First ​Chances (With Me 4.) 1 csillagozás

“Did you get a chance to read the book I gave you?” I asked, taking a step closer to her so she’d have to deal with me being in her space.
Her expression darkened at that, completely taking me by surprise. “I told you I don’t read anymore. Stories are fairytales for children.”
“Really?” I asked with a raised brow. I wasn’t much of a reader myself, but I was a musician. I wrote lyrics that reflected how I felt and things that were happening around me. I knew the importance of words. “Well, I gotta disagree with you there. Words are inspiring; they’re motivating; they’re heartbreaking. And words that create a story, well, they’re like therapy, especially if you can relate to them.”

“Hadie?” Three asked, his mouth struggling to form the unfamiliar word. “That’s a strange name.”
Really? He was going to give me grief over my name when his name was even stranger than mine.
“I totally understand why you think that, Three,” I shot back, the sarcasm clear in my voice.

Hadie was a girl from school, but she wasn’t just any ol’ girl. She was the girl. She was the girl I’d been crushing on since freshman year; the one who would never be mine.

“You can take me home, okay?”
Three let out a sound of disagreement. “How do you know this guy?”
“From school.” Hadie turned to him. “He’s a friend.”
And there it was. The word that no guy ever wanted to hear from the girl he was in love with. Friend. The girl I’d been in love with since I was fourteen continued to relegate me to the goddamn friend-zone. Story of my freaking life.

Nausea hit me hard as my eyes fell on his locker across the hall.
My stomach turned as I thought of him.
Lincoln.
He had taught me things that no one else had—to open up my mind and create new experiences. When I’d been at my lowest—when I’d been cheated on and then bullied and picked on by the popular kids, Lincoln had taught me how to laugh again. He’d taught me how to trust and love again.

“Hadie, wait!” Eddie called out after me, but I ignored him.
I knew what he was trying to do. He was holding out for the girl who used to be me. But he was going to be disappointed. I couldn’t be that girl anymore. I had to be someone else. I had to be a girl who could survive, and this was the only way I knew how.

Today I was upset—furious, annoyed, frustrated. Today I had needed him, and he hadn’t been there for me. I knew that a relationship like this could never work. It was stupid and volatile and self-destructive—but it was so hard to let him go. He was my confidant, but he was also my undoing.

“How can you lay there and not say anything?” I demanded, fighting back tears. “How can you let me feel this way and not come to me?”
More silence. No response.
Being ignored by him, being neglected, not having his attention was tearing me up inside. I needed him to understand me. I needed him to say the things that would help me fix myself.

Who was I without him?
Just a plain, boring bookworm with nothing going on in her life to occupy her. I’d forgotten everything he’d taught me. I was unraveling, becoming someone who was an inferior version of what I’d been before.

I loved Mariah, but Estella was better at giving me the silence I needed, while Mariah liked to talk non-stop. A part of me still didn’t want to do something as normal as a girls’ night. It sounded so silly, so juvenile, in the grand scheme of things.
Still, I didn’t want to let Estella down. I had to give her some sort of hope that I was trying to get better. These days, I did things to make other people feel better rather than myself.
I ate because I knew it would make Mom happy; I pretended to do homework because I knew it would reassure Dad that I was back to normal; and I socialized with my friends because I wanted them to think that I would one day go back to being the same Hadie I had always been. But I was no longer her.