Bitter End

  On the word “do,” he gave the hardest shove yet. I tried to keep my balance, but my arms were still inside my coat and it was no use. I was going down.

  I didn’t make any noise this time. I was too panicked and it happened too quickly. But at the last minute, I twisted my body toward the fall, trying, and failing, to get my hands out of the coat to catch myself. Instead, I went down on the concrete curb that edged the parking lot, my shoulder absorbing most of the blow, but my face hitting hard against the concrete.

  And he laughed.

  Out loud, laughed. Big, hearty ho-ho-hos.

  I finally wriggled my arms into their sleeves and reached up to my face. My hand came away wet, and in the dark, my fingers looked black. Blood. My shoulder ached, but it seemed okay. I could move it. It wasn’t broken or anything. But my chin stung, and my lip, too. I felt something hard rattling around inside my mouth and spit it into my palm. A piece of a tooth. Using my tongue, I felt the jagged edge where my front tooth had broken. A big chip.

  I pulled myself to my feet, too pissed to cry, too scared to say anything to him, and once again numb. Just incredibly numb, as if someone had found an “off” switch and had shut me down. Thrown a veil over me. It occurred to me that numb was a bad sign—that there were all kinds of things other than numb that I should be feeling, and it worried me that I wasn’t feeling them.

  Cole was still laughing, clutching his stomach as if this was the funniest thing he’d seen, ever. I walked around him, holding my hand to my face, opened the car door, and then sat down.

  I’d always thought if I just stayed away from Zack and Bethany, Cole would be happy. If I just made Zack stop tickling me. If I stopped hugging my friends. If I didn’t talk about them or act like they were a part of my life, then I could keep Cole from exploding. But that didn’t work.

  And I thought if I supported him. Agreed with him when he complained about Brenda. Kept positive about basketball. Showed him that I was always on his side, then maybe he wouldn’t blow up anymore. But that didn’t work, either.

  For the first time, it really hit me. There was nothing I could do to keep Cole from exploding. There was nothing I could cut out or do better or stay away from or say. I had no power over what was happening between us. Cole had it all. The turns our relationship took were the turns that Cole created. He was the one in charge. He was the one with all the say-so. I was just his little puppet, moving the way he wanted me to.

  Eventually he came around to the driver’s side and got in, too. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but my arm and chin, and now tooth, had started aching big-time. I willed myself not to cry. Willed myself not to think about how bad the tooth must look. Willed myself not to think about what Dad would say when I showed it to him.

  “I need to go home,” I said as he started the car.

  He shook his head. “Going to Trent’s. Remember? You really, really wanted to go just a minute ago. Now I’m giving you what you want.”

  I stared at him incredulously. Did he really expect me to go to a party like this? I looked gruesome.

  “My tooth broke,” I said.

  The air in the car got serious, and he turned to me. “Really? Let me see.”

  I bared my teeth at him, hating every inch of him but feeling too distant to do anything about it, and he peered at my mouth. “Oh, man, Alex. You really shouldn’t go walking around with your hands all caught up in your coat like that.” And he had the nerve to sound serious when he said it, as if he was really concerned.

  “What do you mean?” I said angrily, unable to hold it in any longer. “I wasn’t walking around. You pushed me.”

  “That?” he asked, thumbing over his shoulder at where we’d just been standing in the parking lot a moment before. Again with that stupid laugh. “I was just teasing you. Just playing. You tripped.”

  So this was how it was going to work now. He wasn’t going to stop hurting me; he was just going to start denying it. Well, that’d be the day. I didn’t care if he bought me a million books, if he knew me inside and out. I could not do this anymore. I could not let him hurt me and pretend it was all my fault. I loved Cole, but at this moment, with my tooth poking a sore spot on the tip of my tongue and my chin seeping blood, I hated him far more than I loved him.

  For the first time since all this craziness had started, I realized he would never stop doing this. There was nothing I could do to keep from setting him off. There was nothing I could do to make him stop.

