Jane lives on the brink of an adolescence about to end and an age she doesn't know how to deal with. Everything she knows about life has been taught her by Jace, the older brother, and his best friends: two guys that in common simply have a passion...
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I look at my mother. I see Catherine's lips move, her expression changing between and after each sentence. She's telling something, but I don't hear anything, my ears are covered with cotton balls that try to captive Seth's words, that last question that echoes violently between the walls of my skull.
Do you really want to hear me say I flirted with the girl Charlie wanted?
No. Actually, I wanted to hear you say something else. I would have preferred a less uncomfortable truth to emerge from your mouth, a more childish, foolish, solvable motivation - but you go big or go home, don't you Seth? If you have to hurt someone you do it mercilessly, hit straight where the blood is pumped and make a mess. Now in front of me I see only blood: that of Charlie, Jace and mine too. You betrayed your best friends by treating them as if they had no value, so it was impossible for me to ask myself: how many hours passed before your lips came to rest on me? How easily did you bend down between her thighs, before you decided to take my heart? Because if hurting them was so easy, doing it to me should have turned out to be a no brainer.
The eyes begin to burn and the awareness of being one step away from bursting into tears becomes worrying; I wouldn't even know how to justify myself in front of the whole Raven family. What could they think? Maybe I'm crazy; a nervous breakdown before high school exams - who knows.
I move an asparagus with the tip of the fork, then put it back in its place. I am not hungry tonight and I think I will not be for a while, so I limit myself to playing with food by deluding my parents that I am eating, even if, if they were to dwell on me, they would notice the deception. And some of them, suddenly, do it. Liz lightly hit me with her elbow, attracting my attention. For a moment it seems to be awakened from a terrible and relentless sleep, but when I turn towards her, rolling my eyes, I see that with the chin she indicates the cell phone that I have placed next to the glass. The screen is rigorously turned downwards, as Mommy commands, but you can clearly see the edges which, intermittently, light up relentlessly, while the vibration makes it rhythmically collide against the glass. I stare at it with a mixture of fear and disgust, without however acting, until my father's vocation brings me back to reality definitively, making me jump.
