Page 105 of Hate Me Like You Mean It
“I was so deeply, unfathomably in love with you that I couldn’t see straight, Alice.” He reached out and gently brushed a stray strand away from my forehead, his warm, nervous gaze latched on to mine. “And I’ve been treading water ever since, with nothing to show for it.”
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I don’t know what Loch Ness said to Troy yesterday after I left school but I know the fear of her in a mans eyes when I see it.
Also he randomly apologized to me today for like ten whole minutes and kept making me swear I would tell her he did it. She probably got her hands on a bunch of maggots and threatened to cut open his brain and stuff them in there or something else really gross and violent.
What a menace.
Kind of funny when I’m not the target of her terror, but still. Now I have to check my room before bed in case she gets any funny ideas about what to do with the maggots now that Troy’s off the hook.
Update: On second thought, maybe I’ll just sleep in my mom’s bed tonight.
Alice
It was almost as though she was expecting me.
There was a brief hitch in her step when she scurried out the front door of her building and saw me sitting on the stone steps, but she recovered quickly, lowering to sit beside me with a deep, resigned breath.
I took the pink to-go mug when she offered it, and we sat in silence for a while, passing the coffee back and forth, watching people power walk to work and herd their backpack-equipped little ones into cars.
“Can you take me through what happened again?” I eventually said, swiping at the drop of coffee that had spilled down my chin. “It’s been so long that I’m a little murky on some of the details, and it’s bugging me.”
I didn’t need to specify what I was talking about.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” I stared straight ahead, unable—no,unwilling—to look at her. “Start from the beginning.”
She took her time, gathering her thoughts before she said, “I never told you how bad it got… the stuff with my dad.”
A frustrated huff shoved out of my lungs. “Rachel?—”
“It’s relevant. I promise.”
I grabbed the mug, sipping it to keep my mouth shut.
“We couldn’t afford my tuition.” Her hands clasped delicately over her knees, the pitch of her voice kept so even that it wasalmost serene. “He lost everything. I still don’t know how that’s even possible, given how much he had to begin with, but he losteverythingand then some. They took my laptop. My clothes. My bed. It was… violating, to say the least.”
I ground my teeth, the jagged edges of my anger thawing against my better judgment. She hadn’t told me any of this while it was happening. She’d done what her parents had asked of her and kept it all hidden, even though I could have helped. My familywouldhave helped.
Instead, I’d found out at the same time everyone else did. One morning, I woke up, and his face was plastered all over the news. The RCMP was looking for the man who was suspected of committing a number of financial crimes and losing billions of his clients’ dollars while lying to them about the performance of their investments. The public had been urged to contact the police with any information about his whereabouts.
If they knew he’d already been gone for weeks by that point, they didn’t mention it.
“You could have said something. Even if your parents asked you not to, you and I, we used to tell each other everything, didn’t we?”
She glanced down at her knees. “Why would I have told you about something that was all just in my head? School was my real life. You were my real life. Home was… an alternate reality, a figment of my imagination. Admitting how bad things were would have broken the dimensional barriers, and then I’d have been trapped. There would’ve been nowhere else to run.” She let out a breath, stretching her legs out. “Reality kept catching up with me, though, if that makes you feel better. I got pulled into the principal’s office one day because my tuition was overdue, and the administration couldn’t get a hold of my parents. I didn’t even realize they hadn’t… Anyways, I told him it was all just a misunderstanding, made up an excuse about my dad havingswitched accounting firms, and promised I’d have it taken care of right away. He gave me ten days.” Pausing for a beat, she slipped her hands under her thighs. “Our tuition was almost a hundred grand. Did you know that? You might not blink at that number, but it’s a lot for anyone to come up with in less than two weeks, let alone a seventeen-year-old kid. And I was building up the courage to ask you for the money, but I… I just…”
Dread whipped through me, dark and nauseatingly potent. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
Her throat moved as she stared straight ahead. “You know what the worst part of all this was? You think it’d be the money and having your stuff, every luxury you’d taken for granted, being taken away from you, but that wasn’t it. The worst part was finally being confronted by the fact that I… You had everything, Alice. Everything I’d ever wanted or dreamed of having,youhad.
“Even before my dad left, I don’t think he would have been able to tell you the color of my eyes unless he was looking right at me. Yours knew your birthday by heart. He wouldn’t have left you behind like that—opened credit cards under your name, emptied your accounts, and disappeared without so much as a note or a goodbye. Your mom wouldn’t have chosen to cope with his bankruptcy by numbing herself with pills until she stripped herself of the ability to feel altogether.” She swallowed, her chin wobbling a touch.
After a deep breath, she said, “They would have picked you, like he did. And that… didn’t seem fair to me. You had everything, and it didn’t seem fair that you got him, too.” She dabbed at a stray tear that had slipped down her cheek, clearing her throat. “I was grieving and scared and seventeen, but that doesn’t excuse it. I just need you to know why it happened the way it did, because I thought he was askingme. He’d slipped me a note that said to meet him outside the aux gym after lunch, andthen Nat had shown up with her hoodie, telling us that the soccer team had made their picks for prom, so I thought… I really thought he’d picked me. But he wasn’t even there when I showed up. It was a couple of other guys from the team, and they wanted the combination to your locker.”
I swiped at my nose when it started to prickle, blinking away from her.
