Firsts (27 page)

I thought it was easier that way. But it doesn’t feel easy now.

When Faye comes back upstairs, she’s holding two mugs of what smells like Kim’s detox tea.

“You realize there’s no food in your house, right?” she says, sitting on the carpet beside me and handing me one of the mugs. The smell makes me gag, and I bite the inside of my cheek so that I don’t throw up all over Faye.

“Zach hates me,” I say.

Faye wraps her arm around me, and I breathe in her scent. She cradles my head like I’m a little kid, and I let her. I know I look pathetic, but I don’t care.

“He doesn’t hate you,” she says. “He’s just upset. He needs some time to deal with it.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He didn’t have to,” Faye says, running my hair between her fingers. “His world just got shook up a bit—that’s all. Give him space. He’ll come back.”

I want to believe her, but I don’t.

For some reason that old adage flashes into my head.
You made your bed, now you have to lie in it.
I start to laugh, softly, until tears start leaking out of my eyes. Faye brushes her thumb across each of my cheeks.

“You must have been so scared,” she murmurs. “Being alone with Charlie. I can’t even imagine.”

I fight the overwhelming urge to tell her everything. Why I’m such a basket case, even though nothing happened. Even though he didn’t get what he wanted. I want to cry into her shoulder and tell her every single thing about me. She might understand. She might get it.

But she might not, and I can’t take that chance.

“You should go back,” I say, sitting up quickly. “I should probably be alone. Don’t skip math. You know you have that test.” This much is true. Faye was stressed out about her algebra test last week and told anyone who would listen that she would “never use that crap in real life.”

“I don’t care,” she says, raising her chin defiantly. “You’re more important.”

I shake my head. “No, I should be by myself. I have some things to work out.”

She nods and unwraps her arm from around my body. “Whatever you need,” she says, squeezing my hand. “I’ll call you after school. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll drop it all in a heartbeat.”

When she’s gone, I think about her words. I roll them over and over again in my head and feel nothing.
I’ll drop it all in a heartbeat
. I thought hearing those words from Faye would mean more. I thought retreating into her, having her arms around me would mean more. But it’s not enough. Not enough to make me feel safe and not enough to make me feel like myself.

There’s only one person who could make me feel that way, and he’s not speaking to me.

I sit down at my desk and open my chemistry notebook. I’ll lose myself in logic, just like I always do. Formulas and numbers and equations that have to balance.

But it doesn’t work this time. Every number makes me think of another way I screwed up, another person I screwed over. The virgins were all numbers to me. Number one. Number five. Number ten. The ratings I assigned all meant something, too. Seven point five. Eight. Six. It was my system. And now I’m alone in it, the one cog left in the machinery.

I’m startled by the sound of a key turning in the front door. My blood turns to ice in my veins and I grip the pen in my hand tightly.
It’s Charlie. It must be Charlie
. I leap up and lock my bedroom door and slide down the wall.

“Honey, what are you doing home?” Kim’s voice drifts up the stairs. For a second I consider playing dumb, but she has already seen the Jeep in the driveway. She knows I’m home.

“I’m doing an independent study project,” I call back, thinking that should be enough to get rid of her.

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” she says, knocking on my door. “Come on—let me in. I have something for you.”

I open the door slowly. “Fine,” I say.

She surveys my face. I can tell from the way her eyebrows lift slightly that she’s surprised. I know what she probably thinks, that I’m hungover and trying to get out of classes. I must look the part. I know my face is puffy and my eyes are red rimmed and my hair is a greasy mess.

“This came for you,” she says, handing me a manila envelope. My stomach drops and I cover my mouth because I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.

Kim mistakes the gesture for surprise. “It’s from MIT,” she says. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

It’s a big envelope, a big envelope with some weight to it. I don’t even need to open it to know it’s an acceptance letter, the one I have been waiting so long for, the letter accompanied by course catalogues and information on residence and brochures starring smiling students. One day ago I would have been filled with excitement to open this. One day ago I would have been filled with pride. I would have called Angela and she would have jumped up and down on the other side of the phone. But Charlie took that away from me, too. I know my eyes are getting wet and glassy, and I wish Kim would leave, but she’s just standing there, waiting for me. I take the envelope and walk over to my bed.

