“Yes,” Isabelle said, quietly. “I promised Georgia I wouldn’t tell anyone, but Jesse, I’m stuck in the middle and I don’t know what to do.”
“Izzy. You know the right thing to do.”
Isabelle looked at me with those big brown eyes, and my insides twisted with guilt. Right away, I realised that was stupid. I was the one lying in a hospital bed, the future of my career hanging by a thread. It was her choice. She could haul me up, or watch me plummet. I hated that she was put in this awkward position. But I didn’t put her there. Georgia did.
“Jesse,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper, “I can’t do it.”
“Why?”
Stupid question.
“Because it’ll ruin everything for her. I can’t do that to her.”
She stood and turned away from me. She was going to walk out, let me crash and burn.
“That’s it?” I asked. “You’re not even going to think about what this is going to do to me?”
“I have thought about it!” she snapped, whirling around to look at me again. “I haven’t slept since it happened!”
Anger began to rise within me. I didn’t want to yell at her, I wanted to rewind a couple of days and not go to that stupid party so we could go back to how we were. How could she be so small-minded to think that her sister’s relationship would survive, to be more important than the one thing I’d worked for my whole life? This girl was not the girl I met when I first arrived in England. She’d been replaced by some cold-hearted lookalike.
Maybe it’s Georgia.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Isabelle said. “This isn’t easy for me either.”
“Oh really? Which part is difficult for you? The part where you get to go back to your happy, privileged life? The part where your sister and Elliott skip off together into the sunset? Or the part where you go back to being mummy and daddy’s little angel who stays at home on Saturday nights reading books and playing Scrabble?”
The words hurt my mouth as they flew out at her. I wanted to take them back. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I needed her to see what she was doing to me.
I
sabelle’s eyes filled with angry tears. “The part where I give you up! The part where I let you go because I don’t want to be forced to choose between the two people I care about the most! You think this is so simple for me, that the right answer is obvious, but it’s not! It’s not obvious, and it’s not easy. It’s killing me.”
Angry as I was, I wanted to block out some of the pain she felt. Pain that wasn’t my fault, but that I’d somehow contributed to by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Izzy. This isn’t about choosing. It’s about doing what’s right.”
“No matter what I do, it’s wrong for someone.”
A knock at the door gave us a break from our fight, and Hunter walked in holding his iPad. His expression told me he would rather die than show me what he was looking at, and I prepared myself for the next piece of crappy news to come my way.
Turns out, there was no way I could have got myself ready. Hunter put the iPad in front of me and I read the words on the screen, posted on the website of one of the UK’s tabloid newspapers.
U.S Soccer Star in Drunken Brawl
A harmless Christmas party turned into a terrifying night for a group of London college students last night. 18-year-old soccer sensation Jesse Shaw who plays for the U.S team, Westberg Warriors, is visiting the U.K after a stellar first season, but the good guy of the football pitch turned into a monster after having too much to drink. In an unprovoked attack, Shaw lashed out at college student, Leon Baxter, 17, pinning him to the wall and showering him with violent punches before he was dragged away by friends. Baxter said, “I don’t usually back down from a fight, but he (Shaw) was mental. He wouldn’t stop hitting me, screaming at me. I didn’t know what to do.” Whether Shaw’s violent outburst will damage the wonder boy’s reputation remains to be seen. Do you think he deserves to pay for what he did?
When I was done reading, I was shaking. With fear, with anger, and with complete disgust that the story was allowed to be printed without so much as an attempt by the reporters to check the facts before publishing.
Nobody cared about me in the UK, but it wouldn’t be long before the story made it home, to my manager Richard Bailey. By the time he woke up, it would be too late to put a stop to the story.
“Did I really do that?” I asked.
Hunter shook his head. “You hit him once, and you had no idea what you were doing.”
I handed the iPad to Isabelle and said, “You still wanna stick to your story?”
Her eyes widened as she read it, but she still had that same look of resolve on her face. She was going to keep the story to herself.