what do I have to lose? Things couldn’t be worse between Lani and me, and Keira might actually be able to help, which is the whole point of why I called her last week. “I’ve been kind of having a tough time lately.” I chuckle humorlessly. “Not that you probably want to hear it. It’s not a fun story.”

She stares at me steadily. “I didn’t ask you if you were okay because I wanted to hear a fun story.”

She means it. I know she does, and somehow knowing that her “are you okay” was not just a social nicety opens the floodgates. I start talking and I find I can’t stop. I tell her everything. All of the ugly details. Even some of the dark, embarrassing things that I didn’t even want to admit to myself, like that Lani is different when we have sex now, as if she’s doing it just to please me, and how it makes me want to hit something. I can’t even believe that I’m telling her things like this, but it’s amazing how good it feels, akin to the first time I was able to stretch and twist my ankle under the sun after I removed the cast from my lacrosse injury.

And Keira is so perfect the way she just sits there in silence. She doesn’t react. I don’t see judgment or pity or even sympathy, and it keeps my mouth flowing freely. By the time I’m done, I’ve left out no detail. She even knows about the gnawing anxiety I’ve felt all day since I left Lani this morning, how she was still sleeping and she never sleeps in. How she was snoring, and she never snores.

“I think it was the Ativan. Do you know much about that?” I ask, hoping that since Keira is a psych major, she might know at least a little about anxiety medication. “It doesn’t seem like it could be good for her. Sure, it makes her panic go away, but it also changes her. It’s like she’s in her own world. Is that normal?”

Keira narrows her eyes as she thinks about it, and I’m amazed anew at the lack of judgment in her eyes. She almost looks like she’s puzzling out a math problem. “Do you know how much she’s taking?”

I’m stunned for a second. This is the first time it’s occurred to me that Lani might be taking more than she’s supposed to. “Is there a way I could tell?”

She opens her mouth and closes it again before eventually speaking. “I would say that if she seems out of it, she’s probably taking too much.”

I nod slowly, my whole understanding of everything changing, everything starting to fix into place. “It’s like I’m not even there most of the time,” I say almost to myself. “When we hang out, like… She almost looks through me. And it’s so different from how things used to be. She and I used to talk all the time. It was one of my favorite things about her. She could have a conversation about literally anything.” A smile rises to my lips. “Like, I could ask if she felt like taco truck burritos for dinner, and she’d launch into the history of the burrito and how she’s against rice on burritos in principle and how even distribution of burrito ingredients is the low key defining feature of a good burrito…”

I trail off at the knowing smile on Keira’s face, feeling embarrassed over the grin on my face. “That really happened,” I say. “She really said all that.”

Keira’s smile spreads into a toothy grin. “I can tell. You’re cute, Logan.”

My smile turns rueful.

“It’s obvious you really like her.”

“Yeah, well… I don’t like how she is right now.” I swallow. “I love her,” I say, feeling guilty. “But I don’t like her right now.”

CHAPTER 21

Present Day

Leilani

Item 1—Makeover

Item 2—Lure him back

In principle, I’m against posting passive aggressive memes to my Instagram Story.

Almost everyone I know does it after a breakup, and the intention is usually embarrassingly obvious. They want to announce to their ex that they’re doing just fine on their own, but know that sending a direct message or text would convey the opposite. If their ex is perceptive enough, they might be able to get away with something as subtle as an inspirational quote, like “And then she became her own source of happiness.” If he’s dense like Logan, they’d have to choose something with a little more of a punch, something like “That moment you realize you dodged a bullet” on a picture of Meryl Streep accepting her third Oscar.

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