Through to You

For my mom

Thanks to all the usual suspects: Patrick Price, Alyssa Henkin, Kelsey Barnholdt, Krissi Barnholdt, Kevin Cregg, Stephanie Hoover, and everyone at S&S.

And Aaron, for everything, always.

This is how it ends:

With me crying in a bathroom at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, cursing myself for being so stupid. I knew it was wrong, I knew it wasn't going to end well, I knew I was putting myself in a situation where I was going to end up brokenhearted.

I reach over and pull some toilet paper out of the dispenser and use it to blow my nose. My feet are killing me because of the stupid high heels I'm wearing. I want to sit down, but there's nowhere to sit. I'm in a bathroom stall, for God's sake. The only place to sit down is on the actual toilet, and it doesn't have a cover. Why don't the toilets in hotel bathrooms have covers? I'm sure I'm not the first person to end up in here crying her eyes out and looking for some privacy. Aren't there
always scandalous things happening in hotels, things that would cause one to end up crying in the bathroom?

Okay,
I tell myself,
just calm down. It's not as bad as you think.

The problem, of course, is that it really
is
as bad as I think. I've never had my heart broken before, and I wasn't expecting it to feel like this. I wasn't expecting to feel like I want to die. I wasn't expecting to be crying so hard my shoulders shake and I can't breathe.

The door to the bathroom opens, and I hear footsteps crossing the floor. A group of girls laughing as they reapply their lipstick. They're happy and excited.

Like I should be.

But I'm not.

Instead, here I am.

Crying in a bathroom stall.

This is how it ends.

And I have no one to blame but myself.

I saw it coming.

I just couldn't stop it.

Harper isn't being fair.

I never wanted to break her heart.

She made the decision to break her own.

This is how it starts:

In world history, with a note, on a random Wednesday afternoon.

Penn Mattingly puts the note on my desk as he's walking to his seat in the back of the room.

Instantly I'm suspicious.

We're in high school. High school boys are notorious for leaving weird notes and other paraphernalia around, and usually whatever they've left doesn't say or represent anything nice or appropriate.

“What's that?” my best friend Anna says. Then she reaches across the aisle and plucks the note off my desk.

“Hey!” I don't know why, but suddenly I feel very protective
of that note. I'm sure it says something totally ridiculous and/or bordering on sexual harassment. One time sophomore year a senior left a note in Anna's locker that said,
I like your tits in that shirt.
If
I'd
gotten a note like that, I would have died. But Anna just smiled and took it as a compliment. And then she started dating that boy, which was kind of an unconventional way for a relationship to start. But whatever.

“What?” Anna asks as she starts to unfold the piece of paper. “We're best friends. We're supposed to share everything.”

I reach over and steal it back. “I'll let you read it,” I say, “but I should get to read it first.”

But I don't open the paper, at least not right away. Instead I just hold it in my hand. In that second a shiver, almost like a premonition, runs up my spine. I feel like if I read what's on that piece of paper, I'm going to be starting down a road I can't turn back from.

“Open it!” Anna stage-whispers.

“Okay, okay.” But still I don't. I turn around and glance back at Penn. He looks the same as always—shaggy dark hair that's just a little bit too long and flops over his forehead; broad shoulders; dark eyes. There's a little bit of stubble on his cheeks and chin, and he's wearing baggy jeans and a red hoodie.

He's joking around with Emmett Wilson and acting completely normal. I marvel at how different guys are from girls. How could Penn have left a note on my desk five seconds ago and now be pretending like it never happened? Meanwhile
Anna and I are sitting here making a huge deal about it before we've even read what it says.

“This is ridiculous,” Anna says, rolling her eyes. She reaches out and grabs the note again.

I grab it back.

And then the bell rings and Mr. Marks walks in, and everyone faces front and gets quiet.

I spread the paper out on my lap.

It has one line on it, scrawled in boy handwriting.

I like your sparkle.

My hand reaches up and instinctively touches my hair, lingering on the piece of tinsel threaded through my ponytail. I didn't even want to wear the stupid tinsel, but it's senior spirit week, and Anna insisted we at least do
something
. So we met in the bathroom this morning and wove strands of tinsel through our hair. Green and blue, our school colors.

I didn't feel very sparkly at the time, but now, knowing Penn has noticed, my face feels all hot. I turn around and look at him again, but his eyes are on his notebook.

I catch Anna's eye and give her a disinterested shrug. Even though my heart is beating superfast, I have this weird feeling, like I shouldn't make a big deal of it to Anna.

So I mouth, “So stupid,” and then pass her the note.

I know it's silly, but as soon as it's out of my hands, I want it back.

I'm not the kind of girl who gets notes like this from boys. No one has ever called me sparkly before.

Anna reads it, her eyebrows raised, then shrugs. “Kind of sweet?” she mouths.

