room as I went upstairs. I shut the door and called Stryker again, sitting back on my now-bare bed. Nearly all of my pillows were on my bed at school.
“Hey, it’s me again. I just wish you would come back. Or I could come to you. Did you go back to school? I really wish you’d answer your phone. I really wish you were here. I really wish things could have been different. I wish we could back to when you dared me to eat the pie. You still owe me a date, by the way. So just…call me back. Even if it’s to tell me to leave you the fuck alone. I just don’t want it to end like this. It can’t end like this.”
I ended the call and looked around my room. Stryker was always asking me why I was obsessed with pink.
Yeah, I had to stop thinking about him. I grabbed my phone again and called Lottie.
“Hey, roomie! Are you in a turkey coma yet?” Her Thanksgiving had obviously been better than mine.
“Well, it kind of blew up in my face and Stryker stormed out.”
“He did what? What happened?” I heard Trish talking behind her, asking if she was talking to me because Stryker hadn’t called her back.
“Trish, seriously. I can’t hear her when you’re yelling in my ear,” Lottie said, and moved away from the noise.
“Okay, I’m alone now. So what happened?”
“It was so stupid. My mom was completely unprepared for him, and I knew she was going to freak out, but I hoped she wouldn’t and then she did, and then I tried to fix it and we ended up fighting and he got pissed and left. I’ve called him a million times, but he’s gone. I’m such an idiot.”
“What did your mom say?”
“Oh, she didn’t really say anything specific. She just treated him like he’d just gotten out of prison, and wouldn’t stop glaring at him. Honestly, I don’t blame him for leaving. He wanted this perfect Thanksgiving and it got ruined.”
“That’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, it kind of is. I shouldn’t have let him come in the first place. I knew Mom would react like that. I should have told her, but what then? She wouldn’t have let him come, so then I would have told him he couldn’t come, and I couldn’t do that. Lottie, what am I going to do?”
“I’ll get Trish to call him and see where he is. He’ll probably answer for her. Let me tell her the situation and I’ll call you back, okay? Don’t worry, this is fixable.”
I said goodbye to Lottie and stared at the pictures of my high school friends and me that were plastered all over my wall. I took a shit ton of pictures, I realized. I got up and looked at them. God, there were a bunch with Zack in them. I pulled one after the other off the walls, scattering them on the floor like leaves ripped from the branches of a tree.
I looked at my face in picture form, grinning back at me. I didn’t know that girl. The girl who smiled at Zack like he’d found the world and handed it to her. Fuck. Him.
I tore down the rest of the pictures until my walls were mostly bare.
My phone rang, interrupting my redecorating.
“Hey, so Trish can’t get a hold of him either. He’s gone off the grid,” Lottie said, a little out of breath.
“Shit,” I said, letting my back slide down my bare wall until I was sitting on the floor. “He’s probably on his way back to his place. I should go apologize.”
Someone knocked on my door.
“Yeah?” I said, putting my hand over the phone. Kayla poked her head in the door, only glancing at the pictures that littered the floor.
“Brought you some tea.” She held a mug out and I took it, setting it next to me.
“Thanks.”
“You should come talk to Mom. She’s really upset.”
Yeah, I bet she was.
“I’ll be there in a second.” Kayla nodded and waited in the doorway.
Lottie had been waiting patiently, but I could hear her talking to Trish as well. I banged the back of my head against the wall.
“I don’t know what to do, Lot.”
“Just fix things with your mom and deal with him tomorrow. He just needs some time to cool off. Okay, Trish, you can talk to her. Here’s Trish.”
The phone was passed as Kayla gave me a look that said she was waiting for me to come with her.
“Look,