Happenstance: Part Two (Happenstance #2) (9 page)

“Erin?”

“I’m glad.”

“You’re glad,” he said flatly.

I closed my eyes, knowing I’d upset him. “I want to say it. It just feels weird.”

“Would you mean it?”

“I think so.”

“You think so.”

“Stop doing that,” I said, sitting up and pulling my arms through my bra straps, and then my shirt over my head.

He sighed, clearly regretting the turn of the conversation.

“It’s scary, Weston. Even if you go to Dallas, you’ll be five hours away. We’ll live separate lives. No one stays together when they go to different colleges.”

“You don’t know that.” He frowned. “Why do you have to be so negative? We’re going to see each other as much as we can. We’ll talk on the phone every night. We’ll stay together, and then you’ll come visit me and fall in love with Dallas, and you’ll move there after you graduate.”

“Is that so?”

He sat up against the headboard. “Yes.”

“I’m not being negative. I’m being realistic. I don’t want either of us to get hurt.”

“If we don’t stay together, it’ll hurt. It’ll tear me up. I don’t want anyone else.”

“Weston, you’re eighteen. You don’t know what you want.”

He stood up and slipped on his jeans. “You definitely don’t know what I want.”

I finished dressing and tied my shoes. “It’s just common sense. We live in a fishbowl here, but there are thousands of young, beautiful women in Dallas.”

“There’s only one you.” We were standing on opposite sides of his bed, staring at each other. He shifted his weight, nervous. “Are you…are you saying this because you plan on meeting someone new in Stillwater?”

“No!”

“Sounds to me like you’re keeping your options open.”

“God, Weston, that’s not it at all.”

His breathing faltered, and he looked around on his floor, then saw his inhaler on his nightstand and grabbed it. He shook it, then took a puff.

“Why are you getting so upset? Why do we even have to talk about this now?”

“I’d kind of like to know if the girl I love sees me as temporary.”

“Blackwell is temporary.”

“I’m not even staying here!”

“I know! I’m just not making any promises I can’t keep.”

“Well, that’s just great. Thanks, babe.”

My shoulders fell. He was fighting dirty. “I have to go home.” I walked around his bed to his door, but he stood in my way. He took a deep breath, touched my arms, and pressed his forehead against mine.

“Homework?”

“Sort of.”

“What does that mean?”

“I want to read Alder’s earlier journals. I want to know why they quit talking to me.”

He stiffened. “I thought you weren’t going to read them anymore.”

“I changed my mind. Julianne kind of doesn’t care.”

“What?” he yelled.

I leaned away from him, stunned by his explosive response.

“They’re none of your damn business, Erin. It’s wrong, and you know it!”

I blinked and then gritted my teeth. “Move.”

“Fine.” He stepped to the side, and I stormed out, passing Veronica on my way.

“Erin?” she said.

“Sorry, I have to go.”

When I got to my car, Weston caught up to me, breathing hard. “Don’t read them, Erin. Just don’t do it.”

“Why not? What are you afraid I’ll find?”

His jaws worked under his skin, and he swallowed. After a few seconds without an answer, I got in my car and drove home.

I parked and ran up the stairs, straight to Alder’s room.

“Erin?” Julianne called after me.

I shut the door and leaned against it, out of breath. Alder’s closet door was shut, and I glared at it, knowing now that whether it was right or wrong, I had to read them. I had to know what was so terrible that Weston didn’t want me to continue.

I marched over and swung open the door, dragged the tub out of the closet and into the middle of her room. I pulled all of them out, one by one, until I got to the plastic diary, skimming over the descriptions of dreams and boys she liked. Once I finished reading that diary, I moved on to the binders. I wanted to skip over to her journal from our fifth-grade year. That was when they’d stopped talking to me, but I forced myself to read one at a time.

Fatigue began to set in when I opened the yellow, plastic, covered binder titled
5TH GRADE
. Any mention of me was like before. We were still friends. She still liked me. On a few occasions, she talked about asking her parents if Sonny and I could join them on their family vacation, and Sam and Julianne were considering it. I flipped the page to the entry I’d been searching for.

Most of the entries after that were about how much they hated me, and what mean things they did and said to me. Sonny’s parents had never gotten a divorce, so I assumed they had worked it out, but it wasn’t until I got to the binders that I fully understood. Sonny’s father and Gina had an affair. Harry had gotten Gina pregnant. I shut the binder. The Erins were half sisters.

That’s why they hated me. They thought Gina and I had nearly caused Sonny’s parents to divorce.

“Gina,” I whispered, flipping the pages.

That was what Carolyn was talking about at the restaurant. Gina’s daughter had been a reminder, an object at which Carolyn could direct her anger. After the accident Carolyn figured out that she had welcomed Harry’s illegitimate child into their home, taken her on vacations, and bought her Christmas and birthday presents. In a strange twist of fate, Harry helped raise his own daughter, even when he thought he was ignoring her to save his marriage.

