"You are such fucking trash," Danica snarls as she stands over me. When I reach for my biology textbook, she kicks it out of my reach. "Wait until my dad hears about what a little slut you are. Bye-bye tuition."
Tears drip onto the papers beneath my knees as I gather them with shaking hands. I don't even know why I bother-when Danica's dad stops paying for my tuition, none of it will matter.
"Say something, you bitch!" Danica screams.
"I didn't sleep with him," I swear again, my voice breaking on a sob, and Danica's laughter fills my room.
She continues calling me names and trashing my room as I grab what I can and shove it into my backpack-school supplies, some clothes from drawers that she empties onto the floor, a few personal effects that I know she'll destroy if I leave them behind. And then I grab my keys from the bed and walk toward the front door with Danica breathing down the back of my neck.
"Don't you ever fucking come back here," she warns as she kicks the backs of my heels. "Mike is going to realize what a worthless piece of hick shit you are, and he's going to beg for me to take him back. And you know what? I will, Hailey. Because he is mine, and you are nothing. You'll always be nothing."
She stops at the door, standing on the stoop as my weak legs carry me to my car. I struggle to unlock my car door with trembling fingers, my vision blurred with unshed tears.
"Bye-bye, slut!" Danica screams loud enough for the neighbors to hear when I get into my car. I spare one last glance to find her waving at me with her fingers, a venomous grin on her face. Tears stream down my cheeks as I put the car into reverse and back away from our apartment.
On the road, I think of the way her smile dimpled when we were kids. I think of how I'm going to explain to my parents that I need to move back home. I think of the waitressing job I'll have to spend the rest of my life working. I think of how tightly Mike held me last night, how he smiled at me this morning, how I'll never see him again when I'm living on a farm in Indiana. I think of all the sweet dreams I never should have had.
Another sob chokes me, and I park along the side of the road to fall completely, utterly apart.
Chapter 18
In the back of a kennel, at the back of a hallway, at the back of a shelter, I sit with my forehead on my knees and an overweight basset hound licking the sausage grease off my fingers. Somewhere under the fluorescent lighting of this hallway, I lost track of time. I'm not sure if I lost it in the first cage or the second cage or the third cage, but now here I am, at the very last cage, with nowhere else to go.
"Hailey," singsongs the shelter director, Barb, as her grass-stained Timberland boots echo down the hallway. "A strapping young man is here to see yooou."
I peek up from my knees to see her grinning from ear to ear as Mike steps into view. He looks a thousand times better than he did this morning, freshly showered and shaved in a black Dogfish Head T-shirt and well-worn jeans. Barb waggles her bushy eyebrows as she lifts the lock and lets him inside.
"What are you doing here?" I ask as she walks away, and Mike crouches down to pet the potbelly pup sniffing excitedly at his side.
"Trying to find you." He lifts his eyes from the dog to me, his expression telling me that he heard about what happened. "Danica told me she kicked you out."
"Did she tell you she trashed my room?" I ask, ignoring the way my eyes start to burn. "Or that she broke my computer? Or destroyed my desk?"
Mike sits down next to me, hesitating a moment before he wraps a comforting arm around my shoulders. The basset hound immediately lays its head and front paws on Mike's lap, its overplump tummy drooping onto the ground.
"I'm taking you home with me," Mike says, hugging me tight against his side. "I already filled out the adoption papers."
My eyes burn hotter, and a scalding tear traces a line down my cheek. "I'm driving home tomorrow."
"To Indiana?" Mike asks, shifting to look at me. I avoid his eyes. "Why?"
"I have nowhere to live, Mike."
"I just told you that you can stay with me . . ."
Another heavy tear drops onto my lap as I shake my head, because of course he doesn't get it. He doesn't know that Danica's family pays my tuition, my rent, my insurance, my gas, my everything. There's no point in staying here because Danica is going to make sure the money stops, and when it does, there will be nothing left but for me to go back home and pretend I never tried to drag myself out of the mud, that I never chased after my dreams.
Thirteen years of "When I grow up, I want to be a veterinarian" school photos: down the drain.
"There's no point," I tell Mike, knowing the pull Danica has over my uncle. He's a good man, but his daughter is his princess, and she's grown up knowing that. She's always had that man wrapped around her little finger, which is why she's twenty-four years old but has never once had to hold a real job.
"Why not?" Mike asks, his voice full of concern.
"Danica's not going to change her mind. It's not like I can live with you forever."
"Sure you can," Mike argues, and when I look up at him, his smile attempts to make the world right again. "We'll eat pizza, drink beer, play video games-it'll be great."
I wonder why he's being so nice to me, why he broke up with Danica, why he came here to find me, why he wants to take me home, what he'd do if I crawled onto his lap and kissed him until the sparks inside me burned the world to the ground.
He's single now. Why is he single?
"Why did you break up with Danica?" I ask with nothing left to lose, and Mike's smile flickers before it fades away.
"That's a loaded question, Hailey . . ."
I want to ask if it was because of me. The words trip over themselves on the tip of my tongue as Mike studies me and I study him. I stare up into those impossibly warm brown eyes, remembering how tightly he held my legs last night. But then I study the curve of his lips, the scruff of his jaw, the perfect way his finger-combed hair lies on his head, and I'm reminded of the girls who scream dirty promises at him from the crowd. I'm reminded of the fact that my cousin, whom he dumped, looks like she belongs on a runway in Paris. I'm reminded of my messy curls, my short stature, my thrift-shop clothes. "Tell me anyway" is all I say.
Mike holds my gaze for a moment before staring out at the chain-link wall in front of us. He takes a weighted breath before saying, "She isn't the girl for me."
"How do you know?"
"I don't love her." His eyes find mine, and I let myself get lost in them. "I'm not sure how I ever did."
"What changed?" my small voice asks.
Each question I ask feels like taking one step further out onto the plank. Eventually, I'm going to drown.
Mike continues staring down at me, his arm snug around my shoulder. His voice is low and quiet when he says, "Everything."
My heart is beating out of my chest when I break eye contact with him to stare at the frayed edges of my bootlace. My eyes travel to the hole in the knee of my jeans, the hem of my oversized sweatshirt.
I shouldn't be with him right now-because he's a rock star, because he's my cousin's ex, because there are bigger things I should be worrying about, because guys like him never want girls like me.
"She thinks I slept with you," I say, and Mike squeezes my shoulder, reminding me that we're friends.
Good friends.
"No, she doesn't."
"She does, Mike. She said-"
"She's hurt," he interrupts. "She's angry. She wants someone to blame." I stare up at him, and he says, "She knows you better than that, Hailey. Anyone who knows you knows that you would never do that."
I'm not sure I believe him. I remember the fury in her eyes when she burst into my room like she was going to rip my heart out of my chest with nothing but fingernails and teeth.
"She knows I would never do that either," Mike adds when he sees the doubt on my face. "She'll cool down. You'll see. Tomorrow, all of this will blow over."
The basset hound finally manages to hop up far enough to crawl onto our laps, its heavy head a comforting weight on the tops of my thighs. I scratch it behind the ears and say, "I don't think so."
Mike scratches the dog's rump, and it kicks its leg, in heaven. "Either way, you're coming home with me tonight, Hailey. You're not sleeping in a kennel."