The Worst of Me (17 page)

I wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t let myself. I knew if I did, Ian would feel sorry for me and try to make me feel better, the way he always had when I’d cried during our fights. He had the right to hate me as much as he liked and I wasn’t going to interfere with that. I clenched my teeth together hard.

‘I brought you a book,’ I said. ‘But that seems pretty stupid, given . . .’

‘No, I can hold books fine,’ Ian said. He took it from me with tiny fingertips poking out from his plastered arm. ‘It looks good.’

‘It’s stupid, sorry,’ I said.

‘No,’ Ian said, trying less hard.

‘You must hate me. I know I don’t have any right to be here.’

‘I don’t hate you. It’s not your fault.’

‘Well, whether it’s my fault or not, you must hate me.’

‘Cassidy —’

‘You must hate him.’

‘Do
you
?’ Ian asked.

‘YES,’ I said. I sat down on the chair next to the bed. ‘Of course I do. I can’t believe he didn’t have to go to prison.’

‘It was just a fight,’ Ian said. ‘He wasn’t trying to kill me. Look, it’s done now.’

‘Are you going to be okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isobel said you might not be.’

‘Isobel’s just worried. I don’t blame you, Cassidy.’

‘But I do.’ I started biting my nails. ‘And I blame you.’

‘Well, I shouldn’t have got involved, you’re right. But it was still the right thing to do, because it turned out you didn’t really know what you were doing.’

I got angry before I could help it. ‘No, I mean, I blame you for breaking up with me. I know how stupid that sounds. But that’s where it all started.’

‘Well, you’re right that that sounds stupid.’ We sat there, both angry, me knowing I had no right to be.

‘I just wish you hadn’t made everything different,’ I whispered.

‘And if I hadn’t?’

‘Well, I’m not saying you’d have been happy, but none of this —’

‘Rubbish,’ Ian said. ‘We were bored with each other. You would have seen Jonah and run off with him if I hadn’t moved first.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘I miss you.’

‘No,’ Ian said. ‘You miss the old
you
, and the place we were in where you didn’t have to think about what happened from one day to the next.’

I knew what he was saying was true. I think I wanted him to believe he had made all the choices, though, so that he wouldn’t blame me. That he’d started everything going in the wrong direction.

‘How’s Sophie?’

‘Sophie’s great,’ Ian said, nodding, and his eyes smiled at the thought of her. That still hurt. ‘Look, Cassidy, I’m not about to tell you something good will come from this, because I have spikes in my head and I have to ask for help peeing, but we
have changed
. You are not the girl who was my girlfriend, and you shouldn’t want to be. You’ll find a better guy than me. For one thing, you’ll find someone who loves you.’ It was a cruel thing to say, and I was happy to take it.

‘I don’t care about boyfriends,’ I said. ‘Do you really think I’m miserable because you’re not my boyfriend and I haven’t got a boyfriend?’

‘I don’t have any claim on knowing what you think any more,’ Ian said. ‘But you need to know that I’m not angry with you. I don’t blame you. And I want you to be okay.’

I wasn’t sure how much of that was true. He was angry about something and he was angry with someone, and it was hard to believe I didn’t qualify. But I was beginning to realise that I’d gone to visit him to make myself feel better – whether that came from seeing he was okay, or from having him forgive me, or from soaking up some of his anger because I thought I needed punishing. Maybe I hoped he’d tell Isobel how sorry I was and she’d start speaking to me again. One thing I was not doing was making Ian feel better, and that wasn’t right.

I saw Sophie on my way out, hiding behind the drinks machine, waiting for me to leave and hoping I wouldn’t spot her. She didn’t want to confront me or make me feel guilty. Ian was going to be fine. He had already found his better girl.

I went round to Sam’s house in the afternoon.

‘You can’t stay,’ he said, excitedly, as he sped down the hall into his bedroom. ‘But come and sit down now, I have to show you something.’

He pulled up an email on his computer screen. He had emailed:
Got Fortress of the Serpent for Christmas. Any good?

