Broken Rules(44)

“Because it’s not fair!” she screams through her tears. “I know Emmett had real feelings for me! Vivian just came along and fucked it all up! Made him turn on me!” she insists before reaching out to Emmett. “I thought if I just kept my head down and stayed out of the way, Vivian would eventually fuck off and you’d come back around. You’d realize that what you felt for me was real.”

“That was just a prank, Lily,” Emmett confirms with real remorse. “It was awful. I know. But I didn’t feel anything for you then.”

“Because Ophelia came along. Everything was fine before then. Everyone knew you were just with Vivian because of your families. You had no choice! It never would have lasted!” She flies into a mad and desperate rant. Her words spill out quickly, leaving no room for any other possibility. “But then you showed up and it was so obvious—the way you secretly fawned over him even when he treated you like shit!” she bellows at me. “And then I was stupid enough to help you and ended up right back as one of the Elites’ main targets. You ruined everything! I wanted to make sure they took you out of the picture for good!”

“So you helped kill someone!?” I shriek, wishing she could hear how crazy she sounds.

“I didn’t know he’d die!” she defends frantically. “It was Malcolm’s idea! I thought he would just start using again and Coach Granger would be distracted trying to help him. I hated him for being on your side. Emmett, college—everything—all ripped from my hands because of you!”

“Lily, I had no idea you felt that way,” I reply in astonishment. “You should have just talked to me.”

“I wanted to punish Coach for going against the Elites. Both of you act so above everything. Like you can do whatever you want,” she says, shaking angrily. “Like you’re the only ones who can just ignore the way things work around here and get away with it. After everything they did to me and my family for not respecting the hierarchy of things!”

“But now you’re going to be investigated for murder, Lily!” I try to give her a reality check. “Just because you were angry with me.”

“That’s not all of it,” she persists. “I did it because I love you, Emmett. And I knew once she was gone, you’d finally come around to how you really felt about me. You do still feel the same way, don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re hanging around Vivian again? Because of me?”

Emmett’s eyes cut to mine with a knowing glance. We both know what he has to do. The sirens are wailing in the distance, but Lily is growing more frantic and anxious. He has to play along with her before she hurts herself or one of us. Or before she tries to make another run for it.

“Yes, Lily,” he sighs. “You’re right. I do love you. That’s the only reason I have been trying to spend time with Vivian. So I could be around you.”

“I knew it! I knew you felt the same way!” she shouts ecstatically as she throws herself into his arms. “Run away with me, Emmett! I can’t stay here and go down for this. You have enough money. We could go wherever we wanted to. Away from all this Elite bullshit. We could start all over again!”

He says nothing but cradles her, keeping his eyes glued to me the whole time. I wait pensively until I see Coach Granger and the cops surrounding us outside. They burst into the room, but Lily is so far gone she doesn’t seem to hear or see them. All she cares about is that Emmett just confessed his feelings for her and is finally holding her in his arms.

“She confessed to everything,” I announce, almost hating to ruin Lily’s delusional fantasy.

“I can prove it,” Emmett says as he pushes Lily over to the cops. He pulls his phone from his pocket and begins playing Lily’s recorded confession back to them. He must have clicked the recording on as soon as I said the police were coming.

Lily doesn’t even flinch as it plays. She keeps her eyes squinted shut tightly, as if she’s trying to stay in some mythical space where Emmett’s feelings are real, and she’s not about to be arrested. I am overcome with pity. I knew Vivian obviously still had feelings for him, or maybe she just wanted him back to restore some sense of her social status. But I couldn’t see Lily’s affections for him boiling beneath the surface this entire time.

Coach Granger nods to me before following the police out as they put Lily in their squad car. Emmett and I are left alone in shock, but I don’t even know what to say to him. I’m almost more afraid of him now than before. I want to feel above Lily, like I am somehow better and could never be so delusional, but am I? Is this just what Emmett does to girls? Who knows how far he took things with Lily during their little prank, knowing he was with Vivian the whole time? I am becoming paranoid that all of the Elites are going to jump out from behind the curtains and announce that what he and I have is really just a prank, too.

