I’d decided last night that I was done liking him. Whatever I’d witnessed when he was with his family clearly was only for show, there wasn’t any part left of the little boy I used to play with, and there was nothing more to him. I was the idiot that had wasted entirely too much of my life, wishing that he’d open his eyes and see that I was an actual person.
Something everyone else failed to see because I didn’t participate in sports or any extracurricular activities, and didn’t offer up the answers in class unless the teacher called on me.
I made it into the school, raced to my locker, shoved my things inside, and grabbed my books before walking to the classroom. I had made sure that everything was where it was supposed to be before I left the house so that I could avoid a scene like what had happened yesterday. The less time I spent alone, the less opportunities Evan had of bruising my other wrist.
It wasn’t puffy anymore, but there were still bruises, and it was difficult to shower the night before. I’d managed to hit it on every surface in the bathroom, and by the time I crawled into bed, it was throbbing again.
On top of that, I’d had dreams about him. In one, he was pushing me off a cliff and laughing maniacally as I fell. In another one, he was taking care of me and making sure that my wrist was okay. He’d actually—I sighed and plopped down onto the stool, leaning forward, and burying my face in my arms—he’d actually kissed it and apologized to me, saying that he didn’t mean it, that he was just having a bit of a rough morning, that he’d never meant to hurt me, and then he’d kissed me.
I guess that’s why they’re called dreams; the most impossible things can happen when you’re lost in your own head.
I tensed when I heard the stool next to me slide against the linoleum floor, and I slowly sat up and stared straight ahead at the chalkboard. I placed my hands in my lap and looked at the clock on the wall. It wasn’t hard to recognize him sitting next to me, even from the corner of my eye.
It wasn’t even time for the warning bell to ring yet. What was he doing here? He had a ton of minions waiting with baited breath for the next word out of his mouth, and he was in his first period class before anyone else? I couldn’t believe that he’d come in here just to speak to me and briefly wondered what excuse he had made to the aforementioned minions so that they wouldn’t follow him in here.
When he said nothing, I flipped open my human physiology book and scanned the pages so I had something to do. Just sitting here with him was like a neon sign that said, She’s pathetic! She thinks Evan Drake would actually talk to her if she just sat here! Even though I didn’t.
I didn’t even want him to talk to me. I didn’t want to be his partner. I didn’t want to talk to him ever again. He wasn’t the person I thought he could still be, and I’d seriously fooled myself into thinking anything of the sort. I was unbelievably mad and frustrated with myself. I had always believed that I was smarter than the other girls that I’d heard stories about. It turned out that I was just as foolish as the rest of them.
“How are you this morning, Arianna?” he whispered.
“Peachy.”
“How’s your wrist?”
I switched arms, immediately hiding the hurt one underneath the desk and draping it across my lap as I stared down at a diagram of a frog.
“It’s fine,” I said, flipping through the pages.
“Can I see it?”
“You saw it last night.” I looked over at him before looking back down at my book. “You don’t need to see it today, too.”
“Look, I get it. I fucked up yesterday. I’m trying to be nice, Arianna.”
“Why now? I’ve known you my entire life, and it takes something like you bruising me to make you talk to me again? Why couldn’t you have tried to be nice to me before?”
I looked over at him when he failed to answer and found him staring down at our lab table, his hands braced against the edge as if he needed something to keep him upright. I opened my mouth to say something else, snapped it shut, and looked back up at the chalkboard. He didn’t have an answer, and I had nothing left to say.
“What did you want to do for this stupid thing, anyway?” he finally grumbled a few moments later.
“I was looking online last night and found something about a lie detector test. I thought it seemed interesting,” I said, shrugging.
“Fine. Great.” He slid his stool back and stood up. “Did you print it out?”
“Yeah,” I said, and then listened as his footsteps echoed in the empty room as he walked out. I slumped over my books, crossing my arms and burying my head in them again.
Just a few more weeks and I wouldn’t have to talk to him about anything ever again. We’d finish this project and go back to our separate lives, pretending that nothing had ever happened. And I could pretend that everything he hadn’t said to me hadn’t hurt like a bitch.
“So . . . did you want to come over tonight to work on this some more?” I asked, closing my book and stuffing the information I had printed out back into my folder.
“I have practice tonight.”
“Okay.” I stacked my books and placed my arms on the table, surrounding them, staring at the back of Steve Forrester’s head as I waited for the bell to ring.
We’d been given the entire period to get our projects sorted out so that we could
