The Breakup Support Group

My eyes widen so hard and so fast, that if I weren’t drunk, I’d fear that they’d fall out of my skull and land in the cup holder. “Emory!” I sound suspiciously like my mother when she’s pissed at me. “You totally stalked me. You followed me out here. Why?” I lean back from the heater, cross my arms over my chest and glare at him. “You just knew that any guy who dated me would be an asshole, huh? You just had to come see for yourself, to laugh at me.” I roll my hand. “Go on then. Say it. Say I’m a freaking idiot.”

He just watches me, his eyes dark windows on an expressionless canvas.

On another day, I might cry. Instead, I latch onto anger, build it up and tether it to my heart, keeping all of the sadness at bay. He’s already had the satisfaction of seeing my failed date. He won’t get anything else out of me tonight. “Say it.” My chest heaves and I run a tongue across my bottom lip, drawing in another ragged breath. “Go on. Get it out of your system. Tell me I’m some delusional lunatic and remind me again that I’m not a special snowflake. That I’m just some nobody who’s never even seen snow, or the mountains, or the Pacific Ocean. I’m not special or well traveled like you are. I get it, okay?”

“Isla—” Emory exhales and rubs his brow with his thumb and forefinger.

The memory of his stupid special snowflake speech sobers me right up. I sit up straighter and stare ahead. “Just take me home. Then we can go back to never speaking to each other since that’s how you prefer it.”

Emory’s phone beeps and he reaches into his pocket to retrieve it. It’s probably a message from some girl, a prettier, nicer girl than me. One he’d rather be hanging out with instead of dealing with the drunk idiot he used to consider a friend. I draw in a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing the buzz to go away.

I wish he didn’t look so sexy from the glow of his phone screen. I wish this whole stupid car didn’t smell like leather and his fresh laundry scent and I’d give away all of the scarred pieces of my heart if I could lose the memory of the last time I was in this car, holding hands with him, teetering on the edge of falling dangerously in love when it was all just a lie.

“Do you need me to get out?” I say, fumbling for the door handle. “Give you some time alone so you can call whoever just texted you?”

“I didn’t get a text,” he says, pressing the home button at the bottom of his phone. “It was my weather app.”

I scoff, shaking my head as I gaze out into the nearly empty parking lot. “You and your dorky weather app. What did it say? ‘Warning: it’s cold as shit outside?’”

“Something like that,” Emory says, flashing me a look that transports me right back to the good days when we hung out during gym and sat next to each other during the support group. I wish I could look away but I can’t. “Give me a second, okay?”

I nod. I watch him as he slides his thumb across the phone screen and then holds it to his ear. A woman’s voice answers, from the sound of it. “Hi, Mrs. Rush? It’s Emory. I was your daughter’s date to homecoming.”

My heart stops and despite the efforts of the Camaro’s heater, my entire chest freezes into a block of ice. He called my mother? She’s going to kill me.

“Emory, hi,” Mom says, her voice trilly and distant through the other end of the phone. I struggle to make out what she says. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His eyes lock with mine. “Well, there’s been a complication but things are fine. Isla had a date, and it didn’t go too well. Turns out some douche took her to Dallas.”

“He did what? Oh my God,” Mom says, loud enough for me to hear clearly. I’m so freaking confused all I can do is sit here and listen to Emory’s lies unfold. I guess it’s better than him telling her I’m drunk.

“No worries, Mrs. Rush. She needed me to get her, so I’m on my way. I should have her back home in two and a half hours.”

“You are such a sweetheart.” The rest of her sentence is too quiet for me to make out.

Emory nods. “I’ll take care of her … of course, Mrs. Rush … You, too. Bye.”

I throw him a glare. “How do you have my mom’s phone number?”

“She gave it to me before homecoming. For emergencies.”

Of course she did. “Why did you say David took me to Dallas? We’re still in Granite Hills.”

“No, I said some douche took you.” He scratches the back of his head. “I didn’t say which douche.”

His words roll around in my addled mind, and I try to make sense of them. “We’re going to Dallas?”

“Weather app,” he says as if that makes all the sense in the world. He puts the phone in my hand, and I stare at a picture of digital snowflakes next to the temperature: fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. “My awesome app just alerted me that it’s snowing up there. It’s only an hour away. I’m taking you to see it.”

Chapter Thirty

The moon hangs over us, a bright crescent peering down, watching Emory and me drive beneath its glow. Emory takes backroads that are unknown to me as we head north, toward the highway. There are no streetlights back here, and I catch an owl, perched regally on a fence post, staring straight at me as we zoom by a field. My breath fogs on the glass of my passenger window, and I wipe it away with my sleeve.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask, more to break the last five minutes of silence than to get a real answer. I’ve given up on trying to figure him out.

“You don’t need to figure me out,” he says, his eyes on the road. “You can just ask me if you have a question.”

Shit. Did I say that out loud?