Bend Me, Break Me (19 page)

“I’m only telling you what I see. That’s it. You can take it or leave it. Why does what I say affect you so much?” I was pushing it. Definitely pushing it.

She gaped at me. I prepared myself for her to slap me or spit in my face, but she surprised me again.

She cried. It started as a gasp of sound and then she crumpled into sobs that were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. God, it was scary, hearing something like that. I reached out and pulled her into my arms where she shook. I tried to do what I could which amounted to me rubbing her back and just holding on for dear life.

Her fingers dug into my chest and I just hoped that I was doing the right thing and she was getting some sort of comfort because I had no idea what the fuck I was supposed to be doing.

She started gasping and I was worried she was going to hyperventilate and pass out. Then she sniffed and I could feel her trying to slow her breathing down, but her lungs kept jerking and spasming. There was a hurricane inside her trying rip its way out. And there I was, holding an umbrella that was pretty much useless.

At last she raised her head and looked at me. Her face was dry. No tears, which threw me off. She let out one last gasping breath and pushed me away.

I searched for the right words to say because I had to be careful. So careful.

“Are you okay?” Oops. Wrong thing.

Her eyes narrowed and she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and closed her eyes.

“No, I’m so fucking far from okay, Coen, but you’d be an idiot not to see it.” It was true. I knew she wasn’t okay. This wasn’t a revelation, but not for the reasons that she thought.

“What can I do to help you? What can I do for you? Name it and I’ll do it.”

She turned her back on me and clasped her arms around herself. Holding herself together by sheer force of will.

“I don’t know anymore. I don’t think anything or anyone can help me. Sometimes I… sometimes I feel like I can be who I was before, and then I see it again and I know I’m kidding myself. I’ll never be okay and part of me doesn’t want to be.” She turned back around and gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen.

“Why not?” I asked, and dreaded the answer.

She shrugged.

“Because some things you can’t come back from.”

I swallowed past a painful lump in my throat and felt tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t going to let myself fucking cry. Not right now.

“What things, Ingrid? Tell me.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head as she started walking back in the direction of campus.

“Ingrid!” I called out to her, but she didn’t turn around.

“Let me go, Coen,” she threw over her shoulder, her voice shaking. “Just let me go.”

I made it back to my room with shaking legs and collapsed on my bed. What the hell had happened? One minute I’d been spilling my guts to him about all sorts of things and then I was walking away. Again. Shoving away the first good thing I’d had in a while.

I flipped on my back and looked up at my ceiling. My phone buzzed with a text and I knew it would be from him. Who else would it be? I had no one else to text and no one who would text me back.

I had no one. I was alone. An island unto myself and all that. I’d broken off from the rest of the world and let myself float into the blue and I’d been fine with it. I had needed it. Sought it out.

And now… it was like Coen had gotten in a boat and rowed out to find me. To try to bring me back. Tether me to life again. I’d let it happen. I’d been so stupid and I let it happen.

I never should have talked to him. Never should have kissed him. Never should have led him on. To be fair, I did warn him, but he didn’t listen. Well, he was going to listen now.

To the sound of silence.

I didn’t text him back. I skipped class the next day. It was too late in the semester to drop it without incurring a penalty on my GPA, so there was nothing I could do about it, but I could sit far, far away from him. Unfortunately, that meant I had to cram myself in with a group of other people so he couldn’t find an available seat. I got a few weird looks the first day, but soon they went back to ignoring me.

I refused to look for him. To see him when he stopped on the stairs near me and looked for a seat. I’d sent the clearest message I could.

Stay away. Don’t bring me tea. Don’t bring me Slinkies. Don’t talk to me. Leave me alone. Once and for all.

If I said it was easy, I would have been a liar, at least for the first few days. Even though I couldn’t see him, I could feel him looking at me. Wanting to talk to me, to reach out and try to grab me one more time.

