Best Friend's Revenge

9. Geography Lies and Reassuring Gestures

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XOXO,

LOSALINI

•••||||•••

If you could ever forgive me, I hope you will come for the present I have for you for the six months of putting up with a sorrowful and undeserving idiot like me tomorrow.

Forever and hopefully always yours,

Nate.

I clutched the roughly patched up paper in my hand tightly against my chest after rereading the words imprinted on it for what could sadly be counted as the fortieth time. But then again, I had lost count after reading it for the twentieth time. For all I knew, I could very well have read the bloody thing a hundred times and not have known the difference.

The first time I'd read it when I was in the student parking lot, I thought it was a joke. In fact, I'd looked around once or twice more just to make sure I wasn't starring in my own version of Punk'd or something else.

The second time, I was still stumbling over the words, wondering if they were real. In fact that happened for a couple more times after that. I read the words in the letter, but I still refused to believe they were from Nate, despite it having been written in his neat, blocky handwriting.

Then after, came the emotions. Anger, disbelief, contempt, sorrow, sadness, and undeniably a slight chance of butterflies enveloped my stomach. But then anger won out in the end.

'...all because of me,' he'd written. All I could do rather than go to his house and decapitate his family jewels was tear up a picture of him.

Of course it was because of him that I was hurting. It was because of him that I couldn't really laugh out loud at Alyson's jokes and it was because of him that all I wanted to do after that shocking revelation was curl up in a corner and slowly waste away.

After one rush of anger had run through me, I swiftly tore the page in half and threw it to waste away in the far corner of my room, just like how I once wished I would. Then I went about starting on my four-page essay on Nikola Tesla. But halfway through my essay, when I'd just finally started on my third page, my eyes landed on the paper as if it was physically screaming out, 'Look at me! Look at me!'

A couple of minutes later, I found myself rereading the now memorized words on the paper I'd sellotaped pathetically back together.

Sad to say, the words ran through my mind over and over again, like they were some annoying indie song I couldn't help but sing absentmindedly.

"Elizabeth!!"

I sat up on my bed after having read the letter again and cursing Nate once I heard my mother's voice. I couldn't help but smile as her usually loud presence returned. 

Usually, or whatever had become a norm over the past few months, the only sound at this time on Saturday morning, or any day of the week for that matter, was from the loose board at the landing of the staircase or was from me trying to sing along to BTS's Dope in the shower with the out of tune, scratchy voice.

My mom's presence was limited and unknown. She could've been an ant with the amount of noise she made.

"Yeees," I answered, my voice drowsy as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.