She hands the note back to me, and then, suddenly, Mr. Marks turns his attention to us. “Something important, ladies?”

“What do you mean?” Anna asks in this half-snotty, half-fake-innocent voice. Anna's not scared of teachers. I'm scared of everything. Including, but not limited to: spiders, the dark, flying, and blood.

“I
mean
that you're passing notes in my class,” Mr. Marks says. He holds his hand out. “Would you like to share it?”

My face burns.

“We weren't passing notes,” Anna lies.

Mr. Marks's eyebrows knit together, and he glares at her. I guess what Anna's saying isn't technically a lie.
Technically
we weren't passing notes. At least not ones we'd written ourselves. Is Penn going to get in trouble too? I fight the urge to look back at him to see how he's reacting to this whole thing. I pretty much already know—the type of person to put a note on someone's desk that says
I like your sparkle
isn't the type to get all freaked out if they get in trouble for it.

The classroom phone buzzes on the wall.

Mr. Marks sighs and walks over to it.

“Yes,” he says into the receiver. “Yes, she's here.” His gaze turns to me, and I sit up straighter in my chair. Mr. Marks
hangs up the phone and gives me a glare. “It seems you will be saved from my wrath for the time being, Ms. Fairbanks. You're wanted in the nurse's office.”

Crap, crap, crap.

Anna gives me a sympathetic look as I gather up my books and leave the classroom. Once I'm in the hallway, I just stand there, not sure what to do. The period just started. Which means I'm going to have to wander the halls for the next forty-five minutes and hope I don't get caught.

Here's the deal with me and the nurse:

She's kind of stalking me.

I know that sounds crazy, but it's completely true. You'd think that someone who'd completed a bunch of medical training wouldn't have the capacity to be a stalker, but it just goes to show you that you can never tell what's lurking under the surface of someone's mind.

Okay, so maybe I'm being a little bit dramatic. The nurse isn't, like, restraining-order stalking me. It's just that there's some ridiculous rule that all seniors need to have a physical before graduation. It's, like, for some kind of state statistics or something, to make sure everyone's healthy. Most kids get them at their family doctors, or when they sign up for a sport. But one of my biggest fears is doctors and needles. So I haven't gone.

Unfortunately, if you don't show the school proof you've had one, they call you down to the nurse's office when the school doctor is in and try to give you one there. Um, no thank
you. I've seen the school doctor. He has beefy fingers, and he smells like pepperoni and Swiss cheese. It's a ridiculous rule anyway. Why should the school get to dictate your, like,
health
?

I pull Penn's note back out from where I slipped it into my notebook and read it again.

I like your sparkle.

Was he being nice? Or is it one of those jerky things boys do just because they can? Was he making fun of me? I have no experience when it comes to this kind of thing. It's the first note I've received from a boy since the second grade, when Charles Dawcett put a note on my desk that asked me if I would be his girlfriend. I said yes, but by the time recess rolled around, he'd moved on to Addison Roach.

Whatever,
I tell myself.
It's just a stupid note. It means nothing.

But part of me can't help but wish it was something more.

And it's at that exact moment that Penn Mattingly appears behind me and tugs on a strand of my hair.

It was just a stupid note.

I wrote it on a whim, because I'd seen Harper walking into world history with that one friend she's always with, the one with the spiky hair. And Harper's tinsel sparkled in the light, and she reached up and smoothed her ponytail down, and something about the way she did it made it seem like she was wearing that tinsel ironically. I don't know why, but it was like she'd done it as an afterthought, like maybe someone had convinced her to wear it, like she couldn't even be bothered to wear a blue or green shirt for senior spirit week, so someone had to be like, “Hey, Harper, maybe you should wear this tinsel.”

And that kind of killed me.

All these people walking around in their stupid school
spirit shirts, thinking that any of this means anything, and there she was wearing this tinsel in this completely ironic way.

So I ripped out a piece of paper from my notebook and wrote that I liked her sparkle. It was just a stupid note I dropped onto her desk. It wasn't supposed to
mean
anything.

But then I noticed she was looking back at me, and I kind of got a little bit nervous that maybe she
thought
it meant something more than it really did, so I pretended to be talking to the kid next to me.

And then I watched Mr. Marks catch her with the note, and I saw her fidget and get all uncomfortable, and in that moment, for some reason, I
wanted
him to read the note. Out loud. To the class. I hadn't signed my name, so no one would have known it was from me.

That's fucked up, I know. But I wanted Harper to be embarrassed. Actually, no, that's not completely true. I didn't want her embarrassed, per se. I just wanted to have an effect on her. I
liked
that I was having an effect on her.

So when she got called down to the nurse's office, I immediately jumped up and asked for the bathroom pass.

I thought I'd have to go running around looking for her, but she was just standing there in the hallway, looking down at something. When I got closer, I saw she was reading my note.