Dear Love, I Hate You (Easton High)

I experience my first slow-mo.

Until the first gasp reaches my ear.

Followed by the second.

And the third.

Before I know it, an amalgam of gasps and whispers ricochets throughout the spacious backyard.

He didn’t.

Xav, tell me you didn’t.

“That’s right, I wrote the confessions. Oh, and Brie.” Xavier looks Brie straight in the face. “Piece of advice, if you have to blackmail a guy into dating you, he’s just not that into you.”

The basketball team and cheer squad stare at Brie with their mouths hanging, failing to stifle their laughter as Brie’s cheeks turn bright red. I study the vicinity, half expecting to find hidden cameras or a television crew of some sort…

I never do.

The sound of glass shattering manages to peel my attention away from Xav. A woman dropped her champagne glass against the concrete patio. Except, it’s not just any woman.

It’s Xavier’s mom.

Realization finds every guest at once, her interruption resulting in a domino effect. Whispers soar around me, a wave of shock submerging the entire party.

“It’s her,” I hear a woman on my right say.

“Principal Emery is the woman in the confession,” another chimes a hair too loud in her husband’s ear.

“She slept with a minor?” his husband questions in horror.

So much for the confessions being a high school thing, huh?

Zac and Love didn’t only take Easton High by storm.

They took over all of Silver Springs.

It all started with an anonymous letter…

And two small-town kids with secrets the size of a city.

Xavier’s mom delivers the performance of a lifetime, a purposefully loud sob shooting from her throat as she makes a run for it, crocodile tears coursing down her face. Xav follows her lead, rushing off the stage without further explanation.

Everybody watches as Xavier shoulders his way toward the house. The mansion swallows him whole in an instant. No one chases after him, too shaken up to muster a reaction.

No one but me.

I’ve barely taken a step before I’m kicking my heels off, my toes smoothing over the grass as I run after the boy who set his own life on fire to extinguish the blaze ravaging mine.

The glass doors of Finn’s square-shaped house close behind me the next second, my heart pulsing in my head to the point of giving me a migraine. Worried sick, I wander into the living room and call his name.

Once.

Twice.

Nothing.

Then I hear a car engine roar outside.