Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
She wasn’t going to cry. She wouldn’t give her tears to anyone if she couldn’t give them to him.
“Kala?”
She stood, her heart a dull thing in her chest. “What you said before, was it about Julia Ennis or me?”
He looked a bit shocked. “What?”
“You said sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to save yourself,” she parroted back, the words bitter on her tongue. “Is this you saving yourself, Coop? You weren’t ever going to take me to the homecoming dance, were you?”
“Why do you care?” Cooper asked, a surprised look on his face. “You don’t even like dances. You call them stupid. Like you call everything fun about high school stupid. Like you call all my friends stupid.”
His friends were stupid. “Your friends all hate me.”
“You don’t do anything to make them like you.” He seemed to be warming to the argument. “You meet someone and immediately pull some crap.”
“It’s called being myself.”
“This isn’t you. This is some phase you’re going through. I need you to get through it faster because I don’t want to spend my entire high school experience apologizing for my girlfriend,” he shot back.
“A phase? I’m in a phase? What was I before? Sweet and docile?” Where the hell was this coming from? “This is who I am, Coop. You’ve known me since we were in diapers. Did you think I would turn into some sweet thing who decorates your locker before the big game? Who sits around and waits for you to notice me?”
“Maybe it would be better if you did sit around and wait because what you do now is start freaking fights,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I knew we couldn’t have this talk. I told her…”
And she was afraid she knew who “her” was. It might be easier if she thought he’d had this talk with some other girl. Some other girl would give him advice so she would have a better shot at him. Some other girl hadn’t been around all of her life. This was worse. “Did you talk to your mom about me?”
He went still, and for a moment she thought he might not answer her. Then he sat back down, his hands threaded together like he didn’t quite trust himself. “We were talking about what Kyle’s going through. It worries me.”
Oh, this was bad. “We’re not Kyle and Mae in this scenario.”
“I didn’t say that. I just think you’re intense and sometimes we need to…”
He said a bunch more stuff, but she didn’t hear it. It was a lot of word salad, and it didn’t mean anything. She’d heard the important stuff. Intense. How often had she heard the word? She wasn’t the Mae in his metaphor. Or was it a simile? She should have paid more attention in English, but she spent all her time thinking about a boy. Who thought she was like Julia Ennis. Which meant he thought she was a monster.
He was still talking, complaining about how often she got grounded.
“She told you to save yourself? Your mom?” At one point in time she’d called Eve McKay Auntie Eve, though they didn’t share any blood. A few years before she’d dropped the honorific since she needed there to be no family ties between them. The fact that Cooper had been adopted meant nothing. He was a McKay and not her cousin.
“She said I can’t control what other people do and sometimes when a person is drowning, they end up dragging the person trying to save them down, too,” he admitted.
He was trying to save her? From being herself? She didn’t know how to be anyone else. Sometimes she pretended to be Kenzie to fool everyone—because no matter what Coop thought, they were perfectly identical—but she wouldn’t want to live like Kenzie.
He wasn’t saving her life. He was saving what he valued.
The tears were there. He was choosing. His friends. His place at Johnson High School. A hole opened up inside her. A hole she hadn’t realized he filled. Well, there was one thing she could give him. The last thing she would give him. Starting this moment, she would cut him out of her heart. She wouldn’t hate him. Wouldn’t love him. Her goal was to look at him and feel nothing. “I won’t drag you down, Coop.”
He took a long breath, and there was an odd relief in his expression. “Good. My mom was right. This was a hard conversation but a necessary one. I know you don’t want to drag me down. I know you don’t want to cause trouble.”
Oh, but she did. It was there. The need to push whatever button was in front of her simply to see what it did. The impulse to sometimes burn the world down because it pissed her off. Trouble was fun. Trouble might be her true native language. “I won’t cause you anything at all. Good-bye, Coop. Next time you see me, pretend you don’t know me.”