boys don't cry. [h.s]

twenty

May

Isabel had been twenty for a week and she had hated every single second of it.

In between revising, covering shifts at work to make up for the ones she'd missed, and crying hysterically about failing all her exams, all she thought about was Harry. Which really, wasn't so good.

Not at all.

Far too soon for her liking, she found herself in the exam hall and she considered it achievement enough that she didn't run out of there crying. She wasn't happy, and she really had no one else to blame other than herself, and annoyingly, one of her first thoughts was that if she'd listened to Harry's advice from the start and put some effort in a long time ago, she would have saved herself both the stress and the disappointment.

And as if failing her exams wasn't enough of a problem, she had Harry to deal with as well. Because Harry was just everywhere, and she wasn't sure what to do to get him to go away.

It wasn't just that she had to see him at work, sit there for a couple of hours with him in the shoe booth and make occasional conversation over their respective textbooks before they parted ways.

It was that he insisted on driving her home each time, and that they texted every day, and that when he hadn't spoken to her in a couple of hours she got anxious, like he'd suddenly realised she wasn't worth the fuss and had given up, finally. Not that she would have blamed him.

Isabel didn't like to be unnecessarily self-pitying, but the whole thing was just unfair. It wasn't fair to her, it wasn't fair to Caitlin, and it wasn't fair to Harry, and the whole situation was so horribly fucking unfair that she actually got angry.

Today was one of those days.

There were technically two weeks left until term broke for the summer, but she was already packing up to go, pulling clothes out of her wardrobe and flinging them across the room roughly, letting out little grunts of anger as she did so. The others had gone out a little while ago, probably to another party that she wasn't invited to, and so she'd put on the angriest CD she could find and screamed along whenever she knew which part of the song they were at and vaguely recollected the words, which wasn't very often.

In the midst of all this, she had also been made to sign the contract to extend the lease on the house for next year. It had occurred to her for a brief minute when the pen was shoved into her hand that she might not want to live with them anymore, but she wasn't really given a choice in the matter and so she signed the contract without complaint.

If she was in the mood to look for silver linings, she would have recognised that she didn't need to pack up all her things and take them home since the house was theirs over summer as well. But she was so angry that she didn't care, and after she was done with gutting the wardrobe she went over to her chest of drawers and tipped each of the drawers out onto the floor, and then stood in the mess she'd

made, thick jumpers and balled up socks and flimsy tights gathering around her feet like she was standing in water, and wondered when on earth she'd become so pathetic.

It was then that she saw her bag from London sitting in the corner, untouched since her birthday. She'd flung it in the corner when Harry had dropped her home on Sunday night and only opened it briefly to fish out her toothbrush. Now she went over to it, yanking the zip open with clammy hands because she'd just remembered that Harry's birthday card was inside. She was wearing Harry's grey jumper, the one he'd worn to the zoo the first time they'd been to London together, the one she'd worn the day of his marathon, and it made sense to wear it because if she didn't she might accidentally pack it, and that would be awkward when he asked for it back. Except, if she really thought about it, it had been a few weeks now and he hadn't asked for it back yet. He hadn't even mentioned it.