Layla - Colleen Hoover Page 0,20

longer sits next to me. Instead, I sit next to a girl who seems like she’s fighting not to crawl out of the skin she’s in.

It’s like all her resilience is buried beneath layers of scar tissue now.

Maybe that’s why I’ve let her basically take over as my manager while she recovers. I do what she says because my career is the only thing that seems to give her a sense of purpose. Keeps her mind off everything that’s happened.

And maybe that’s how she deals with it—by turning the one thing that caused all of this into a positive thing. Every aspect of our lives other than my career has suffered. Layla says it’s good we have that small sliver of positivity to hold on to. I don’t want to deprive her of that, but I kind of miss the days when she didn’t take my career as seriously. I miss it when she encouraged me to quit the band in order to preserve my own happiness. I miss how she used to pull my guitar out of my hands so she could crawl on top of me. I miss it when she didn’t care about what was posted to my Instagram page.

But mostly, I miss just being myself around her. Lately, I feel like I’ve been inching away from the person I was so that I can become the person she now needs.

“Is the seat belt sign off yet?” she asks. Her face is buried in the sleeve of my shirt. She’s gripping my hand. Honestly, I hadn’t even realized we’d taken off. It’s like I live inside my own head now more than I live in reality.

“Not yet.”

She must be extremely nervous right now if she can’t even lift her eyes to look for herself. I bring my hand to the side of her head and press my lips into her hair. She tries to hide it, but anxiety is not an invisible thing. I can see it in the way she holds herself. In the way her hands twist at her dress. In the way her jaw hardens. I can even see it in the way her eyes dart around when we’re in public, as if she’s waiting for someone to come around the corner and attack.

When a ding indicates the seat belt signs are off and it’s safe to move around the cabin, she finally separates herself from me. Her eyes flitter nervously around the cabin as she takes a mental note of her surroundings. She lifts the shade and gazes out the window at the clouds, absentmindedly bringing her hand up to the scar on the side of her head. She’s always touching it. Sometimes I wonder what she thinks about when she touches it. She has no memory of that night. Only what I’ve told her, but she rarely asks about it. She never asks about it, actually.

Her knee is bouncing up and down. She shifts in her seat and then glances back into coach. Her eyes are wide, like she’s on the edge of a panic attack.

She’s had two full-on panic attacks in the past month alone. This is how they both started. Her touching her scar. Her fingers trembling. Her eyes full of fear. Her breaths labored.

“You okay?”

She nods, but she doesn’t make eye contact with me. She just blows out several slow and quiet breaths, as if she’s trying to hide from me that she’s attempting to calm herself down.

She closes her eyes and leans her head back. She looks like she wants to crawl beneath her seat. “I need my pills,” she whispers.

I knew she didn’t seem right. I reach to the floor for her purse. I look for her anxiety medicine, but it’s not in her purse anywhere. Just a wallet, a pack of gum, and a lint roller. “Did you put them in the checked bag?”

“Shit,” she mutters, her eyes still closed. She’s gripping the arms of her seat, wincing as if she’s in pain. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like, dealing with anxiety. She tried to explain it to me last week. I asked her what the anxiety felt like. She said, “It’s like a shiver running through my blood.”

Up until that point, I had always assumed anxiety was just a heightened sense of worry. But she explained it was an actual physical feeling. She feels it running through her body like tiny waves of electric shocks. After she told me that, I just held