“Oh, sweetie,” she says. “I should have the camera. This is a big moment.”

My fingers feel numb as I open the envelope. My breath hitches in my throat when I read the first sentence, even though I knew what it would say. It’s more real, seeing it in print.

Dear Mercedes,

On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to the MIT Class of 2016.

“You got in,” Kim says, sitting down beside me and squeezing my hand. “You got in. You got everything you wanted.”

She means it in a nice way. She’s proud of me. I can tell by the way her hand is trembling slightly and the flush in her cheeks. But she’s so wrong. I didn’t get anything I wanted. Maybe what I deserve and what I want are two very different things.

“We should celebrate,” she says. “A fancy dinner, some drinks. Something special. We won’t get to do that kind of thing once you’re in that other city.”

“Massachusetts,” I snap, surprised at the venom in my voice. “It’s called Massachusetts, and it’s a state, Kim. And I don’t want to celebrate. I have work to do.”

Her hand goes limp on mine. I hurt her. But really, what did she expect? Kim’s priorities have long been established, and I’m at the bottom of the totem pole. Now she can know what that feels like.

“I get it,” Kim says. “You have work to do. Schoolwork should come first.”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Kim’s choosing now, of all times, to get preachy about schoolwork?

“You should make sure you’re at school tomorrow,” she says, standing up and taking a step toward the door.

“I’ll be there,” I say, pasting on what I hope is a convincing smile before noticing the familiar black leather bag around her shoulder. “What are you doing with my purse, Kim?”

“I found it downstairs, thrown beside the door,” she says, dangling it in front of me. “This is a Prada bag. Take better care of it.”

I snatch the bag from her grip and shut the door in her face. I can tell she’s lingering outside, debating whether or not to force some stupid plans on me. But there’s no way I’m caving in. Whatever is left of the little girl inside me, the one who used to cry herself to sleep when she heard her parents fight, is pulling at my shirttail, telling me to open the door and collapse in Kim’s arms and spill everything. But that little girl has been gone a long time, and I’m not listening to her now, not when I need logic on my side more than ever.

I’m very aware that my purse is vibrating, so I locate my phone inside it. I’m stupid enough to expect a text from Faye, checking up on me. Instead, there are twenty-seven new messages, all from unknown numbers, all a variation of the same theme.

I HATE YOU

I hope you get herpes

You’re going to pay for this

Don’t show ur face in school skanky bitch

You can run but you can’t hide. Videos are forever

I HOPE YOU DIE

We are going to make your life such hell

I slump down on my bed and drop my phone on my nightstand, where it lands with a clatter and continues vibrating periodically. I want to turn it off, but I can’t bring myself to. The truth is, I deserve all of those words. I plan to have a good cry and fall asleep on a pillow wet with my own tears, but sleep doesn’t come to me. Something else comes to me instead. Something I remembered Angela saying, back when we first met and she didn’t have a cell phone. I had helped her pick one out. She ended up getting one identical to mine, probably because I knew how to use it and could show her.

“I’m so bad with technology,” she had said. “I miss when people wrote letters. I feel like the world just moves too fast for me to keep up.”

It’s a long shot, but any shot is one worth taking right now. So I write Angela a letter, by hand, telling her everything. I tell her things I have never told anybody, things from before we met, things I haven’t fully admitted to myself. I tell her the whole story about what happened with Luke, even though I don’t understand it any better myself when it’s down on paper. I don’t know how to end it.
Your friend, Mercy
seems presumptuous, since I don’t think we’re friends at all anymore.
Sincerely
is much too formal.
Love
is much too gushy.

So I end it with honesty. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I hope you can understand someday.”

