Sometimes It Happens (19 page)

“Yes,” I say.

“You better,” Cooley says seriously, “warn Noah. Because that girl is not going to be too happy. She might heet him too.” He takes the dishes and heads back behind the counter, shaking his head as he goes.

I sigh and put my head down on the table, not even caring if it’s gross. Worst. Day. Of. School. Ever.

Of course I have no ride back to school, so I pull my phone out and text Lacey.

“911 cll me immediately”

Five seconds later, my phone rings. “What’s wrong?” she asks immediately. “Is it Ava? Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I need you to pick me up,” I say.

“From class? Okay,” she says. “I’ll see you after the bell. You’re in gym, right?”

“No,” I say. “I’m at Cooley’s.”

“At Cooley’s? What the hell are you doing
there
?”

“I can’t explain right now,” I say. “Just come and pick me up, okay?”

Ten minutes later, her car is pulling into the parking lot. “If we hurry, we can get back before fifth,” she says as I hop in. “Now tell me what the hell you were doing at Cooley’s. And how the hell did you get there?”

“Ava wanted to go,” I tell her. “She, uh, needed to talk to me about something.” I look out the window as Lacey pulls her car out of the parking lot, wondering if maybe Ava is lurking around somewhere, getting ready to jump me or something. But I don’t see her. Or her car. She must have gone back to school. Or maybe she went home.

Shit. I have to tell Noah that I told her. Don’t I? I pull my phone out of my bag and scroll down until I find his name in my contacts list. I run my hand over the send button, not sure what to do. Warn him? Or let him deal with it by himself, the way he’s been letting me deal with it by myself all morning?

“About what?” Lacey asks. “Her new teeth?”

“What?” I look up from my phone.

“What did Ava have to talk to you about that was sooo important she had to pull you out of school on the first day?” She says it like she can’t possibly imagine Ava would have anything to tell me that could be important enough for me to skip class. Well. She’s in for a shock.

“She had to tell me,” I say, “About how her and Noah broke up.”

“What?”
Lacey screeches. She’s so excited she almost
runs through a stop sign. The car jerks as she slams on the brakes. “They broke up?! Did you have any idea?”

“No,” I say. “Not until she told me.”

“Wow,” she says. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell us he was planning to break up with her! I hope I don’t sound like a complete bitch, but I’m kind of glad. Noah is way too cool for her. No offense, I know she’s your friend.” She looks at me out of the corner of her eye, checking my reaction, like she’s afraid I’m going to be mad.

But I’m not. I’m just sad. I look out the window and try not to cry.

“What happened to your face?” Lacey asks.

“What?”

“You have a big red mark on your face.” We’re at a stoplight, and Lacey reaches over and grabs my chin, tilting it up to look at my cheek. “What happened?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” I say, pulling away from her. “It’s nothing, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t want to
talk
about it?” she says. “You leave school in the middle of the day, then ask me to pick you up, which I do without any questions, and then you show up with a big red mark on your face and tell me you don’t want to talk about it? You’re talking about it. Now.” She waits, and the fact that she didn’t even sanitize her hands after touching my face makes me realize this is serious.

“Fine,” I say. “You’re . . . you’re probably going to find out anyway. Ava slapped me.”

“She did
what
?” The light turns green, and Lacey slams on the gas, her car flying through the intersection. “I’m going to kill that girl!”

“No,” I say. “It’s fine, we . . . we got in a fight, and she just got carried away. It didn’t hurt or anything.” Which is actually true. It didn’t hurt all that much. Mostly I was just shocked, but the actual slap wasn’t even that bad.

“She can’t just go around hitting people!” Lacey says. “What were you guys fighting about?”

“It had to do with Noah,” I say slowly. “Ava thought that something was going on between us this summer.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lacey scoffs, and I’m glad my face has a red mark because suddenly I feel hot. She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “Isn’t it?”