My thoughts drifted to Gina. Sonny’s parents were quite a bit older than her. He was part owner of a prosperous fabrication plant just outside town. He would have to have been in his early thirties when Sonny was born—when we were all born. Gina wasn’t even old enough to buy alcohol when she got pregnant, and she never spoke about the man we both thought was my father.

A sudden sympathy weighed me down, making me feel so heavy, I felt stuck to the floor. I’d been so angry with her, but the truth was, we both knew what it felt like to be hated by everyone. To have no one. To learn early that the best defense was to shut everyone out, even those who try to help. She was too broken to be my mother; it wasn’t that she didn’t want to be.

As the dates on the entries wore on, Alder wrote less about Gina and more about how much they hated me. The older Alder was, the better she explained Sonny’s reports of Harry and Carolyn’s periodic fights about Gina—usually around our birthday—and by middle school, it was clear to Carolyn that Gina’s daughter would always be a reminder of her husband’s infidelity, and she hated me for it—and so did the Erins.

She also talked about watching me watch Weston, and catching Weston looking at me—dozens of time. My stomach began to hurt.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Erin?” Julianne said before peeking in. Her hair wasn’t soft and shiny. It was in tangles and matted in places to her head. Her face was shiny and makeup free, and her pink floral pajama set was mostly covered by a long, thin robe. “Oh, honey. It’s three in the morning. Do you think maybe you should take a break?”

It was then that I realized my eyes felt like dry, scratchy balls under my lids, and the skin around them was heavy and tight at the same time.

“I’m almost finished.”

“O-okay,” she said. “Weston called a few times earlier. He said you weren’t answering your phone.”

“It’s still in my car, I think.”

Her lips made a hard line, and she offered a sympathetic smile. “You’re a blank page, Erin. Maybe you shouldn’t fill it with Alder’s words.”

“Did you know? About Gina?”

She nodded. “I think everyone knows.”

I closed my eyes. “No wonder Gina was angry. She was alone, and blamed, and hated, and all she had was me as a reminder.”

“Not you. It wasn’t you. You were conceived of love and nothing else. You’re ours.”

“Everyone was wrong.”

“Yes, they were.”

“No. They left her with all the blame, and he still got his family and his reputation. It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not. I’m sorry Sonny and Alder took it out on you.”

“I need to see her. I don’t know why. I’m not ready yet, but I need to talk to her about this.”

Worry sparked in Julianne’s eyes. “Oh, okay. I, um, I understand.”

My eyes fell to the binder in my lap, and Julianne shut the door. I rested my chin on my fist as I turned the pages of Alder’s high school journals. She knew I liked Weston, and that was the only reason she pursued him. She wrote about losing her virginity, but to my absolute surprise, it wasn’t with Weston. She was cheating on him with Eric Liberty. My face twisted into disgust. Eric was a gangly, pimple-faced pothead who had been held back twice, and then dropped out of high school altogether, and she was in love with him, not Weston.

The sky was changing outside Alder’s window. I looked up at Alder’s alarm clock. It was nearly six in the morning.

I turned the page, reading about the first week of our senior year. Page after page, I’d read about my misery through her eyes, and how much she enjoyed inflicting it. It was one of the only things that brought her joy. She hated Blackwell, her house, her car, and sometimes Sam and Julianne. Her aspirations included marrying Eric and moving to San Francisco.

Her first entry in October made my blood run cold.

My hands began to tremble, and I slammed the binder shut, leaving it on the floor with the others. My mattress barely made a sound as I crashed into it, burying my head in the pillow. As much as I wanted to believe it wasn’t true, Alder wouldn’t lie in her own journal. The Erins were planning one last twisted, humiliating moment for me before graduation, and Weston was going to help them. The picture he’d drawn of me, the necklace, the attention and phony kindness were all part of the plan to disgrace me in front of the entire school.

My pillow was soaked with tears. After everything they had put me through, how could I have been so gullible? How could I have trusted that Weston had suddenly taken an interest in me for no reason? The nights at the overpass, the late-night talks, losing my virginity…It was all part of the plan. Maybe it wasn’t his idea, but he was going along with it, and Alder was only pretending to be jealous because she knew it wasn’t real. And even if it was, she didn’t care. She was secretly planning to be with Eric anyway.

I kept trying to make excuses for Weston, trying to think of anything that would make him an innocent bystander, but it was all there in her journals. One last stab at me, even after her death. No wonder Weston didn’t want me to read them. He knew exactly what I would find.

Why stay with me after Alder died? Why continue the charade? And then it hit me: he had asked me to prom. He was going to carry out her plan. He was in love with her, and he was determined to carry out her final wish.

How malicious would someone have to be to agree to and go through with something like that? I knew the Erins were evil, but Weston…That’s what Brady meant before. He knew what Weston was doing. I had given myself to someone like that. Let him touch me. Put his mouth on me. Penetrate me.

I ran to the bathroom, pulled the necklace away from my skin, threw it in a drawer, and then stripped off my clothes. The knob whined as I twisted it, and the water rained down. I stepped in when it was still ice-cold, desperate to get any trace of Weston off of me. I stood under the water as it warmed, scrubbing and sobbing, feeling utterly destroyed and beyond betrayed.