Moving in Reverse (23 page)

Her face was a stone wall, I couldn’t
read it. She ignored my hand, and I felt my smile
falter.

Before I could even register it, she’d
lifted her icy pink glass into the air above my head.

And poured it upside down.

I felt the sticky alcohol all over my
hair, dousing the front of the dress Lauren had gotten for me and
probably ruining it. Wiping my eyes with the back of my hands, I
looked at the girl, trying to decide whether to cry or
scream.

“
What’s your
problem
?” I shrieked,
instantly realizing that yelling was a bad idea. If half the
restaurant had been staring at us a second ago, now the entire
restaurant was.

The girl glared at me, not backing
down for a second.

“
Slut
,” she yelled, straight to my face, so physically close to me
that I started to get scared. I took a step back, and that seemed
to egg her on. “You broke up his band and then
you cheat on him?
You’re pathetic.
Go back to whatever rock you crawled out from and leave Blake
alone.”

My mouth fell open. “I—” My first
instinct was to explain, to tell this girl that I hadn’t cheated on
Blake, that I loved him, that I’d never meant to break up Moving
Neutral.

But then one of the ice cubes from her
drink slipped out of my hair and down the back of my
dress.

I couldn’t explain myself to this
girl. She’d clearly already made up her mind, and nothing I said
was going to change anything.

I scanned the room for the exit,
feeling like a cornered animal. Fortunately, just at that second, I
saw Lauren peek in from the doorway. Her face went from curious to
shocked as she took in the scene, and she immediately burst into
the restaurant, grabbing my hand and dragging me
outside.

“
What the heck?” I heard
her whisper as she hit the button to unlock the doors and I climbed
into the passenger seat. “What happened?”

I took a deep breath, feeling like I
couldn’t even answer the question.

She hated
me
.

That complete stranger, some girl I’d
never met before in my life, hated me so much that she’d poured a
whole drink on my head in the middle of a restaurant. She’d called
me a slut to my face.

She hated my guts.

And she probably wasn’t the only
one.

I bit my lip, already starting to feel
my eyes fill with tears. Lauren looked at me sympathetically, but I
felt like a time bomb, and she’d only known me for a few days. I
needed a friend. A real friend.

I pulled out my phone and typed a text
message.

It’s Casey. Can I come
over?

It was after eleven, but I wasn’t
surprised when my phone beeped in response a few seconds
later.

I showed the address to Lauren, and
she put the car in gear.

I tried to dab at the back of my hair
with my sweater, already getting pink juice on the soft leather of
her car seats.

“
It’s never just easy,” I
said, half to myself. “I keep waiting for it to finally get
easy.”

Lauren looked at me sideways, barely
taking her eyes off the road. “Nothing worth having comes easy,”
she said, smiling at me sympathetically.

I sighed, and turned up the radio.
“Wish someone had told me that last summer.”

Chapter
Thirty-Five

I told Lauren not to wait, and walked
up to the house alone. It was a trendy neighborhood, and the last
thing I needed was some photographer getting wind of a
drenched-in-alcohol Casey Snow wandering the L.A. sidewalks and
writing some story about how I was suddenly an alcoholic or a drug
addict or homeless.

There weren’t any lights on inside,
but the Los Angeles homes that weren’t gated were all built around
their fenced-in backyards. You could have two shuttered windows in
the front and a whole party out back without anyone noticing from
the street.

For
celebrities
, you know. And
their
privacy
.

But it was all just a big joke on
everyone else, because nobody really wanted privacy, did they? They
set up candid shots, they got paid and got clothes and got pampered
for every time they set foot in public. It was all styled and very
pretty, but none of it was real.

Except some of it was. I knew, just
knew in the core of my body, that what happened last summer, all of
it, was real. And no matter how many times I screwed things up or
dug myself into a hole and kept digging with all my might, I could
go back.

Some people were always going to be
like home. Like coming home, to your private backyard, where no one
can see in but you.

I rang the doorbell.

I heard a shuffle inside, a peek
through the view-hole to make sure I wasn’t paparazzi. And then the
door opened.

Even though I knew they were gone, I
was still expecting her blunt bangs from over the summer. But the
Sophie that opened the door, dressed in a tank top and pajama
bottoms, was the same and different from the girl I’d
known.

She looked me up and down, a little
sympathy creeping onto her face.

“
What happened to you?”
She finally asked.

“
Um,” I was shivering a
little bit from the night air, my dress still damp and chilly. “I
need to borrow some clothes?”

She snorted and then caught herself,
her lips forming a smile.

“
Yeah, I’d say you do.
Come in.”

I exhaled, not realizing how tense I’d
been, wondering if she was even going to let me inside.

She opened the door a little wider,
and I walked into her living room. Sophie lived in a little
bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, about the same size as Blake’s but
less expensive because it wasn’t right on the water. And it had
been decorated by a girl, which meant that it had less stark modern
furniture, and more comfy pillows and patterned rugs.

I stood awkwardly in the entryway
while Sophie disappeared into the bedroom.

“
Take off your dress,” she
said, and I fought back the urge to laugh.

“
You know I’m still dating
Blake, right?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Or Tanner,
or whoever?”

I flinched.

She flicked a hand to the stains on my
dress. “Did you forget about the 16 ounces of Cosmo or whatever
that is all over you? Jeez, Case. Did you get into a barfight or
something?”

