"He's a breath of fresh air. The happiness to my sadness. The calm to my anxiety. He's an equal and opposite force, blocking me from the course of self-hatred I've been hurdling down my entire life."
◊ ◊ ◊
Mikaela Martin is almost certain quarterbac...
For once, I'm grateful to live in a small town, because I can pull over every time my eyes fill with tears on the drive home from Peyton's. There's no need to worry about traffic or being rear-ended if you stop on the side of one of Ramsey's perpetually desolate roads.
And stop I do. Five times. Peyton lives less than three miles away.
I barely manage to hang up my jacket before I dissolve into sobs and collapse in the small corridor where we store coats and shoes. I sink onto the ground, not caring that the floor is dirty from the twins' boots. My heart is broken into a million pieces.
Mom isn't concerned about dirt either. She plops down beside me, letting me rest my head on her shoulder and cry. I cry and cry and cry for what must be hours, and Mom never makes me tell her what's wrong, not that it's very difficult to guess. She just rubs my back and runs her fingers through my hair.
That's how I spend Sunday too, except Annalise takes Mom's place. In the afternoon, she edits my homework because my answers are so sloppy Evan or Ava could probably do better. My brain simply isn't capable of work.
For once, I don't care that my grades will be affected by this. I'm so, so sad. Too sad to care about grades or what my teachers think of me. Too sad to consider the blemish that Mr. Quentin's B-plus will leave on my transcripts.
Within twenty-four hours, I lost Cooper and my relationship. I desperately want to sob into Cooper's fur, to find comfort where I did for eight years. I want him to rub his nose against mine in a display of doggie solidarity and then beg for head scratches or a walk that never failed to distract me from my problems. I can't do any of that. I'll never be able to again. No one understood me like Peyton and Cooper, but now Peyton doesn't, and Cooper is gone.
My eyes are going to be insanely swollen at school tomorrow, but I care about that even less than the half-assed assignments I'm soon to hand in.
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"Bad night, Mikaela?"
I glance up from my PB-and-J and see the last person I want to interact with right now. "Yep," I reply.
"I had a great night," Jake brags.
"Literally, not a soul cares," Annalise snaps at the same time Sarah sighs, "Jake, stop."
"I hung out with Peyton," he continues. "We talked about you a little bit, Mikaela."
My eyes fill with tears, while the lump in my throat and social anxiety team up to keep me from telling him to fuck off. Luckily, Annalise doesn't have a lump, and she definitely doesn't have social anxiety, so she instructs him to fuck off.
"In a minute," he says teasingly. "He was shocked to hear that you and tennis boy had lunch together last week after I told him how Liam was after you the whole time you were with Peyton."