  As if to confirm my thought, he jabbed a knuckle into my rib.

  “If I was going to hurt you, I wouldn’t do it in a place where people could see it,” he said. “You really are stupid, aren’t you, Alex?”

  We locked eyes for a long moment, me refusing to wiggle under the pressure of his knuckle, which was growing worse with each second as he pressed it into my ribs.

  “Let’s go to Trent’s,” I said, but in my head all I could think about was my new realization, which racked me with fear and grief.

  Cole was an abuser. I was abused.

  And it was never going to get better between us.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Trent’s house was packed. Of course. Had I looked amazing that night, there would have been nobody there. But I walk in looking like I’ve just been through a wood chipper, and there’s a crowd of about a million; and of course Renee Littleton would be the one standing closest to the front door, because she’s got the screechiest voice ever, and if you’re within a hundred miles of Renee Littleton, you can hear absolutely every single word the girl says.

  “Oh my God!” she screeched as soon as Cole and I stepped through the door. “Alex! What happened to your face?” And every person in the entire house, I swear, looked at me. Even the music seemed to hit a dull note.

  I glanced up at Cole, who still had that wait-till-you-hear-this-hilarious-story look on his face. “I fell in the parking lot,” I mumbled.

  “The doofus had her hands inside her coat,” Cole said, spreading his hands wide.

  I felt my face get hot, partly from the way Cole was playing this off like it was my fault, and partly from the eyes boring into it. Renee got so close I could smell the alcohol on her breath.

  “Ew,” she screeched. “You’re really messed up.”

  “I know,” I said, thinking, More than you’ll ever know, Renee. More than you’ll ever know. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Her hands flew up to cover her mouth, and her eyes grew wide. “Oh my God! Alex! Your tooth!”

  Cole nodded elaborately. “That’s what I’m saying. Who knocks out a tooth in the freaking parking lot? Dude!” he called to Ben Stoley, who was manning a cooler in the dining room. “Over here.” He held his hands receiver-style, and a can blurred through the air, landing with a thunk in the center of his chest. Several kids cheered and, thankfully, forgot about me. Including Renee Littleton, who was busy screeching to the boy next to her about her recent trip to Padre Island.

  Quickly, I ducked away, keeping my face pointed to the floor as much as possible, and trying to avoid eye contact.

  I slipped down a hallway on just the other side of the kitchen. Surely there’d be a bathroom there. The first three doors that I checked were bedrooms—two of which were occupied (one by a crowd of about ten, playing Twister and laughing their asses off, and the other by a couple who were quickly moving past the just-making-out stage). The third bedroom looked like a master bedroom, so I ventured in, and sure enough there was a bathroom.

  I closed the door behind me and flicked on the light. I turned and looked in the mirror.

  My hands went to my face of their own accord, and I let out such a huge gasp it was almost a cry. I’d been too afraid to look in the mirror in Cole’s car—too afraid that I’d see how bad it looked and would cry, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. But, oh my God, it looked so much worse than I’d thought it would.

  Apparently my nose had been bleeding, too, though I didn’t eve
n feel it hit the ground. But there was crusty blood all around my nose and mouth, standing out against my pale skin, making me look like I’d kissed a clown. My chin had a scrap of skin hanging from the bottom of it, and my top lip was fat.

  I opened my mouth, then snapped it closed again. As I suspected, my tooth wasn’t just a little bit chipped. It was chipped almost in half, at an angle, pointing down sharply at my tongue. I bared my teeth and stuck my tongue through the gap, then immediately pulled it back from the sharp pain in my tooth. I wouldn’t even be able to eat with my tooth like this.

  Trying to stay calm, I turned on the warm water and began splashing it over my face. Surely once I got myself cleaned up it wouldn’t look so miserable. Surely it would just look like a little scrape, a fat lip. Maybe not so obvious.

  But my tooth… that was obvious.