I hesitate. I know I should tell her the truth. I know I should tell her about what happened last night between me and Noah, how it was building all summer, how I couldn’t stop it, how I didn’t
want
to stop it, how I wish now that I could take it back, how I’m so confused I can barely think straight.

But the reason I couldn’t tell Lacey what was happening over the summer is the same reason I can’t tell her now. After the situation with her, Riker, and Danielle, she has a zero-tolerance policy for cheating, especially for hooking up with your best friend’s boyfriend. (And she
should
have a zero-tolerance policy;
everyone
should have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to those things, including me.) So if she
finds out what happened, she’ll probably never speak to me again, and right now she might be the only friend I have left. So I lie.

“Yeah,” I say, rolling my eyes and hoping she believes me. “So ridiculous. Nothing is going on between me and Noah.”

“I can’t believe she would even think that!” Lacey rages. “You would never do something like that. And then to hit you! Who does she think she is?”

She rants the whole way back to school, and once we’re in the building she walks me to my locker so I can get my stuff for fifth period.

“Are you okay?” she says. “Do you want to just go home? I can take you.”

“No,” I say. “I’m okay, really.” Going home sounds tempting, but to do that would be taking the easy way out. And I kind of feel like I deserve to be punished. “Listen, I’m going to run to the bathroom before fifth. I’ll text you later?”

“You sure?” she asks. “I could go with you. Or I could cut out with you, I don’t mind, seriously.”

“I’m sure,” I say, and give her hand a squeeze. “I promise.” I leave Lacey and head to the second-floor bathroom to wait for the bell to ring, signaling the beginning of fifth period.

My eye makeup is running down my face, the same way it did that night at Jenna’s party, and it almost drips onto my first-day-of-school shirt. I rip some paper towels off the roll and try to clean myself up. The bell rings as I’m doing it, and
the door to the bathroom flies open. A few freshmen trail in and chatter about their classes and how much homework they have already.

I fix my face as best I can, take a deep breath, and head out of the bathroom. And when I do, I bump right into Noah. Again.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hi.”

I expect him to keep moving, to push past me and go walking down the hall the way he did earlier, but he doesn’t. Instead, he stops and looks at me awkwardly. “So, um, how—”

“Listen,” I say, cutting him off before he can say anything else. “I have to tell you something.”

“Okay.” He shifts his books to his other hand, and his features arrange into a look of concern. Which is actually good. He should be concerned.

“I told Ava what happened between us.” We’ve moved a little bit out of the way, standing over to the side by a row of lockers, while kids go rushing by us. Kind of a weird place for us to be having a potentially life-changing conversation, but what choice do I have? Actually, now that I think about it, probably lots of potentially life-changing conversations take place in this hallway. I mean, isn’t high school just a string of life-changing moments interspersed with football games, proms, and homework?

“You what?” Noah asks. “
Why?
Why would you do that?”
His tone is halfway between annoyed and disbelieving, like he has no idea how anyone could be so stupid.

“Because I thought she had a right to know,” I say, suddenly indignant. Why is he so concerned about Ava knowing anyway? If he broke up with her, it’s not like he has anything to lose. It doesn’t make any sense, unless he wants to make sure that he comes out of the breakup looking good. The thought fills me with rage. “And besides, who cares if I told her? You guys broke up, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but . . .” he trails off and looks at me. “Hannah, I never wanted you to wreck your friendship with Ava because of me.” His tone is suddenly softer, and almost sympathetic.

I stare at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”

“I just mean that what happened last night . . . I never meant for you to tell Ava about it, to ruin your friendship over me.”

My mouth drops open. “I didn’t ruin my friendship with Ava over you,” I tell him. Which is true. I didn’t tell Ava because I somehow thought Noah and I were going to be together. I told Ava in a fit of weird anger that somehow led me to tell her, for reasons that had nothing to do with Noah and everything to do with the dynamic that Ava and I have built up over years and years.

“Okay,” he says. But he doesn’t sound like he really believes it.

I can feel the white-hot wave of anger start in my toes and slide all the way up my body. “I wouldn’t just end my
friendship with Ava because of you,” I say. “That’s ridiculous.”

