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Finally I took the first photo we’d ever taken together… and held it preciously in my trembling hands. We were on the merry-go-round at a local carnival — one of those traveling state fair things that set itself up and took itself down over the span of a single weekend. We’d met at the ring toss. I was still holding the stuffed unicorn he’d won for me; the one that was upside-down and probably very confused in the middle of our front lawn now.
My hands shook as my eyes glassed over with tears again. The photo had always meant so much to me. The two of us looked so happy, so excited. We had everything ahead of us...
I could rip it in half right now, and that would be it. It could never be retaken. I could never go back.
Do it.
My fingers tightened, creating the beginnings of a crease that would turn into a tear. It would be so easy and cathartic, shredding the photo. Severing that last link between a past we enjoyed so much together, and a future I now knewwould never happen.
BZZZZZT!
I stopped, letting the sound of my buzzing phone become the photo’s stay of execution, at least for now. It was Drake again. There were twenty-three new text-messages, of which I hadn’t read a single one. But now he was calling me…
“Hello?”
Drake hesitated at the other end of the phone, as if he hadn’t expected me to pick it up at all.
“Sloane?”
“Yeah asshole,” I spat acidly. “Who else would it be?”
“Sloane I’m so worried about you!” Drake cried. “You haven’t been answering my calls, my messages, anything at all! I was starting to think—”
“Who is she?”
For a split second I thought he was going to actually tell me. Instead, he decided upon more lies.
“What? W—Who are you talking about?”
“The girl!” I shouted tearfully. “The blonde you were sitting with at the sandwich shop!”
“Sandwich sho—” he paused stupidly mid-sentence, as if something suddenly — and innocently — occurred to him. “Oh,Sydney?She’s just a friend! A friend who—”
“A friend who you hold hands and play tonsil-hockey with?” I demanded.
For some reason, I was having fun. Even wounded and angry, there was an intoxicating sense of power that came with having the upper hand.
“Isawyou, dickhead,” I chuckled, almost manically, “with my own two eyes. I stood there for a whole minute, watching as you made out with this red-lipped bimbo, who I somehow kn—”
HOLY SHIT!
It came to me at once, in flash of insight. The girl. Her face. Her big-toothed, red-lipped smile — all bright and cheerful — as she handed me back a few dollars in change.
The girl from the Christmas tree lot.
She’s been the one who sold us our tree! The one who I’d paid with cash as Drake helped one of the lot’s workers tie the tree securely to the roof of his Range Rover.
She’d wished us both a Merry Christmas before we drove off, staring strangely at my boyfriend the whole time. I remember her being all doe-eyed for him. I even remembered teasing him about it on the way home.
“You’re being silly,” Drake had laughed dismissively. “Was she even pretty? I barely noticed her.”
Somehow I’d let him convince me I was being foolish. I’d even thought it was cute that someone else had an insta-crush on my boyfriend. We decorated the tree together in the hours that followed, drinking wine and eating snacks I’d fixed earlier. It was one of the few good times we had together recently.
And now…
And now he’s lying through his fucking teeth.
“Sloane? SLOANE?”
