Gone Girl 2

Chapter 16

Veronica's POV

I sit in my wrecked car and I put my head on the steering wheel.

I don't know what to do.

I want to cry, I want to let it all out but I'm too tired of crying. Some parts of me think I'm overreacting but being told that my mom has been dishonest for longer than I ever thought makes everything worse.

Maybe it would have been easier if everyone else was honest to me, but this year consisted of only lies. I'm fucking sick of it.

I want to stop caring but it's stronger than me, I always care, I care about all the smallest details, every word people didn't mean to say but hurt me, every time someone disappoints me even when I deserved it—Alexander, Irène told me I shouldn't trust him and I didn't listen to her, maybe she isn't too trustworthy but she didn't want to get in my pants.

He just wanted fuck me and I thought he was just a friend. How dumb could I be?

Now I ruined everything with Derek, he hated me before and now he hates me even more. I don't blame him. I'm so fucking useless.

I look at the box I put in my lap.

Should I open it?

Do I really want this pain? I'm afraid of all the lies, all the time I believed something that was fake... surfacing here, in this cheap and destroyed car at 12 AM in a town that has ruined me. I don't feel safe here.

My good childhood and amazing moments with my friends and parents got wiped away the day I was assaulted.

Everything matters but nothing really matters.

I sound like I'm high... and Gosh, I wish I was high right now. I'd give anything for that fake adrenaline pumping through my veins, the way I inhaled all the cocaine into my lungs, and how much I ruined my body. Weirdly, I loved it.

I loved harming myself, I felt like I deserved it and I was paying for my sins.

It's so much easier to believe your traumas are your fault than to believe you were just a poor little victim who had an unfair life. At least it is to me.

Or maybe because you can fix something caused by yourself, most of the time. But can you really fix the unfairness of life? How do people live when unfair things happen to them? What is the point when everyone else seems to have it so much better?

"I need to tell Derek the t-truth," I murmur to myself, as I press my hands against the steering wheel with all my force. "I need to."

I rotate the key and turn on the car, I back out a little and I look both ways as I leave the street.

I'm an idiot for going there again but I need to do the same thing he did for me, he kept trying the whole year to talk to me, to be there for me and he always explained his side every time there was a miscommunication. I need to do better.

I won't open the box now, I don't care about the lies my mother held from me, I want to just throw it away...

But I'll keep it in the back of my car, maybe one day I'll change my mind.

My phone is still on campus and I hope to be home by this morning. They decide on my suspension at 9 am.

Derek doesn't live far away from my place, luckily, it will only take me thirty minutes if I go over the speeding limit.