God, what an asshole. Noah apparently thinks he can just have sex with me, and then, the very next day, tell me that he doesn’t want me to ruin my friendship with Ava because of him? He should have thought about that before he got me naked last night. I turn around and start marching down the hall, my strappy black first-day-of-school shoes making loud noises on the floor.

I turn the corner, not even sure where I’m going. I’m so enraged that I can’t even remember what period it is.
Fifth
, I tell myself.
It’s fifth period.
I pull my schedule out of my bag, and my hands are shaking. Physics, room 341. Which is on the complete other side of the school and one floor up.

I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. I feel like I’m going to throw up. My stomach has been churning ever since I was at the diner with Ava. I try to relax my body.

The sound of footsteps comes from behind me, and I turn around, hoping it’s Noah and hoping it’s Ava, not caring which one of them I explode on.

But it’s not Noah. Or Ava. Or even Lacey. It’s Jemima, the girl who hit my car this morning. The girl who hooked up with Sebastian.

“Oh, hi, Hannah,” she says. “I was looking for you. Uh, I just wanted to make sure that you had my cell number. I actually think maybe I wrote it down wrong. I just got a new phone, you know? And I can never remember the new
number.” She rolls her eyes, like,
Oh ha ha, isn’t this so funny? I’m such a flake.

I stare at her, not able to comprehend that this is now my life. I’ve slept with my best friend’s boyfriend, who I think I am probably in love with, and it turns out that he most certainly does not love me. My ex-boyfriend cheated on me and broke my heart, and now the girl he cheated on me
with
is following me around school because she hit my car. How can everything go from being completely okay to completely and totally fucked within the span of a few months? Or even one day! I mean, as bad as things were this morning, they were way better than they are now.

“Sorry,” I say to Jemima, giving her a bitchy smile, just because I feel like it. “I don’t think I really need your cell number. It’s probably better that we go through the insurance, since you really messed up my friend Lacey’s neck and she might need to sue you.” I force my smile bigger, and then shrug, as if the whole thing’s completely out of my control. Jemima, having no idea that this is so not about her, drops her mouth open in shock. But I just shrug, like
sorry, what can you do?
then turn around and run down the hall and up the stairs to physics.

After that night at the hospital, Noah and I don’t talk for two weeks. Lacey starts picking me up in the morning before work, which is fine, except for the fact that she doesn’t bring coffee like Noah did. Lacey uses coffee strictly as a way to get caffeine into her system, and therefore doesn’t think that coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks is any different than the cheap stuff we have at the diner. (Of course, that didn’t stop her from drinking it when Noah would bring it.) Lacey also has a hard time getting up in the mornings, so by the time she gets to my house, we’re almost always cutting it close, with no time for morning coffee runs.

But I’m doing okay. I’m not upset about it or anything. I’m actually trying not to think about that, or anything else, and it’s also definitely helping that Sebastian hasn’t tried to contact me ever since the day he showed up at the diner a couple of weeks ago.

But then one night in the middle of July, I’m in my room writing in my journal, when I’m hit with such a wave
of loneliness that I feel like I can’t breathe. It comes out of nowhere, and suddenly, I’m missing Sebastian. Which makes no sense because, like I said, ever since that day at Cooley’s, he hasn’t tried to contact me, and I’ve really been doing a good job of not thinking about him.

I’m just about to go into my mom’s room and look for some of her Ambien to help me sleep, but before I can, I hear her car pulling into the driveway. Shit. I completely forgot that she was coming home before work. She must have gone to the library after her classes, and now she’s here, about to come into the house and prevent me from raiding her medicine cabinet. And maybe even wanting to talk. Shit, shit, shit.

I shove my journal into one of my desk drawers, jump into bed, and bury my head in the pillow just as the front door opens. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, echoing through the hallway, and then there’s a knock on my door. I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend to be asleep, even though I’m lying in a very uncomfortable position and all my sheets and blankets are in a tangle on the floor.