  The numbness wore off then, and I started to cry, staring at myself in the mirror as I scrubbed, gently, at the blood on my face, only to find that not much of it came off. I was one giant scrape. No wonder my face burned so badly. It was all raw skin.

  But it was a soft cry. A giving-up cry. I honestly didn’t know what to do at that point. I wanted to leave him, but I was afraid to do it. I wanted to love him, but I didn’t want to be the person who loved someone who did this to them.

  There was a soft knock on the door then, and it opened, just a little at first, revealing Bethany’s glasses on the other side.

  “Renee said you got hurt,” she said. “Can I come in?”

  I bristled but nodded, and she stepped into the bathroom with me.

  “Wow,” she breathed, grabbing a washcloth off the towel rack next to her and soaking it under the running water. “What happened?”

  The sadness felt so heavy I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know if it was still safe to say anything to Bethany. I opened my mouth, but everything was stuck, somewhere down deep in me, just as it had been that night on the patio with Georgia, and I knew it was not going to come out here, in Trent’s parents’ bathroom, tonight.

  “I fell,” I finally said. “In the parking lot.”

  She stopped dabbing my chin and looked at me skeptically. “You fell,” she said, only it wasn’t a question, but a statement. A statement of incredulity. Cole may be right about me—I may be stupid as hell—but he could never accuse Bethany of being stupid.

  “On the curb by the car,” I said. “I was…” I grasped for the first thing to come to mind. “I was running.”

  She blinked, used the back of her wrist to push her glasses up on her nose, and then went back to dabbing. “Were you running away from someone?” she asked in a dull voice.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I winced when she touched a particularly sore spot.

  She sighed, dropped the washcloth into the sink, and looked me in the eye. “Listen, Alex, don’t take this the wrong way, but… Zack and I’ve been talking about you and…”

  I straightened up. “Great. You’re talking about me behind my back now, too? Is Tina in on the big conversation?”

  She reached out and smoothed my shoulders softly. It was such a departure from the cold grip Cole had used just a few minutes earlier that I couldn’t help pulling away. “Don’t, don’t,” she said. “It’s not like that. We’re worried.”

  I reached down and picked up the washcloth, squeezed it out, and blotted the space between my nose and upper lip. “Well, don’t be,” I said. “I fell. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It looks like a big deal from here,” she said. Then, softening again, she took the washcloth from me and began blotting where I’d left off. “Alex, we’re your best friends. More like sister and brother, really. If that asshole’s hurting you…”

  I backed away suddenly, shaking my head. Bethany watched me in the mirror, her hand still holding the washcloth in the air where my face had been a second before.

  In my mind, I was thinking this was it. This was my chance to finally come clean. This was my chance to let Bethany in on what had been happening to me. This was my chance to have someone on my side.

  But then I remembered what had happened at the game. Whatever. Let her go, she’d said. Whatever. Let her go, while she hugged and chatted with Tina, and made plans for Tina to go to Colorado with us. I loved Bethany, but I no longer was positive that I could trust her. I had been so totally devoted to Cole for months now, and I didn’t know who else I could turn to anymore.

  Besides, this was something that had been between just Cole and me for months. Our secret. If I told her about him pushing me and breaking my tooth, I’d have to tell her about the punches in his bedroom. And about the wrist in the tutor lab. So many secrets. So many of them. She would be mad that I’d kept these things from her. She would tell. I would have to repeat the stories over and over again, everyone angry and disappointed with me. It would be so humiliating.

  I started to feel dizzy.

  “Alex,” Bethany said, her hand looking comical, still in the air like that. “You can tell me anything.”

  But I kept backing away, holding my hands up against my temples thinking, This is it. This must be the part where I go goosehouse-shit crazy. I backed into the bed but scrambled up quickly.

  “Please,” I said. “Please don’t say anything to anyone.”

  She stood up. “So he is? You have to tell.”