33

Faye calls me when I’m huddled in a heap on the floor, trying to sleep. I tried sleeping in my bed but just kept imagining different guys beside me, blocking me off from any source of oxygen.

“I have to tell you something,” Faye says. “I went to the website.”

I suck in a breath, feeling like I might choke on the air. I squirm and clutch the edges of the duvet. Faye has seen everything. How can she be on my side after that?

“He posted your journal entries. All of them. I just thought you should know that.”

All of them. All of those words. I imagine them lined up like ammunition, ready to take shots at the names within those pages. The nicknames, the ratings. All of the worst things I thought about myself. I can’t go to school on Monday. I can’t go ever again. I can’t face those people. The knowledge that my journal is out there is the worst kind of naked. They haven’t just seen my outsides, but my insides, too.

Faye is silent on the other end. She’s pissed off, having second thoughts about me. Maybe she never even had first thoughts. Then I remember what I wrote about Faye, the entry I scribbled when I came home from her house, the words I used to preserve whatever I felt about her.

There’s just something about her.

“Do you hate me?” I ask. My voice sounds clotted and mangled, and I realize I’m crying.

“God, Mercy. Of course not. I could never hate you.”

“You must think I’m a monster,” I say, pressing my face into the carpet, letting my tears leak out the side of my eyes.

“You’re not a monster,” she says. “You thought you were helping those guys. I get it.”

“I can’t go back to school,” I say. “I just can’t face them.”

“You can, and you will,” she says. “I’ll be there. So will Zach.”

For a long while nobody says anything. I can hear her breathing on the other end, and that’s enough for me, to just know she is there.

“I’ll meet you in the parking lot on Monday,” Faye says. “You won’t have to face anybody alone.”

“You’re too good to me,” I say. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Well,” she says softly, “there’s something about you, too.”

I can hear the smile in her voice. It gets me through the night, through the panicky nightmares that force me to wake up in a film of sweat.

Faye is there Monday morning, just like she said, before I even get out of my car. She insists on walking into school with me, like she can protect me. But she can’t protect me from the message scrawled in permanent marker on my locker, waiting for me.

WHORE
.

I don’t even try to wipe it off. I just leave it there. Maybe I can switch lockers. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Everybody knows what I am anyway, and it won’t make a difference. This way at least people know the truth. It’s honest.

Faye makes me eat lunch in the cafeteria, even though all I want to do is lock myself in a bathroom stall. It’s weird, with just the two of us and no Zach. I wonder what he’s doing right now, if he’s somewhere in the sea of faces. I dart my eyes around, careful not to make direct contact with anybody. Several tables over, Rafe Lawrence is standing on his chair, gesticulating wildly. The people around him keep laughing and looking our way.

“Ignore them,” Faye says, biting into a cheeseburger. “He’s an idiot.”

I push food around my plate. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it if I tried.

Something smacks the side of my head, and when I move my hand to feel what hit me, my hair is wet and goopy and Faye is on her feet, shooting her middle finger in the air. I know hundreds of eyes are on me, waiting for me to cry because a pudding cup just hit me in the head. I know what they’re all thinking.
Cry, bitch. Cry. Let us all see it.

“In five years, none of this will matter,” Faye says, wiping my hair with a napkin. “Nobody will remember this.”

Yes, they will
.
In five years people will still remember who ruined their lives.

When I get back to my locker after lunch, a familiar form is hunched over it, biting his lip. Zach. He’s scrubbing the permanent marker, or trying to.

“Hey,” I whisper.

He keeps scrubbing furiously, his hand moving in a frantic circular motion.

“It won’t budge,” he says with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I did my best.” He starts blacking in the letters with more marker, eventually encasing the whole ugly word. I watch him and I know this is why he wasn’t in the cafeteria, that he spent his lunch hour trying to rub away everything I did. I want to tell him that it doesn’t matter, that what’s underneath will still be there no matter how hard he tries to make it go away.