New Girl - By Paige Harbison Page 0,64

hot, too—said that she didn’t know where the girl was but she was sure she was still out there. She’s all over interviews online.”

I felt light-headed. It was too strange to hear my best friend’s annoying douche of a boyfriend talking about Becca and Dana.

“That’s so weird. Is everyone freaking out at your school, then?” Leah’s eyes were wide.

I nodded. “Yeah, everyone’s really worried.”

“That’s just awful. That poor girl.” My mom clucked her tongue and started moving the cookies from the tray to a cooling rack. “I hope they find her. Her poor friends, they must be so worried! Oh, and if she did have a boyfriend…that must be just the worst kind of worry— Oh! The corn bread! I’d nearly forgotten it.”

I wanted to press the reset button, and make it so Michael had never come. It would have made things infinitely better for a thousand reasons, but right now his little bit of online stalker info was making me feel nauseous.

“Look!” Lily ran over to me and presented me with the drawing she’d had her nose to for at least ten minutes.

I crouched down to her level, thankful for a change in subject. “What have we got here?”

It was the most tactful way of asking an easily offended child like Lily what on earth she’d been trying to depict with the four free crayons she’d smuggled out of Harry’s Restaurant and Pub.

“Jasper,” she said, pointing to the thickly drawn figure that took up a third of the page. He looked like a horse. “And that’s me.” She pointed to a squat little girl with a crown on her head. “That’s the house, and that’s Mommy and Daddy.”

“Where am I?”

She stretched her mouth out to either side and looked guilty. “Um…” She ran into the other room with a red crayon, and came back a moment later with a stick figure drawn in on the backside of the sheet. “You were just here on the other side. Because you’re not here anymore.”

Ouch.

I smiled, feeling as separated from my old life as the little crayon me, and put an arm around her. “That is an excellent drawing. It should definitely go on the fridge.”

I pinned it up with a magnet and all the other drawings.

An hour and a half later we had finished eating my mom’s best Christmas Eve food (chili, corn bread and—less happily—green beans) and were watching It’s a Wonderful Life. We watched it every year. Even Lily could be heard whispering some of the lines to herself in her small falsetto voice as she played with toys by the Christmas tree.

The sun had finally set, and there was a slight chill wrapping the blanket around my feet. Jasper was curled up next to me, breathing quietly. Michael and Leah were sitting next to me on the sectional sofa, holding hands and whispering things to each other too often and stifling giggles. My parents were in their respective chairs. My dad was falling asleep, as he almost always did during movies, and my mom was sipping on her warm—and spiked—apple cider.

I thought about Michael and Leah. Just about anyone who didn’t know the intricacies of their roller-coaster romance might look at them now and think they were in love. Maybe that’s what it had been for Becca and Max. Maybe they weren’t as in love as everyone thought they were. Maybe they weren’t blissful and bound for a lifetime of happiness. Maybe everyone had been wrong. The thought lifted my heavy heart for a second before it fell again.

Because what if I was wrong? Maybe Michael and Leah were what love was. They always came back to each other, no matter how bad they were for one another. They chose to forget the wrongs of before and stay together. It was their choice. There must be some reason they got back together and stayed with each other through thick and thin.

Was that love, or were they just emotionally destroying each other? My phone buzzed on the cushion under me. It was a text from Max.

Watching It’s a Wonderful Life…you said you watch that every Christmas, too, right?

I clicked off my phone’s screen, feeling an unexpected urge to cry. It was stupid, and I knew it. But suddenly I felt the weight of realizing that no one had ever felt that way about me. No one had ever not been able to stay away from me. Whether Michael and Leah were true love personified or not, they always came