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chapter eighteen two lone flames
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Izzy knew who she was from a very early age . . . or at least who everyone told her to be. For as long as she could remember, everybody loved her. She never knew exactly what it was. She just knew she had something special that others admired. They strived for it. They strived to be her. And that gave her confidence. But then her mother died and Izzy started going to school without makeup and she stopped talking as much, and then people looked at her like she was this sad, pathetic little thing. She felt like it too. She quickly realized people didn't love her . . . they loved the idea of being someone like her. They loved the money she had, they loved how pretty she was, how perfect she seemed to be . . . but they didn't love her. Quite honestly, they feared her, and if it were Izzy who died instead of Julia, no one would have shown up to the funeral.
And she tried to be okay with that. She tried to convince herself that people actually did like her, but she knew they didn't. They were all pretending, hoping she'd look their way and give them a few hundred bucks or whatever. They just wanted to use her, and for a while, she used them too. But using people wasn't all that. It made her feel more like an object rather than a person.
She thought maybe it was because she wasn't that person anymore that nothing made sense. She wasn't the girl who used people to fill the void in her chest because she realized that had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with her. And she was getting better at this 'trying' shit. But she was still so fucking confused.
Her life confused her. Her morals, and herself, and JJ . . . they all confused the shit out of her. She only knew that she liked JJ. Jesus, it sounded stupid to her and she couldn't really believe it all that much herself, but she did like him. She liked being around him. She liked it when he smiled at her, and when he made her laugh, and she even liked it when he did stupid shit. She thought maybe she had always liked him, and the twine wrapped around her heart was just there to remind her. She had been so blind before, and she felt stupid for thinking she could ever be just friends with JJ Maybank. Because there was no being just friends with the boy she had harbored feelings for since junior high. And that confused her . . . because she wasn't supposed to like him . . . but fucking hell, she did.