“
Or something,” I
responded, shrugging my shoulders.

She tossed me a sweatshirt out of a
dresser from the bedroom, which I caught with one hand.

“
Want some
tea?”

I smiled gratefully. “I’d love some.”
When Sophie’s back was turned I added, jokingly, “you’re the only
rockstar drummer in Hollywood who sits around on a Friday night
drinking tea in pajamas.”

I ducked in advance, wondering if she
was going to throw something at me, but she emerged from the
kitchen with a hint of a smile on her face. She leaned against a
wall.

“
Nope. You forgot about
Blake.”

I smiled. “Not a drummer.”

“
And you, at one
point.”

“
Not a rock
star.”

“
Ah… right. Sometimes I
forget. What are you, at this point, anyways?”

I wasn’t sure if she meant it as an
insult or if she was actually concerned. More importantly, I wasn’t
sure I even had an answer to that question.

“
I don’t even know
anymore,” I said honestly. “A college student who just missed two
weeks of classes. A rock star’s girlfriend who hasn’t talked to him
in a week and a half. Some sort of model or ambassador or something
for sixties-style jean shorts?”

I was laughing at the end, hysterical
giggles that seem like they could turn into tears any second, and
Sophie looked at me like she was fighting back sympathy. I held my
breath and waited for her to talk.

“
Case, I was so mad at you
this fall, after everything that happened—”

I opened my mouth to say something, to
try to explain, and she held up a hand, silencing me.

“
It wasn’t even the lying
— it more than that. I didn’t care whether you knew Blake was
famous, we all knew you loved him. But then you took him away from
all of us. I blamed you for it.”

Tears stung my eyes. She was right —
I’d been blaming myself for it all fall. Probably Blake had been
too.

Sophie paused. “I couldn’t see how I
could be friends with you when you’d broken up my
family.”

I took a jagged breath. “I blame me
for it too,” I said, putting voice to everything I’d been thinking
since Blake had showed up at Columbia. “I took him away from
everything he loved. He followed me to school and he’d already read
all the books and he had to share this terrible dorm room, and he
lost all his best friends.” I paused, wondering whether to say it.
“He wasn’t happy there. Not without having all of you guys
too.”

Sophie leaned back against the couch,
her face unreadable. “And what about you?”

I thought about it for a
second.

Nothing I was doing was
working.

Not at school, not in Los
Angeles.

I was just reacting, propelling myself
as fast as I could go into these unformed plans, never having a
clue how I was going to solve any of my problems.

I’d spent the last three days digging
myself deeper, further from Blake, with every blowout and meeting
and free shoe.

It wasn’t all bad. But at best, it was
a distraction.

“
Do you know the story of
the lotus eaters?” I asked.

Sophie shook her head no.

“
It’s a story from the
Odyssey, where Odysseus’s ship has been lost at sea for years, and
they’re finally on their way home, but they come to this island.
And the only food on this island is this lotus plant, so they try
it. But when they do, it’s so delicious that the sailors stop
caring about getting home to their families, they stop thinking
about anything but the plant itself. They were miserable, trapped,
but they couldn’t see it. All they could see was the bliss from the
lotus fruits.”

“
Drugs.”

“
Sort of. Basically. But
more than that.” I paused. “The thing is, you can be happy wrapped
up in things that are bad for you. And things that are good for you
can make you absolutely miserable. But we’re all so bad at telling
the difference that you can never tell in the moment which is
which. And when you follow the distraction, you wind up leaving
your whole life behind.”

“
So... what’s the
distraction?”

My voice turned serious. “Everything
that isn’t Blake.”

Something flickered across Sophie’s
face. If it had been last summer, I’d have known exactly what she
was thinking, but we’d grown apart. It was like we were strangers
again. Strangers with a freight train of baggage between
them.

“
Soph?”

“
Yeah?” Her eyelashes were
darker, longer, so it felt like doll’s eyes looking back at
me.

“
I’m so sorry. About
everything, this summer. I never meant for it all to happen this
way.”

She sighed. “I know, Casey. None of us
did. I know.”

“
Okay,” Sophie said,
coming back from the kitchen and setting a mug of tea in front of
me. She sat down in an armchair opposite the couch I was on. “Start
at the beginning,” Sophie said. “Tell me everything.”

I hesitated, just for a moment. But if
everything was going to go back to normal, it had to start
somewhere.

Hadn’t I learned my lesson a hundred
times? Lies beget lies beget lies, until you’re so far from the
truth that you can’t even find your way back.

So I started talking. I told her about
my fight with Blake, being seen at the restaurant with Tanner, and
what happened afterwards.

“
Wait,” Sophie
interjected. “All this time you were a
virgin
?” When I looked like I was
about to cry, she clamped her lips shut and let me keep
going.

And then I went backwards some more. I
told her about Darby, about the awful frat guys who’d put a bet on
who could hook up with me, about the fact that I’d been an A
student in high school and was barely average at everything in
college. About the fact that Blake didn’t seem happy at Columbia,
about thinking that it had all been my fault. About skipping a week
of classes and deadlines to fly out here, and finding at the end of
the week that things were even more broken than they’d been when
I’d left.

When I was finished, she didn’t say a
word.

We sat there, in silence, until I did
the only natural thing for a person to do in that
situation.

I started to cry.