I stomp the rest of the way home and I’m glad to see that my parents aren’t there. I need to be able to vent to Jodie without them hearing it. I reach for my backpack, and when I see the open front pouch hanging down with nothing in it, a sense of dread wells up inside me. My phone was in there, with my pens, eye drops, and lip balm. All of which are now on the passenger’s seat of Hunter’s car.
Luckily, Jodie’s number is one of the few I know by heart, and I use the upstairs cordless phone to make my call.
“Hello?” Jodie asks, sounding annoyed. Normally, she’s all, “Yo, El, what’s up?”
“Hey, it’s Ellie. I’m on my landline.”
“Oh,” Jodie says, sounding less annoyed but still not like herself. “I thought you were a telemarketer or something. Did your phone finally die?”
“No, you’re not going to believe this,” I say. “It fell out in Hunter’s car while I was—”
“Hunter’s car?” Jodie repeats, her tone changing back to annoyed. “What were you doing in Hunter’s car?”
“It’s seriously the most—”
“Jesus, Ellie, you still haven’t gotten him out of your life yet? Is that why we’ve barely spoken the last few weeks?”
Seriously? She’s making this my fault? “We’ve barely spoken because you’re in a perpetual funk these days.”
“Nope, you’ve been super evasive lately and now I know why, since you apparently think hanging out with Hunter again is acceptable behavior. Why can’t you just get over him already?”
I take a deep breath, wondering if it’s possible to strangle my phone. “Jodie, I’m very, very sorry you’re not going to USC, but you don’t need to take it out on me and—”
“Excuse me? You know how much USC meant to me. Do not throw that in my face.”
“Yeah, I do. And I know that your life isn’t over because there are other colleges that you don’t have to fly to, which you seem to have conveniently forgot during this stupid extended pity party.” I feel my eyes bugging out and I suck in my breath. Did I really just say that?
But before I can take it back, Jodie makes a strange noise between a laugh and a yelp. “You’re going to lecture me? Oh, that’s rich, Miss Avoid Everything That Makes You Feel Bad.”
Whatever bit of regret I just had evaporates instantly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You stick with what’s safe because you can’t bear to have your feelings hurt. You don’t want to experience anything new and just stay in your little shell, so you stick with the familiar, even if the familiar is an asshole like Hunter. God, even your obsession with beating his group is like a weird, sick way of keeping him in your life.”
I suck in my breath. “Newsflash, Jodie, I hooked up with Luke last month, but I haven’t told you since you’ve been so busy feeling sorry for yourself and I felt bad. And I told Hunter off today for good. I actually dumped my drink on him, but since you’re too busy being a raging, reactionary bitch right now, maybe we can have this conversation another day.”
With that, I slam down the phone.
Seriously, what did I do to deserve today?
CHAPTER 24
It might sound crazy but the Feast-Off is the only thing keeping me focused at the moment. It’s like all of my anger and angst and fed-upness is funneled into creating the perfect meal.
And this is fine with me because I don’t want to think about yesterday. At all. Like, if I remember my fight with Hunter, I’m liable to punch someone. If I think about my fight with Jodie, I feel like I might start crying and never be able to stop. I mean, this is a pretty epic moment in our friendship. Aside from a minor tiff in the sixth grade over who was the bigger T.J. Choi fan, we’ve never really fought. I’ve always tolerated Jodie’s pushiness and sometimes opinionated advice because it’s a minor part of who she is. But our argument took that to a whole other level, and since neither of us has apologized, I’m terrified this might be a permanent thing.
“Are you okay?” Isaiah asks at lunch that day. He’s staring at me with a deeply furrowed brow over a book Mariana gave him about horse care. He’s been working at the equine therapy center on Friday afternoons and Saturdays, the only two days his mother would concede. But it seems to be enough for Isaiah, who has been practically glowing since he started working there, and every lunch period he devours the reading material Mariana gives him.
“I’ll be all right,” I say.
“You sure?” he asks. “You look upset.”
“I just had kind of a late night last night is all.” Okay, that’s kind of true. I kept waiting to see if Jodie would call me and simultaneously fought the urge to call her. That went on until about 1:00 a.m., when I finally fell asleep.
Isaiah doesn’t look like he believes me, but he stops the line of questioning.
I’m digging half-heartedly at my pudding cup when a shadow falls over our table.
There’s a loud thwack as a heavy Ziploc bag is dropped on the table between Isaiah and me, startling the both of us. I look up to see Brynn standing there, scowling.
“Hunter said to give this to you.” It’s more of an accusation than a declarative statement.
I examine the bag, which contains my phone and all the stuff that fell out in Hunter’s car. I don’t know if Hunter