  I felt tears well in my eyes. “No,” I said, pointing at her with one hand, the other still on my temple. “He’s not…. Please don’t say anything to anyone, Bethany. Please. I have it under control.”

  She started toward me, but I bolted for the door.

  “Alex,” she pleaded, and I noticed that she, too, was crying. I wondered what on earth was making her cry. It’s not like she’d lost everyone she ever loved. Not like she’d lost her mom in a car accident before she was old enough to even remember her. Not like her dad had ever crawled into a mental hole and never come out again. Not like the boy she loved had punched her in the face. Not like her best friends had moved on without her. What the hell did she have to cry about? She still had everything, and I still had nothing. Just as it’d been our whole lives. “We’ll help you,” she said, her voice thick with tears.

  “There’s nothing to help,” I said, or maybe yelled, because now that the door was open, the music was beating into my temples on top of everything else, and I seriously couldn’t pay attention to anything but the noise in my head.

  I left her there. Standing halfway between the bathroom and bedroom, clutching a dripping, bloody washcloth on Trent’s parents’ off-white carpet, tears streaming down her face, the water faucet gushing behind her. Promising to help a friend who no longer trusted her. Promising to be there for someone who insisted that there was no “there” to be.

  I found Cole in the basement, playing pool with Trent and a couple other guys from the basketball team. It was just the four of them down there, no music, no Renee Littleton, no Bethany. I could think down there.

  “Hey, there she is!” Cole said when he saw me. He took a long drink out of his beer can.

  I ignored him and slouched back on the couch and turned on the TV. Some old black-and-white movie was on, and I vegged out in front of it, not paying attention at all to what it was, figuring the lamer I could make it down here, the better chance I had of nobody else wanting to come down and hang out.

  Eventually I fell asleep, only to snap awake again when someone flopped down beside me, slinging an arm over my sore shoulder. I opened my eyes. It was Trent, and he was way drunk. I crinkled my nose at the smell of his breath, and was immediately reminded of my skinned-up face from the movement, which made my face feel as if it was being shredded up by razors.

  “Heeey, Alex,” he slurred. “You look like shit.”

  I glanced over the back of the couch. The pool game was over, and all the other guys were gone.

  “Where’s Cole?” I said, clearing the sleep out of my throat and sitting up.

  Trent laughed
in my face, pelting me with drunk-breath, and leaned into me. “You fall down go boom?” And then he laughed some more.

  I edged my way out from under him, leaving him to melt into the couch, still giggling over his joke. Hopefully he would pass out. Sleep it off. Hopefully the rest of the party wouldn’t destroy his house while he was down here face-first in the couch.

  I went upstairs and plunged back into the party, which seemed to have thinned out a little. According to the clock, I’d already missed curfew. Which meant I needed to get home before Celia realized it and woke Dad.

  Problem was, I couldn’t find Cole anywhere. I checked every room. I checked outside. His car was gone, too.

  Great. Abandoned. Very nice.

  This was shaping up to be a really shitty night.

  I sat on the porch to try to figure out what to do. People stumbled past me, got into their cars, and rumbled away. Soon I imagined everyone would be gone. Just me and Trent, snoring away on the basement couch, my broken tooth rotting and me getting grounded for pretty much ever for not coming home.

  I found Bethany and Zack playing PlayStation on a big screen in the den. It was some sort of racing game, from the sounds of roaring engines filling the room, and Bethany won, standing up and giving a victory dance.

  Her eyes landed on me and her smile faded, stopping her in mid-dance.

  “You’re still here?” she said.

  Zack turned, still holding the controller in his hand. “Oh, hey, Alex. I thought you’d left.”

  “I fell asleep downstairs,” I said. “Cole left.”

  They exchanged a look that I couldn’t quite decipher; then Zack leaned forward and turned off the PlayStation. “I’m ready to go, anyway. Kicking Beth’s ass was getting old.”

  She slapped him on the shoulder but set down her controller and left the room, saying something about finding her purse.