I don’t think I can do this anymore.
Tristan: Us, I mean.
Tristan: Something is broken and I don’t know how to fix it.
Tristan: I don’t know if it can be fixed.
Tristan: I’m sorry. It breaks my heart to do this.
Tristan: I wish I didn’t feel this way. But I do.
Tristan: And I have to stay true to what I feel.
I shut off the phone and toss it onto the floor.
I’m about to press Play on the remote to watch the episode of Assumed Guilty yet again when someone knocks on my door. It’s my sister.
“I was about to put on a movie. Do you want to watch it with me?”
I smile and push myself off the bed. “Sure. But not The Breakfast Club, okay? I’ve seen that too many times.”
She looks at me in surprise. “How did you know I was going to watch that?”
I shrug. “Just a hunch.”
My sister runs back to her room to get the movie ready and I walk over to my window and stare out at the lonely tree in our front yard. The one Owen climbs on so many other versions of this Monday. I don’t know what will happen tonight. I’ve already messed with every single moment of the day.
But I crack the window open anyway.
Because despite being dead and stuck in purgatory, it turns out I still have some hope left.
Break On Through
9:45 p.m.
Hadley chose Some Kind of Wonderful, another teen movie made in the eighties about a guy who empties his entire college savings account to take the popular girl out on a date, but then discovers that he’s actually in love with his best friend.
As the credits roll, I turn to my sister. “Hads, what happened today? Why did you walk home from school soaking wet?”
Flustered, she searches for the remote in her tangle of blankets and presses Stop. “How did you know about that? Did they put it on the Internet?” She grabs her phone off her nightstand and swipes it on. “Is there a video?”
“What?” I ask, confused. “Did who put it on the Internet? Hadley, what happened?”
But once again, she completely shuts down. “I’m tired. I need to go to sleep.”
I know this is my cue to leave but I don’t budge. “Hadley, you know you can talk to me about this, right?”
“No!” she screams and I flinch. “I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because you wouldn’t understand. You have everything figured out.”
This makes me laugh, and I immediately realize what a mistake that is because Hadley clearly thinks I’m laughing at her. “I have nothing figured out!” I tell her.
She crosses her arms, evidently not believing me.
“Do you know why I stayed home from school today?” I ask. “Why I really stayed home from school?”
“You were sick.”
“No. I was scared.”
This was obviously not even in the same galaxy as what she thought I was going to say. “Of what?”
“Of my life. Of facing it. Of being me. The same old stupid me, day after day.”
“But your life is perfect,” she argues.
“It’s not.”
“You get perfect grades and all the teachers like you and you’re going to be on the varsity softball team. And you have the cutest boyfriend in school!”
I sigh. “Actually, I have none of those things. And Tristan broke up with me today.”
Her jaw drops. “Because of one fight?”
“No, because…” I trail off. Because why? Six breakups and I still don’t seem to have a straight answer to that question. “I guess things were just broken between us.”
“But you can fix it!”
I look at her sweet, innocent face and feel a pang in my chest. She’s so desperate for me to tell her that she’s right. That I can fix it. That my seemingly perfect life will go on exactly the way she wants it to.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe some things aren’t fixable.”
“Maybe everything is fixable.”
I reach out and ruffle her hair. “When did you get to be the wise one?”
She laughs. “I’ve always been the wise one. You’re just noticing it for the first time.”
I nod. “You’re probably right.” I stand up and start for the door.
“Ells?” my sister calls out.
“Yeah?”
“They told me Avery Frahm wanted to kiss me. He’s the cutest boy in our class. I never should have believed them. They told me to wait for him on the soccer field. Then they turned the sprinklers on.”
I open my mouth to demand who. Who would do this to my sister? But before I can get the word out, I realize I already know.
The giggling girls.