That wasn’t going to happen again. I was going to go through my life like this now. I was going to somehow finish a degree (once I decided what the hell to study) and then I was going to… do something. Or maybe nothing. There was money. Plenty of it to live on and pay for things I might need. I didn’t want to use it, but it was there anyway.

I could do this. I’d been doing it and it had worked. It had worked just fine until Coen. Until those damn green eyes and that cursed smile with his chipped tooth. Perfectly imperfect Coen LaCour.

The first week was the worst. I found myself with endless hours of time that I had to fill with something. I ended up reading a lot. Books I hadn’t touched in years. I got ahead on all my homework and my grades started getting even higher. The nightmares came back and I went back to not sleeping too often, but it was a small price to pay. I’d gone through it all before Coen and I’d do it now. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

I was well on my way to being back to who I’d been when I first moved in. I’d moved all of my things (what few things I brought with me) myself. No one helped me.

I tried as hard as I could not to picture how it could have been. Mom, fussing and fluttering around like a bird who could never find the right place to land. Dad, calm and steady, giving me an exasperated smile. And Elise, bouncing around and asking all kinds of questions and scoping out the boys for me.

With a groan, I slammed the door shut on that line of thinking. I couldn’t. It hurt too much. It hurt in so, so many ways. Because I was here and they weren’t. Because I should have been with them and I wasn’t. Because I was still living and they weren’t.

But here I was, despite wanting to be otherwise more than once. It would have been so easy. Some pills and a full bathtub. There was no one to save me because I was alone. It would have been fitting, to do it in that house where their lives had ended.

I’d thought of it so many times, but I’d never done it. I’d held the pill bottle in my hand so hard that my hand ached and I had to drop it. I wanted to write about it. To spill the words out of my head and onto a page. But that would have given them more shape and power and I couldn’t. I just… I couldn’t.

So instead I wrote poems about other things. Happy things. And then I burned them and watched the ashes flutter like wings.

I thought about burning the house. That place where everything had ended and where this new life for me had begun, but I couldn’t do it. So instead I got an apartment and left the house as it was. A museum of tragedy. I couldn’t sell it. I couldn’t do anything with it. So I let it stand there. Stand there and gather dust and mold and decay.

Coen didn’t stop texting me, and I allowed myself to read his messages. Guess I had masochistic tendencies. At first they were pleading. Asking if he could come over, if we could talk, telling me he was sorry for what he said and he’d make it up to me if only I would let him.

When those didn’t work, he moved on to just asking me how I was. He knew I was still alive because he saw me in class. Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of him and he always had my tea waiting for me. I didn’t know what he did with them when I didn’t drink them. I hoped he didn’t throw them away.

The days dragged on and soon we were full in the arms of fall in Maine. Everywhere you walked was covered with leaves that made a susurrus when walked on. I liked the sound, so I spent a lot of time just wandering around campus. I didn’t go back to the nature trails. Too complicated. Every now and then I would see Coen, and I would always turn away. To be fair, it wasn’t like he sought me out. He didn’t wave or call my name or try to get my attention in any way. That was a relief. For a few seconds after I saw him, I would want to yell his name. To run over to him and tell him that I had made a huge mistake and I wanted to be friends with him again. But I knew it wouldn’t work.

To be fair, we’d never really been friends exactly. We’d always been more. From that very first day. We’d tried to deny it, but that only worked for so long. We were all or nothing, the two of us. And right now, I needed us to be nothing.

October break arrived, and since I didn’t want to just go home and sit alone in my apartment, I sat alone in my dorm room and ate my weight in peanut butter and crackers and watched seven seasons of
Parks and Rec
and seven seasons of
Gilmore Girls
. I also read five books. I had at least two nightmares every night and went back to just sleeping for a few hours at a time, with my phone set to wake me up so I didn’t sleep too deeply.

Coen stopped texting me. I was both devastated and relieved by this. Was it possible to feel two such opposite emotions at once? I wanted to write about it, but wouldn’t let myself. That would have been admitting how hurt I was and how much I wanted to go back to the way things had been. I just couldn’t.