27. lists and lingering silences

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Monica,

PLEASE come back, even just for a day. I'd literally trade my soul to have you here. You know how much I love my soul.

And I think you're forgetting, apart from you Jack was the only one to really speak to me. He's good to fall back on.

Love, Chloe

I sat cross-legged, my body comfortably wrapped in cotton pajamas and an old fluffy sweater with bobbles on its drawstrings

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I sat cross-legged, my body comfortably wrapped in cotton pajamas and an old fluffy sweater with bobbles on its drawstrings. Even after showering, eating, washing my mouth a million times, and resting, I still felt completely awful. Like someone was bashing a truck into my skull, and my throat was a ragged trail of broken glass.

In front of me, spread out in a messy array on my duvet, was a bunch of lists. All the lists I'd hoarded over the past few months, ranging from menial tasks like getting ready for a party, what I'd eaten in a day, or my evening workouts, to fundamentals like the amount of times Sophie checked her phone at lunch on Wednesday and a list of people close with Jonas that I'd found on Facebook.

They were all being traded for two important new lists. The first, all the things I could do to take down level one. The second, all the things I could dig up on 'Mike', the photographer

Because, although patience was important, I was losing my head. It was clear that for this to work, I needed to minimize my time on level one.

After a sleepless night, and a lot of pondering, one problem became strikingly clear to me, one I hadn't anticipated in my summer of planning. And that was subjecting myself to a personal relationship with William Bishop.

I was good at planning. Well, I thought I was at least. I'd mapped out almost everything, from quizzing myself on the correct pronunciations of fashion brands and how to accessorize them, to how I could discretely come across as unassociated with Monica Pennington. But there was one big thing I hadn't planned for.

How could I have known, having no prior experience with boys, that putting myself in an intimate relationship with one, even a false one, would have an effect on me physically? As someone who always thought logically, I hadn't realized how strong the heart could be.

And no. I didn't love William. In fact, it could have been anyone. Just someone to take away all of my firsts and bring out the stupid, hormonal teenage girl within me, who I currently wanted to strangle with the sleeve of William Bishop's jacket, which was hung on the back of my desk chair.

I hated being out of control. And that's how I was starting to feel around him. As much as I wanted to blame it on the drugs, something about him last night brought forward all the feelings my stupid insides had been developing. Because I couldn't stop thinking about him. It was awful.

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