cry. “I had hoped to see you here—in your…environment—so I can tell myself that you’re a monster. You’re not who I thought you were. You never were.”
My chest aches so badly I can’t inhale.
“And don’t think I don’t know. What you are now. Who you hang around with, what you people do. Soon I’m graduating, and I’m going into law.”
I swallow—somehow. “Good for you.”
“Luca?” Her hard voice is hoarse now. I can tell from her mouth that she’s trying not to cry. “Why did you do it that way?”
I look at my legs, at the black pants I wore to play poker. “I don’t think it matters.” Breathe in…and out. I can feel my body flickering, and distantly I wonder if I might pass out.
“No. It doesn’t, at all,” she says. “But I still want to know.”
Another long breath in and slow breath out so my head will stop spinning. “Doesn’t matter.” I bite my cheek hard enough that I can taste blood. The sting helps to ground me. I look at her. At her eyes, which look at me with kindness every time I shut my eyes to sleep. I take in how angry she is—this real, living person that I broke with my actions.
“Doesn’t matter,” I rasp. I step back against the doors, fixing my gaze on the wall over her shoulder. “You just said you know who I am. None of that stuff matters.”
“You’re not a nice guy,” she whispers.
I touch my jaw where it’s now dripping, feeling really float-y. “No,” I agree.
She sniffs. When she speaks again, I hear the tears I can’t see while looking at the reflective gold walls.
“Do you know how hard I tried to find you? I found out you were at her house. The next day,” she rasps. “I wanted to kill her. I thought…everyone…and it was Isa. She was always strange. So quiet. I thought she was…scary.” Some sound comes from her throat; it’s like a laugh mid-strangle. “I just didn’t get her. Dani—I could see that. Everybody was in love with Dani. I couldn’t see how you could fall for Isa. So fast. It made me think that you had never really cared about me.” Her voice breaks as she says, “And that made me crazy.” She hides her face behind her hands, and I can’t keep my eyes from sweeping up and down her again, reverent, almost starving for her. “That’s the part that really made me messed up,” she says into her palms. “Not that I wasn’t good enough to keep you. But the way it was all fake.”
She lifts her head, breathing deeply as tears stream down her cheeks. “I assumed I didn’t really matter. When you’re eighteen, you blame yourself for not knowing. I had wanted you so much. I said to myself that I must have misread it. I was so lonely at that time.” Her eyes squeeze shut, and she bows her head like she might lose it. But she doesn’t. She just stands there with her head down, and she covers her mouth like she’s afraid she might be sick. Then she moves her hand and she looks at me.
“I think you should know it absolutely ruined college. I played…a role…the whole first year. I played a role of someone who had never known you and who never knew of all the bullshit Shakespeare in the track field, all that stupid shit you used to tell me in Italian. I knew you couldn’t fake the way you came when I would bite your lip or how you would lay on me when we cuddled. Like, you’d shift your weight so I could feel you lying on me, like on top of me—so I would have to hold your body up with mine. Like you just…needed to be close to me. I told myself that didn’t happen because there was no way I could explain why you would just break things off. Deep down I knew something bad might have happened, so I came by one time when I heard where you were. And Isa’s people sent me away.
“My parents took me to Southampton and I did cocaine and figured out how pot was better, and I went to college how I should have after that because you can’t be dead over a boy who never even loved you. That’s just crazy! I was crazy, and I knew you have to hide it if you’re crazy. That’s what people do, you know, they