Page 37 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
“No,”he said. “It’s too much fun watching you glare at me.”
“When I glare at you, I’m imagining laser beams coming out of my eyes.”
“See?” His voice was near my ear. “That’s what makes it so fun.”
“You’re completely shameless,” I muttered, hugging my books to my chest.
“I know.”
I whipped around then, anger simmering in my throat. He looked so ridiculously pleased with himself, like infuriating me was a contest and he had just been crowned the ultimate victor. Then something fluttered out from the pages of my books. It was an ad of some kind for a lobster restaurant, printed on cheap pink paper. I only needed to take one glance at it to know who had put it there. “Are you serious? Now you’re puttingtrashin my things for fun? Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“The wordtrashis really subjective,” he began, but I was sick of it already, sick of him. Everywhere I turned, he was there, ready to laugh at me, to pull another prank, to make my life unbearable. It was bad enough that none of the other kids really liked me, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to torment me the way he did.
“Oh my god, just go, Cyrus,” I snapped at him, stomping forward until we were face-to-face. He’d been unfairly blessed with another growth spurt over the summer, and he was one of the only boys in our class who was taller than me, even if it was just by an inch. “Ihateyou. I never want to see you again.”
I braced myself for him to laugh in my face, because he never took anything seriously anyway, but he just blinked, frozen to the spot, something sharp flashing across his eyes like the edge of shattered glass. Then the bell rang, and he seemed a little dazed as he started to walk up the stairs again—but his feet slipped on the next step, and he stumbled. Instinctively, my hands shot out to help him, but it was too late.
Someone screamed as he fell from the top of the stairs. Their scream was so piercing that I thought he was already dead, and in my head I saw a sped-up reel of terrible images, the red-and-blue sirens of the ambulance, the puddles of blood, his parents sobbing outside the school gates.
Later, they all agreed it was a miracle that he hadn’t broken any bones. He did have a concussion, but it took only two weeks for him to recover from the fall. It would take two years for me to fully recover from the fallout.
They also all agreed on this: I had pushed him.
Everyone there had witnessed it. Supposedly, we had been arguing, and in a blaze of rage, my arms had shot out to shove him down the flight of stairs. They spared no detail in describing the way my expression had twisted with fury, how I had hissed his name. Some claimed that I had insulted him outright by calling himtrash.
It made sense to them, because of who I was.
You know that Leah girl? She was always a little weird, wasn’t she?they whispered to one another in the corridors.Didn’t have a lot of friends. Wasn’t really good at any of her subjects. Used to wear these hideous lumpy sweaters and invent dumb, childish games and go around nagging people to play them with her. An outcast. Nobody liked her much …
They spun their own stories about why it happened. I was lovesick, obsessed with him; I’d been annoying him for years now, forcing him to hang out with me, and finally he’d stopped tolerating it and rejected me outright, and that’s when I snapped.
The footage from the school’s cheap security cameras only cemented my guilt. From their angle, all you could see was me marching up to him and moving forward right as he fell back. There was no other logical explanation for why Cyrus Sui had stumbled on those steps. He was one of the best students in our gym class. He never faltered, never lost his balance to something as silly as gravity; he couldn’t have justtrippedwithout some kind of trigger.
But none of that mattered as much as Cyrus himself accusing me of hurting him. Once the teachers heard his response, my fate was sealed.
My parents were the only ones who believed me. They defended me when the school claimed that I was violent, a threat to the other students. They comforted me when they found out that my expulsion would go straight into my records and raise the brows of any future admissions committees. My dad helped me throw out my old school uniform and began to search for a new school that would let me enroll in the middle of the year. My mom threatened to sue—the family legend goes thatI will suewas the very first phrase she’d picked up after she immigrated to America—but even she had to admit the evidence was stacked against me, and by that point I just wanted to stop talking about it. Let my old life crumble off a cliff, let them whisper their lies behind my back. I knew I couldn’t go back to that place again, not ever. My name would forever be inextricably tied to the Incident, to Cyrus, to a crime I hadn’t committed. I promised myself I would never forgive him, even if he groveled at my feet.
I still refuse to forgive him, and yet—that was before the trip.
Before this.
I stare at Cyrus as we pick our way up the stone steps, the familiar edges of his profile, and I think about how time is such a funny thing, running through the years like water, washing away some memories, buoying others up to the surface. But time shouldn’t have the power to change someone completely, from the kind of person who would get me expelled on a false accusation to the kind of person who would protect me with their own body, bow their head the way he did, like the hurt lived inside him.
***
I might actually be turning into a cloud enthusiast.
The rain has settled at last by the time we reach the peak of the mountain, the sun streaming over the crags and boulders in dazzling beams of gold. A sea of clouds rolls out beneath our feet, whiter than smoke, thicker than mist, lapping against the mountain ranges. My cloud doodles couldn’t possibly do it justice; it looks like the world’s most gorgeous ink painting come to life, all those soft washes of blue and pale brushes of light.
There are always mountains beyond mountains, people above people, my mom would lament whenever she was in one of her philosophical moods, and I have to wonder if whoever invented the saying had been thinking of this specific place. When I squint out at the horizon, all I can see are the dark, grayish-green shapes of mountains, one outlined against the other, stretching on and on until I can’t tell where the sky ends. The view is beautiful enough to distract me from the fact that we came in second. But the distraction doesn’t last long.
“Damn, it feels like we’re in heaven. In a non-biblical sense,” Oliver remarks, standing much closer to the edge of the viewing platform than is advisable, the wind snatching at his shirt. Daisy, meanwhile, is shivering on the other side of the platform, her face white and eyes squeezed shut. “You should open your eyes, Daisy. You’re missing some great views—it’s not eventhathigh up.”
“No, thanks,” Daisy squeaks out. “I think I prefer looking at the inside of my eyelids.”
“Okay, how did you manage to get here before us?” I demand. “We never even saw you on the way up.”
Oliver grins over his shoulder at me. “We took the cable car.”