“Did you have any idea Lily felt that way?” I gape at him from across the room, wishing I could run into his arms.

He shakes his head no, staying silent. He looks lost as his dark gray eyes dart hopelessly around the room and back to me. He looks like he’s trying to decide if he can talk to me right now, if he can bring himself over to me. But his feet are planted firmly. He won’t come to me, and he won’t go.

“Emmett,” I start, my face lifting in desperation. “There’s so much I need to say. I…”

He holds his hand up firmly to silence me, and just like that, he turns to leave. I don’t know why he came here in the first place, but he was exactly who I wanted to come bursting in after me. But now that he’s gone, I don’t think he was coming after me at all. Why else would he have left me?

I look around the empty room, feeling suddenly vulnerable and afraid to be here alone, not knowing when Malcolm will return or if he will at all. I don’t want to risk it. I walk out of the house, hoping maybe, by some chance Emmett was unable to leave. Maybe he’s waiting for me by my car. I don’t see him when I get out there, so I linger for a while, thinking maybe he’ll come back. But there’s no sight of him.

I remember my thought about the security cameras and turn back towards Malcolm’s one last time to see if I spot anything, but there are no cameras that I can see. Even if there were, I probably wouldn’t have a clue how to retrieve the footage. Someone like him surely has every measure possible in place to protect people from getting into his system.

Feeling no closer to convincing Emmett the photo was fake, I reluctantly climb into my car and drive home. Lily’s voice and face haunt me for the rest of the night. I’m beginning to question my ability to judge the character of a person. To think she was so desperately in love with Emmett the entire time, and I had no idea! Even when she paired off with Vivian, even after what she did to me, I never would have thought she’d be capable of something like what she did to Coach Granger’s son.

After everything I have been through, I am grateful that I still have so much to come home to, which is more than I can say for everyone else. Emmett seems to have lost his entire family. Lily has been arrested. Malcolm’s been forced into hiding. The rest of the Elites are under investigation. I almost feel sorry for them, no matter how awful they all have been. They were raised to believe they could do whatever they wanted. That people like them never faced consequences for their actions. And now all at once, their worlds are crumbling down around them.

My world may feel like it’s crumbling without Emmett, but I still have the warmth of my loving family to come home to. I give my mom and Brendan extra-long hugs after dinner that night, and think of Coach Granger and his poor family as I fall asleep. I hope that maybe he can find some peace now that he knows who sabotaged his son’s recovery and ended his life.





21





Chapter Twenty-One





I am dreaming about being on a sinking ship. Alarms begin to sound when the water levels grow dangerously high, but I ignore them. I carry on with ordinary things while the ocean rushes in. People around me rush past in a panic, heeding the warning of the alarms, but I refuse to move. My dream self has decided to go down with the ship. It’s a strange moment when real life and dream life bleed together. The alarm of my phone leaks into my dreams as the alarm on the ship, and I choose to ignore it and stay asleep.

The Elites taught me about pain. I thought I knew all about it from running—pushing past the burning ache of my muscles to get in another mile and then another. But I didn’t know anything about pain until I met them. Until I saw what Emmett was capable of. To still desire a person even as they are scaring you and physically harming you—that is a pain running could have never prepared me for. Just like this seizing feeling in my chest is something I have never felt before. I’ve seen what Emmett is capable of in both good and bad ways now, and the thought of losing him is still paralyzing.

I sit up in bed feeling a new kind of emptiness. A big, wide, gaping hole where Emmett used to be. At least when I asked him to give me space, it was a choice, one that I felt like I could take back at any time. Now the choice is his, and any attempt to chase after him will just look desperate. And before I asked for space, there were times when I wanted him, but the reality of him was so awful that I prayed that he would just leave me alone. And yet he invaded my life anyway. Always there when I wished he wouldn’t be. Never in the way I wanted him.