AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Christ with this woman. “I mean, what’s your relationship like?” I asked slowly.
“Tucker and I are in love.” She tossed her hands in the air. “It’s just the timing that messed everything up. He wanted to break things off with Dylan the week she told him she was pregnant. There’s no love lost between those two. I think they’re both equally miserable together.”
I couldn’t argue with that one, especially considering Dylan’s reaction to the news Tucker was cheating on her.
“But you still tried to be with Row.” My eyebrows slammed together.
She looked at me blankly, like she didn’t understand why this was peculiar to me. “What does love have to do with marriage? The two don’t have to coexist.”
“You’ve always been evil,” I said, to myself more than to her. “What you did to me in high school scarred me for life.”
“About that…” She stared at her feet pensively, licking her lips. “Calla, I—”
Another knock on the door snapped us out of our trance. Allison’s father, this time. “Al, need any help?”
Tears clung onto her eyelids as she stared at me. She shook her head silently, as if he could see her. “No,” she croaked, barely audible. “I’m fine, Daddy.”
We both took a breath before she continued. “Franco. He…” She gulped, shaking her head. “We were together when you started hooking up. I…” She closed her eyes, one tear escaping past her lashes. “I…I was pregnant.”
The whole room began spinning, rapidly spiraling downward, toward a black, bottomless abyss. He had been two-timing us?
“That day…in the woods…i-it was the day after I found out. I was rabid. I was so mad. At him. At myself. At you. You were the other woman, the one standing in my way to a happily ever after. In my mind, we stood a shot. Only I guess you didn’t know that.”
“And the baby?” I choked out. I still thought she was a horrible person. It was her choice to take the worst road possible when faced with a problem. But I no longer felt she was carelessly malicious.
She pressed her head against the door, sliding along the wooden surface all the way to the floor. “My father forced me to have an abortion.”
“I…I’m sorry.” And I was. For the girl she had been. And for the woman she’d become as a result of everything that had happened.
“Yeah. So am I. Most days, anyway.”
I bit my lower lip, trying hard not to cry myself. “You could’ve communicated this to me.”
“I really couldn’t, though.” She looked up, trying to control the tears. “I had to take this secret with me to the grave. Before you dug it out, that is. Yeah, I took my anger out on you. Yeah, it was…horrific. But no one knows what it’s like to be me, okay? The expectations. The arm-bending. Being at your entire family’s beck and call. You didn’t have that. You walked around school proud that your dad was the kooky, fanny-packed physics teacher with the reading glasses that were taped together with Scotch Tape.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I blinked, surprised. This time it wasn’t a tic—it was pure confusion. “He was the coolest thing a person could be—unapologetically himself.”
She gave me the sad smile of a woman who knew she had lost the battle—and the war. “See? That was why I was jealous of you. Because of silly things like that. And here I was…with all these rules to follow. I needed to be the best. And I just got…tired.” She let her head drop between her hands. “So I decided to be ruthless.”
“Well, you are going to have to be something you haven’t tried so far. Honest. And tomorrow seems like the perfect time.” I stepped around her, nudging her to open the door. “If you won’t tell people, I will. Kul kalb biji yomo.”
“What does it mean?” She glanced up, wiping her nose.
“Every dog shall have his day.”
CAL
“I Try”—Macy Gray
Everyone stared at me.
That included pets, small children, and out-of-towners who had come to support the 10K for Kiddies charity run.
“What’re y’all staring at?” Dylan stomped along the police barriers that bracketed the road, Grav strapped to her chest, bundled in her BabyBjörn. Posters for small businesses that sponsored the event were plastered along the barricades, and the Christmas crowd was thick and festive, nursing hot cocoa with extra marshmallows. “Never seen a woman running before?”
It wasn’t that I was running that made people do a double take, though. It was that I was doing it wearing a neon-yellow windbreaker, neon-purple leggings, rainbow sneakers, and my mom’s technicolor mittens. I looked like I’d been vomited up by a unicorn. Glass half-full: If I veered off course and got lost, they could probably detect me from space.
“How do I look?” I asked Dylan, running in place by the barricades.
