Page 55 of Quarter-Love Crisis
‘Lucy Hayward– she went to school with us. We got together in our teens; I thought everybody knew that.’
Her name comes with a weight that pulls my jaw to the floor and crushes my chest in the process.Lucy Hayward.Lucy Hayward, who caused me so much pain and, worse, picked her nose throughout primary school.
‘She’d stopped eating her own snot by then,’ he says, apparently reading my mind.
‘Sorry, it’s just. . . You weredatingher?’ I ask.
Years of interactions flash before my eyes, dating all the way back to when we were eight. There was the petition she started to ban my ‘stinky lunch foods’ and the times she would scrunch my hair and tell everyone it felt like a scrubbing sponge. I thought I was free of her when she didn’t stay on at Winterdown to do her A levels, but she was always there, at every party, making me the butt of every joke until eventually I stopped going anywhere she might be.
I went to university convinced that I would be a stronger, more evolved version of the person that I was before. A resolve that almost broke when I moved into my room and found out that I was to be neighbours with none other than Lucy Hayward. Her eyes narrowed in on me the second she saw me, resemblant of a predator clocking its prey, but that environment was different and so she took a different approach.
‘Maddison!’ she exclaimed, her forced smile publicly distracting from the snarl in her voice. ‘You got inhere? Wow. So impressive for you.’
Things went from bad to worse after that. I should have switched halls there and then. Maybe even universities.
‘How could you not know?’ he asks, unperturbed by my shock. ‘You guys went to the same uni and we were all over each other’s feeds.’
I rack my brain for an instance where I’ve heard about the two of them being together. I saw them act close and heard that they went to the same parties, but Aiden was a flirty guy and I never thought anything of it. Honestly, the second Lucy stopped going to school with me, I tried to block all mentions of her out of my life. I certainly didn’t know that they were in a full-blownrelationship.
‘I never saw it on Facebook.’
‘Well, that’s ’cos no one our age uses Facebook, Maddy,’ he says dryly as he takes another sip of his drink. ‘But we were insufferable just about everywhere else. I had to go through and archive over a decade’s-worth of posts. . .’ He stops as he takes in my face. ‘Are you all right?’
I can’t even try to hide it this time; I nearly choke on my drink in shock. My cheeks puff out as I attempt to trap the liquid in my mouth.
‘A decade?’ I splutter, coughing on some stray droplets.
‘We dated from Year Nine through college, then off and on again through uni. Long distance is a bitch.’ He sighs, nursing his drink carefully. ‘I visited her at uni one singular time and it didn’t exactly go well.’
I flash back to May Madness, the chaos of it. A week of debauchery and mind-numbing EDM and non-stop parties. If you didn’t attend, you may as well not call yourself a student. I was prepared– I pre-wrote my assignments, bought cheap vodka and had new outfits that had FGA approval. By night three I was in my element, or, at least, buzzed enough to pretend that I was a girl who could be in her element like that. That’s when I saw him.
‘You were visitingLucy. That’s why you were there,’ I say quietly. ‘You never told me that. I guess that’s why. . .’
A shiver passes through me. His shoulders tense. This is clearly not the time.
‘How did you two end?’ I ask at a normal volume.
He relaxes ever so slightly, relieved at the quick diversion.
‘With a text,’ he replies bitterly. ‘She was on a girls’ trip, and apparently it couldn’t wait.’
‘That’s gotta suck,’ I mumble, studying him carefully.
He did his best to wipe all traces of sadness from his voice, but even he couldn’t help the audible clench in his throat right at the end of his sentence. Suddenly he can’t look at me, or the bar, or anything for that matter. His eyes fix on an ice cube, following it as it melts, bobbing in his glass.
‘That was just the start.’ He gives a brief, sadistic chuckle. ‘We’d moved in together right after graduation to make up for the years apart, butsheowned the apartment we shared; her dad gifted it to her. So, after the text, I had three days before she got back to pack up my stuff and move back in with my mum.’
I suck in air through my teeth, my face pained on his behalf. It’s loud and harsh enough to make him look up at me.
He shrugs. ‘Nothing quite like getting dumped and told you’re homeless with a poorly typed message at four in the morning.’
‘Four a.m.?’
‘She was out clubbing. I reckon she met someone else. Props to her for not just cheating, I guess.’
‘I mean. . . that’s not really where the bar should be, is it?’
He chuckles again, but this time the sound is a little lighter. Sweeter.
