Last Year's Mistake - Gina Ciocca Page 0,51

done the year before. He must have been trying to outdo himself this year because I’d caught him during one drop-off.

I’d placed the rest of my bouquet on the floor next to me until I could gather my books, and I pulled the rose out, intending to add it to the pile. I froze when the flower that emerged from the shadow of the cubby was not red but white.

The first thing to flash through my mind was the extra white rose David had asked for. But why would he . . . ?

I looked down the hall, hoping Ryan would be at his locker wearing a huge grin that would tell me this was all his doing. He was nowhere to be found. When I looked in the other direction, my heart stuttered. David stood at his locker, watching me through the corner of his eye. When he saw me looking at him, a dumbfounded expression on my face and a white rose clutched between my fingers, the corner of his mouth pulled up ever so slightly. He held my gaze for only a second before shutting his locker and walking away.

“Hey.”

I jumped as a voice sounded next to me and turned to find Violet at my side.

“Hey.” My eyes dropped to her hands. “Where are your flowers?”

Violet looked confused. “In Candy’s car, why?”

“How many did David give you?”

“Six.” She tittered. “He’s so sweet.”

“Six? Not eight?”

“I do know how to count, Kelsey. Three red plus three white equals six. Why?”

“Oh. No reason.”

Violet held out two heart-shaped cookies wrapped in plastic. “Anyway, Candy told me to give you her cookie-grams. She says she’s watching her figure. Gotta run, I’m late for practice.”

I bent down and put the cookies in my bag, gingerly placing the lone white rose in my pile of red ones.

So David had bought eight roses but given only six of them to Violet. No—scratch that. He’d bought seven roses and given one to me.

Technically, I’d given the eighth rose to him.

Twenty

Connecticut

Winter, Sophomore Year

“Kelsey, please eat something.”

David held a spoonful of chicken soup over the bowl my mother had brought to my room on a snack tray. The tray stretched across my legs, which were buried beneath the blue and green flowers of my comforter.

“I’m not hungry. I’m . . .”

“You’re what?”

My chest constricted. “Humiliated.”

That morning my mother had gotten out of bed and gone to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. She’d heard my cell phone ringing in the study and, seeing it was David, picked it up. As she walked by the bathroom, she saw the door ajar and the medicine cabinet mirror wide open. That was when she found me, dead asleep on the bathroom floor with a bloody towel in my lap and a pair of scissors at my feet.

If she hadn’t been holding the phone, and if she hadn’t started screaming, everything would’ve been fine.

David put the spoon back in the bowl and put his hand on my arm. “Listen. Isabel isn’t going to tell anyone. She could hear your mom through the phone, and I had to explain why I couldn’t stay.”

“You could’ve stayed,” I said flatly. He’d slept at her house after the dance. Granted, so had a bunch of other people, but the knowledge still sat like a brick in my stomach.

“I felt bad enough that I missed your messages because my piece of crap phone didn’t have service at the dance. So, no, I couldn’t have stayed. I needed to make sure you were okay.”

“You didn’t have to tell her I tried to hurt myself, David!” Hot tears spilled over my cheeks and I turned away from him. “The whole school is going be talking about me now!”

He squeezed my arm. “All I said was that I thought you’d tried to hurt yourself. I’m sorry I even said that much. I swear I’ll make sure she knows what really happened.”

I shook my head. “Don’t say a word to Isabel or anyone else. Except that I’m fine.”

My mother crept into the room then. “You will be fine, no matter what. Understand?”

I grabbed the soupspoon and swirled it through the broth and noodles, not wanting to look at either one of them. I didn’t have to look to know they exchanged a glance.

“Are you going to eat that or play with it all afternoon?” my mother asked.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Crawford; I’m not leaving until she eats it,” David promised. “I’ll pour it down her throat if I have to.”

Mom