The Anatomy of a Broken Heart //Completed//

7. Caleb

I didn't call her for the rest of the weekend. Instead, I let her cool off and waited for her to text me apologizing for her behavior. Farrah hated getting drunk. Said it was something only desperately under-stimulated, socially retarded people needed to do in order to gain the motivation needed to face the reality they couldn't cope with sober. I'd only ever seen her drunk once before: when her older sister ran away with some poor idiot who couldn't even afford to pay for a proper wedding for her. He was a starving artist and she was now a starving wife. The socialite of the decade had run away with a pauper. She must have thought that was romantic, what a joke.

By Monday, I still hadn't heard from her, so I figured maybe she wanted to wait until she saw me to apologize. In the morning, I dropped by her house like I usually did to pick her up and drive to school together, but when I got there, her maid said she'd driven herself.

"Caleb? Is that you darling?" Mrs. St. James called from inside. She appeared by the door dressed in a pink dress, too bright for the morning. "Oh, Caleb! Come inside! I knew it wasn't true. When Farrah told me you two had broken up, I just couldn't believe it, and here you are, looking as handsome as ever to put my broken heart together again."

"She told..." That wasn't right. Why would she tell her mom we were broken up? My heart began beating a little too quickly in my chest. Farrah was always very careful with her words. She never said anything that wasn't true or final, especially not to her parents. If she had told her mother we were over...

"Yeah, it was just a silly fight. Umm, I forgot that she told me she needed to get to school earlier, so I'm going to head over there now. I'll see you soon Mrs. St. James." I lied through my teeth, hoping I didn't sound as breathless as I felt, while blood rushed through my head, drowning out her reply. I got to school half dazed, not really knowing how I made it there. It was 8:30. At this time we'd still be under the bleachers, where no one would bother us, in our secret spot. So I had no idea where she could be now.

She wasn't by her locker, or in the student council room where she spent most of her afternoons. When I ran into Bo and Adriana, her best friends, they looked at me pityingly and told me they hadn't seen her yet.

Liars.

"It's okay, you'll just see her in class. She's probably finishing some work," I rationalized.

"Talking to yourself again, I see. Not crazy at all." Ansel walked up to me, looking better but still pretty beat. Both his eyes were rimmed with black and purple bruises and he bore a fat white bandage on his nose. His lip was still torn so he spoke tightly so as not to rip open the cut and start drooling blood. At least his sense of humor was back.

"Hey, have you seen Farrah?"

"Yeah, I saw her with that priss Coleman. They were putting up decorations for something in the art gallery."

Abraham Coleman. His parents and mine hated each other so, naturally, they made sure to have dinner once a month, and pretend to be the best of friends. In reality, they were keeping tabs on whatever the other couple was doing, and, obviously, my younger sister Sadie and I had to sit through that nightmare as they all humblebragged the night away over Merlot and brie.

Coleman was definitely Ivy League bound and his parents always made sure to bring it up. I'd spent summers at his California beach house and they'd spent Christmas with us in Aspen, but we were never able to get along. Not like Sadie and his little brother Carson did. There was just something so...beguiling about him. It made me not want to trust him. Charming people are always the best liars. But we pretended to be friends. It was a common practice among the Olympians—the ones who mattered anyway—to pretend. It made everything easier.