Crash

“What do I know?” I asked, waiting. And waiting. “Come on,” I said, marching towards him. “What do I know?” Because, for the umpteenth time, I didn’t have a clue.

His lips tightened as he tried to slide aside. I didn’t let him. I blocked his path, shoving him back. “Come on, Ryder. What the hell do I know?”

His eyes blazed, meeting mine. “You can’t be friends with the person you were meant to spend your life with,” he said, his eyes darkening. “So get on with your life and live mine the hell alone.” Nudging by me, he jogged out of the garage and kept going.

And what I regretted most, more than anything I’d screwed up along Jude’s and my journey together, was that I didn’t go after him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Every day of the rest of the school year, I regretted letting him go that day at the garage. I regretted not chasing after him and holding him captive until he explained exactly what the hell he was trying to say. In concise, detailed sentences a woman could decipher.

The months that followed our cryptic conversation left me wishing the silent treatment back because now when Jude passed me in the hall, he was no longer intentionally ignoring me. It was as if I didn’t exist.

I’d gone from something he despised to something he didn’t notice in the space of one conversation that only gave light to more questions.

I turned eighteen last month and was going to graduate next week, and in the fall, I would be a freshman at Juilliard. It was a time to celebrate, to let down my once again long hair and look back at the past with nostalgia and forward to the future with hope.

I was having a tough time implementing that idea and, although I would never allow myself to openly admit the reason why I felt like some lost ship in the night, at the very core of me where things like right and wrong, truth and love existed, I knew why.

“I’m calling time out on your zoning out bouts tonight, Lucy,” Taylor shouted at me over the stereo blasting some song about summer and friends and partying. It was really a terribly cliche song, but I suppose it set the mood for the night. “Tonight is about nothing but having a killer time and being in the moment.”

Sage words coming from a girl that mainly talked about her bright future. “And by that you mean getting smashed and making out with the first piece of ass you see, in the moment?”

Taylor groaned. “And I thought I was a cynic.”

Turning the volume down, I pulled the top of the dress Taylor had stuffed me in up and the bottom of it down. There, now it covered half of my boobs and most of my ass. “Sorry. It just comes so natural when you’ve dressed me like a cheap hooker on her way to work.”

“You’re wearing pearl earrings, for crap’s sake, Lucy,” she said. “Last time I checked, hookers didn’t wear pearls.”

“Fine,” I said, checking my reflection in the mirror for the third time. Could she have added another coat of mascara before my eyelashes snapped in half? “A hooker on her way to church.”

Taylor laughed, staring over at me when we hit a red light. “Jewelry, huh?” she gave me a scandalous look. “Somebody must have been very good, or very naaauw-tie, to get a pair of pearl earrings for a graduation gift.”

“Your depravity never ceases to astound me,” I said, sticking my tongue out. “And the earrings were a graduation gift from my parents, not Sawyer.”

Thank god he hadn’t given me any jewelry yet because I was about three commitment levels below jewelry.

The light flashed green and Taylor gunned her little Volkswagen off the line. “You only have yourself to blame for that. Guys get jewelry for girls as a reward for putting out. It’s a simple fact of life.”

“Again, you are depraved,” I said, rolling down the window. Where I really wanted to be was at the studio, preparing for the next four years of dancing with and against the best. I didn’t want to be crammed in a small car with a high school drama vixen, heading to a graduation party where alcohol would be in endless supply and inhibitions would be in no supply, suctioned into a dress that made a Holly socialite look like a prude.

“Since I’m seeing no diamond pendants or gold bracelets on you, I’m taking it you’re still c**k blocking Sawyer into a coma?” The shit this girl came up with. It might have been funny if it wasn’t so sad.

“None of your business.”

“So, no,” she assumed, whipping the car down a gravel road.

“So, hell no,” I edited, since she was going to draw conclusions whether I validated them or not.

“Why not?” she asked as we bumped over the potholes. “You guys have been ‘seeing each other’ since Sadie’s and an official item since Winter Formal. Are you guys taking it slow or some stupid shit like that?”

“I’m taking it slow,” I said as the party grounds came into view. I was familiar with the place, the mansion down on the lake. Sawyer’s parents were out of town at some auto auction, so he decided to throw the most epic graduation party that would go down in the books. His words, not mine. From the end of the road, the Diamonds’ place looked like it was crawling with ants. Drunk ants.

“And Sawyer?” Taylor asked with pointed inflection.

“Sawyer’s a guy. Since when have any of them been for taking things slow in that department?”

“Since never,” she said, answering perhaps the most rhetorical question known to woman.