Two Birds, One Stone

21. Peer Pressure

The rest of the week was hell.

     I thought I might feel better, physically, after a couple of days. But when I woke up on Friday morning, I still felt as if I hadn't slept at all, and my head still ached, and my stomach was still in knots.

     I hadn't spoken to Jamie all week. I'd spared a few glances at him, because I couldn't stand not seeing him at all; not once had I found him looking back at me.

    After finding out on Wednesday that Jamie was eating lunch by himself on the bleachers, Vanessa left Bryan and I to sit with him, and hadn't eaten with us since. I couldn't help but wonder how the minutes passed between them. Did they eat in silence, or did they talk? If they talked, did he ever mention me? Did they get along?  When I thought about it, I got this unreasonable, jealous pang in my chest; it seemed so backwards that Vanessa, hardly an acquaintance, was spending so much time with Jamie, while I had ruined my own chances of doing so. 

     It wasn't like I hadn't thought about trying to talk to him again. Every time I stood up to approach him, I had to sit right back down, because the idea was nauseating, and the ticking in my head would start, like a warning — one more step and you'll panic, right here, right now, in front of everyone.

     Not that I had done a very good job of controlling my anxiety. Sometimes I had to pull over on the side of the road, or hurry to the bathroom, or suddenly abandon a conversation, just to go splash water on my face and cool down and breathe and wait for my heart to stop pounding. I wondered when the next bad one would come, and I would ruin something else.

     Stevie came down that weekend, surprising the whole family. My parents asked her why the visit was so random, but she told them that she just really wanted to see us. When they asked how she was doing, she looked right at me and told them she was doing better, now that she was back in therapy.

     She spent most of the weekend with me, up in my room. She watched my favorite movies with me and told me about her stupid professors to try make me laugh and hugged me while I tried not to cry. We didn't talk about Jamie, but I knew we were both thinking about him.

     When she left on Sunday evening, she took with her my only anchor. Without her deliberate distractions and constant comfort, it seemed easier than ever for my mind to drift to the wrong places. The feeling carried over to Monday morning, and every bone in my body steered me away from school, but somehow I still ended up in my car, black tie around my neck, driving toward the last place I wanted to be. I expected the morning to start like any other: I would meet with Bryan and our other friends — the smart ones that had chosen us over Zack's bullshit — and we would hang around one of our cars until the bell rang. Before I could even get out of my own car, however, a loud knock at the passenger window hand me jumping an inch off of my seat, and I looked over with wide eyes to see Bryan bending over, looking unusually ruffled.

    "Open up!" he said, muffled by the door between us. I unlocked the door and he sat heavily on the seat, staring ahead for a moment before he turned to me. "What the hell did you do?"

     Blinking, I said, "Uh, what?"

     "To Jamie," he snapped. "What did you do?"

      My eyebrows lifted in surprise. "We . . . fell out."

      Bryan scoffed, unimpressed and impatient, the look on his face one of mixed frustration and concern. "Cut the bullshit, Liam. You dumped him. What I don't get is why, because you both seem pretty damn miserable, and —"

     "Hold on," I interjected, holding a hand up and leaning away from him as if I wanted him to repeat himself. Not because I hadn't heard him -- I'd heard him loud and clear -- but because his words didn't add up in my head, and I was racking my brain for any memory of him speaking another language. One where the words you dumped him roughly translated to you guys had a bad -- platonic -- argument. After several seconds of staring -- wide-eyed on my part, impatient on his -- the whirring behind my ears died down and I realized no, Bryan did not speak some kind of inverse-English, and yes, he somehow knew about me and Jamie.