The reply went:
It is X-L-ENT. Already played the
demo. Any chance u can bring it round l8r? Rashad.

‘He does text-speak in his emails,’ I said.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Sam said. ‘That’s how people younger than you talk.’

I growled at him because I couldn’t shove him hard, like he deserved.

‘So, is it a date?’

‘Of course it’s not,’ Sam said. ‘And you’re wrong if you think that’s what I want. He’s just my mate.’ He gave me a wide, gorgeous smile, and his eyes were sad for so short a time that I almost thought I’d imagined it. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

‘It wasn’t bad,’ I said. ‘You know, considering I don’t have any friends except you, I had to sit through
the
most awkward Boxing Day of all time with my dad’s
other
family, and my mum gave me a warm coat for Christmas . . .’

‘A
nice
warm coat?’

‘You’ve just seen it.’

‘Oh, that. Yeah, that
is
a nice coat,’ Sam said, with a smirk.

‘Isn’t it?’ I said, smiling. ‘But Paul gave me my own tiny laptop. He said he’s sick of me snooping around in his browsing history to check on the academic sites he’s visited.’

‘Really?’

‘He was joking.’

‘What do you think?’ Sam asked. ‘You’ve been a bit hard on him?’

‘If he thinks he can buy me off with cool stuff . . . well, I can live with that.’

When I got home I booted up my tiny, new, powder-blue laptop and checked my messages. There was one from Jonah, as there was every day, but it didn’t have any text today, just a song. I clicked it open. An Ella Fitzgerald track: ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’ I hadn’t realised it was New Year’s Eve the next day. I wouldn’t be doing anything, I wanted to tell him, but I hadn’t replied to a single one of Jonah’s emails since Halloween. He’d moved to the sixth-form college in town and I didn’t see him around even accidentally, but the emails still came. Sometimes short ones, sometimes long ones – I felt worse ignoring those. When the song ended I felt sad and played it again, but I didn’t reply.

It’s New Year’s Eve today, and I’m not doing anything.

I went out this morning to buy my mum her newspaper and it started to snow. I tilted my head up to the sky to watch it falling – it makes you dizzy and is impossibly, amazingly beautiful that way – and when I looked forward again, Jonah was standing there in front of me.

‘Don’t run away,’ he said. I just shook my head and turned away, pulling my nice coat more closely around myself. ‘Cassidy.
Cassidy.
’ But then I stood there with my back to him, unable to go. ‘I . . .’ He sighed. ‘I know you don’t want to see me now.’ I focused on the snow melting on my sleeves. ‘You can’t know how much it kills me to think of that night,’ Jonah said. ‘I would do anything to make it not have happened.’

‘You’ve told me all this,’ I said. ‘And I believe you.’

‘I love you.’

‘You’ve told me that too.’

‘But you don’t care?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’ So easy to say something like this and make it believable, to sound all dead and flat. I dropped the newspaper as I started to walk away, and when I picked it up I could feel the imprint of my fist, I’d been gripping it so hard.

‘When I think,’ Jonah said, ‘that you have completely and totally stopped loving me, I’ll leave you alone.’

‘You’re so sure I ever loved you?’ I said.

Jonah smiled. ‘I have to believe you still do.’

Maybe he’ll get tired of waiting before I’m ready to take him back, and maybe I’ll be sad if that happens. I’d be there to watch it, him letting me go – I’ve already applied to the sixth-form college for next year, the one Jonah
transferred to. I don’t want to do another two years of Samuel Bond’s with the same people I’ve always gone to school with, all of them knowing what I’m like – what I
was
like.

Jonah’s right: I still love him. That’s not enough, though. I’m going to take Sam’s advice, but I have to try to make
me
nice first. I need to start listening and reading and thinking, so that I can never be fooled or seduced or frightened by the wrong people again. So I can step up when things don’t feel right. I want to be able to trust myself. If Jonah’s prepared to wait for me, I want to be worth the wait.

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