He comes over to the bed and leans over, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Harper,” he says softly. “I’m-”He doesn’t know how to talk about it, what it felt like to lie awake in bed worrying about her, not knowing, waiting for something to happen, desperately hoping it wouldn’t, but even more desperate for the weird, endless, torturous limbo of waiting to just end. One way or another. He doesn’t want to ask if she heard all the things he told her when her eyes were closed, because he’s afraid that she did-and afraid that she didn’t. “We were all really worried,” he says finally, hiding in the “we.”
”I didn’t think you’d come,” she says dully. “I thought you hated me. ”
”Of course I don’t hate you,” he says, his voice too jolly. She winces. He knows he’s trying too hard; he just doesn’t know what he’s trying to do. He pulls a familiar chair up to the bed. He doesn’t take her hand. “Look, things got all screwed up at the end there, and I … we both said a lot of things that… you know, we probably shouldn’t have.”
”Mostly you said a lot of things,” she reminds him. “I just said I’m sorry. ”
She’d said it over and over again; he hadn’t wanted to listen.
”I know. I know you are,” he tells her. “I get that now. And I forgive you. ”
”Really?” Her eyes widen. She tries to sit up in bed, and her face twists in pain. He touches her shoulder, gently, helping her to lie back. She reaches out, touches his face. “Everything I did, I just did it because-”
”I know.”
The tension disappears from her face. “Then it’s okay,” she murmurs, almost to herself “Then at least something is…”
He leans in closer, struggling to hear-and she kisses him.
He jerks away.
He does it without even thinking.
He hasn’t thought any of it through, he realizes now. And now it’s too late.
”What?” There is a new pain on her face. “What is it?”
”Gracie, when I said-I didn’t mean-”
”You said you forgave me, Ad,” she says softly, as if maybe he forgot, and this is all a simple misunderstanding. “So that’s it. We can start again. No more lies, no more-”
”No.” He doesn’t know he’s going to say it before the word pops out, but he means it. “I want us to be friends again, Harper, I really do. But anything else… I think we work better, just as friends. When we tried to have more”-When you had to have more, he doesn’t say-”things got messy.”
”But it was all a mistake!” she protests, her voice scratchy and weak. “I explained that. I apologized, a million times. And you just want to go back? Like none of it ever happened? Like you never told me that you-”
”None of it was real.” He tries not to look away. He wants so much to make her smile; but he can’t tell her what she wants to hear. “When we were together, it was all a lie.” The words are harsh, but his voice is gentle. He doesn’t want to hurt her. “Everything you said was based on lies-and everything I said, that was just because I believed them. ”
She sags back against the pillows, her face returning to the dull, expressionless mask she’d worn when he came in.
Stop, he tells himself, horrified. Look what he’s said, what he’s done. He has to fix it- fix her.
”Gracie, you’re my best friend,” he says, and now he does take her hand. He can feel her pulling away, but he squeezes tighter, and she doesn’t have the strength. “I miss that. I miss you. We tried the whole dating thing, and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t matter why, or whose fault it is. It just didn’t. But that doesn’t mean-”
”Get out,” she says flatly.
”What?”
“I don’t need this.”
“I don’t understand,” he says, trying not to.
”You don’t forgive me,” she says bitterly. “You still think I’m not good enough for you, that I’m this manipulative slut who can’t be trusted. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That I’m this terrible person, all rotted on the inside?”
”But I was wrong,” he protests. “I didn’t mean it. ”
”Right. “ Her voice swells, and he realizes that even now, hurt, powerless, confined to a bed, she has power. She is still, after all, Harper Grace. “You meant it. Then. So what’s changed now? You see me lying here and you feel sorry for me? You figure poor little Harper needs a nice pick-me-up in her bed of pain? And what? I’m supposed to be grateful for your pity?” Her voice is shaking, but her eyes are dry. And he knows that she will never let him see her pain.
“It’s not pity,” he argues.
”Yeah, but it’s not-” She stops herself. There is a long silence. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says finally. “I’m fine. You did your little good deed by coming here, so you can forget your guilty conscience. ”
It would be so easy to fix this, he thinks. All he has to do is take her back, tell her he loves her and he understands everything she did to him. Tell her he’s ready to start over again, that the past doesn’t matter.
But it does matter. A car crash can’t erase anything that happened, or the choices that she made; it doesn’t change the kind of person she is, it doesn’t make it any easier to trust her again.
”You should get some rest,” he says. “We can talk about this tomorrow. I’ll come back and-”
”Don’t. ”
“I want to. ”
“I don’t care. “ She turns her head away from him and closes her eyes. They’re done.
“She’s feeling a lot better,” Miranda said, shrugging. “I’m sure pretty soon everything else will be back to normal. And the two of you…”
“I don’t know,” he said dubiously, although he had the same hope. It’s why he kept trying, in hopes that, if nothing else, she’d eventually get tired of pushing him away.
“I could tell her you were asking,” Miranda offered.
“No, don’t bother.” He looked down at his notebook, where a mess of numbers and letters sprinkled the page in an incomprehensible pattern. “Maybe we should just get back to work.”
After all, nothing in his life made much sense anymore; at least when it came to algebra, there was an answer key in the back of the book.
Beth pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, nudging the car just over the speed limit, and tried not to think about the two meetings she was blowing off or the stack of homework she’d face when she got home again. Today had gone from bad-an encounter with Kane that had rattled her even more than her first ever detention slip- to worse as she’d bombed a pop quiz, forgotten her gym uniform, and almost lost the Spirit Day prizes. She’d found them at the last minute, but had been forced to miss the culminating Spirit Rally in favor of her first detention, where she’d cowered in the back row under the glare of a tall, gaunt boy with pale skin and greasy hair who kept whispering something about how hot she’d look in leather.
It would be nice to say it had all been worth it, that she’d managed to erase some part of her imagined debt to Harper, and she was able to start feeling good about herself again, or at the very least that she could put the day behind her, sleep long and hard, and hope the next day would be better.
But she just felt unsteady. Maybe it was the detention, maybe it was the four cups of coffee she’d downed since morning, maybe it was Kane-her supplier, she reminded herself. She tried to shut it out, but the image popped into her mind yet again: the empty box on her nightstand. Kane was the only one who knew about it-the only one who could ever suspect what she’d done.
