Bitter Angel
Authors: Megan Hand
To Anna, who told me I could,
and I should, so I did.
To Dan, my partner in crime, love, and life.
Same team, for always and ever.
Don’t say it.
Don’t even think it.
I’m not crazy, I swear. It happened. I don’t know how, but it did.
I lived the same night twice—and not like that
Groundhog Day
movie, but like that
Sliding Doors
movie. I did two completely separate things in one night, like two halves of me split off in different directions.
I only know this because it’s the morning after, and I’m lying in bed, remembering everything from both scenarios, including my dreams. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, I somehow know that I only lived one of them.
I’m not sure which one.
While the morning sun warms my face, my body chills as every hair stands on end from sudden terror.
Friday, 6:00 p.m.
I’m Lila, like Delilah without the
dee
. My mom was a real peach naming someone as sarcastic and independent as me somewhere between a biblical whore and a flower. I think she was hoping to make me her delicate flower. Sorry, Mom. Not that I hate it. It fits. Most people call me Lil. Last name’s Spencer.
It was an ordinary Friday evening, not fork-in-my-eyeballs ordinary, but it was right up there. I was bored to tears
.
My boyfriend, Jay, was journeying into town from about five-hundred-and-thirty miles yonder to see me. He went to a university in the heart of Chicago, and it was torture being here without him.
I lived in a small college town. The name was not worth mentioning, because it was that much of a snooze fest. The most you needed to know was that the town was small, the campus was small, the people were small. Small, small, small. Except for me and my five-foot-eight giantness.
Jay, the only person that managed to put a sparkle in my eye these days, was coming to see me. He was my lobster, my penguin, my mate-for-life, and the only person in the world that could make my insides feel like halfway-baked cookie dough. He melted me all over and gave me shivers from the roots of my scalp to my toenails.
We had been together for over three years.
That was how I knew it was going to last because we still loved each other this much after all these days. During high school, we’d pretend to study around my living room coffee table while we played with each other’s fingers underneath, waiting for my mom to stop hawk-watching for ten seconds so we could make out. On rainy days, we’d study in the school library, the ugliest place on earth, just for any excuse not to go home. He’d let me snot up his T-shirt every time a family pet died. With ten hamsters, three rabbits, two ferrets, five dogs, a cat, and a very messy parakeet, the burials added up.
Thousands of seconds of endless togetherness, and we still weren’t sick of ogling each other.
Ah, Jay.
My heart beat a little quicker at the thought of seeing him. He was supposed to be here at seven, which meant it was going to be one earth-shatteringly slow hour. I had plenty to do though. Biology, psychology, mathology, and paperology were all calling to me. I sometimes wondered who invented all those
ologies
. Whoever it was, they sure were an expert in mental torture.
I was at my desk, halfway through a stack of quiz questions, when my two friends Nilah (pronounced
Nee-luh
) and Heather flounced in with a gush of September wind. It was funny, considering our dorm room door had an inside entrance. But with all my glamorous roommates’ grandeur, they always seemed to beckon the wind to follow them the thirty feet from the main entrance into our room. Or maybe it was just the drafty old building. Either way, in the room they choked on laughter from some finished conversation or punch line and threw themselves on their beds.
The three of us shared a decent 14
×
16 cell that, by the grace of God, squeezed in three twin-size beds, three economy desks, a couch, rug, TV, and two bookshelves that we (also miraculously) split evenly. I didn’t care that we barely had room to walk a cop-enforced DUI assessment line between our beds. It was worth it to be with my homeys.
As lame as it sounded, we came here together from a couple hundred miles north in Cincinnati, Ohio. We had known each other since KinderCare and had been besties ever since. For sixteen years, they had been the only ones I could escape to when my parents were in the middle of one of their love-to-hate-each-other
fests.
Since Jay had already chosen his school, and I had no interest in The Windy City, my friends and I had applied to this college in Nowhere, Tennessee. Our original plan was to get out of the ‘burbs, but after being at this school for a year, we were all going a little stir crazy.