67 ~ Mandy! Mandy! Mandy!-5

This seemed like the perfect out to take, to nod my head and press a hand to my stomach, mumble that I had some bad sushi or dip and then she would just nod back, whether she believed me or not, and that would be it. One less person would have to know about me. But I felt myself shaking my head at her, denying this and the opportunity of escape it held, and I pressed my palm down on the floor to stand up. The room felt small, as if the walls were squeezing in on me and depriving me of my oxygen, and I felt the swing of dizziness swirling in my mind but I attributed it to the two beers I had consumed. “No, I’m not sick,” I murmured. I was gripping the edge of the sink, feeling the cool porcelain pressing hard against the bones of my fingers. “I’m . . .” I was going to say something, to tell her that I was trying to lose weight or that I was trying out this new diet—of nothing—but as I stared at those large eyes taking me in, holding me in her gaze, with this tenderness, and it suddenly made me realize why Roxanne confided in her instead of me. “I’m sorry,” I said instead of anything of this. “I’m sorry that I slapped you.” Debbie’s strikingly bright cobalt eyes averted from my countenance for a moment, her ocean rimmed pupils glancing down at her hands clasped together in front of her waist and smoothing a thumb over the chipped, red nail polish on her ring finger, and her neck seemed to flush faintly. “It’s okay,” she murmured to her hands, softly, and I just barely saw the flicker of her eyes looking down at me for a brief millisecond before they fell back on her fingers, looking more discomfited than indignant as I expected her to react.  She was nearly six feet tall standing in her pair of three inch heeled boots but she somehow managed to look small, and fragile, and her red curls looked so enduring, so naturally beautiful, that it made me a pang of jealous and scorn for my flat, dark hair. “I deserved it. I mean, I  . . .” She shrugged, her voice drifting away from her lips and she pressed her peachy, glossy lips together into a thin line, and her eyes glimmered sadly as she stared down at her hands. “If I didn’t . . .” “It wasn’t your fault,” I mumbled, my own eyes trailing down to her hands as she tightly gripped her fingers together, the lengthy and pale digits slowly turning even more ashen if that were somehow possible, and I felt like reaching for her, to touch her hand or her arm and say those words again to her, and again until she believed them, but I restrained myself and continued to stand by the sink, grasping onto the edge of the counter so tightly that I could feel it beginning to dig into my skin, possibly creating the dark purple hue of a bruise. I nearly told her that it wasn’t her that had made Roxanne grab that bottle of pills from her mother’s medicine cabinet behind the bathroom mirror but me—me and Evan Dillinger. I nearly told her that Evan Dillinger had done more to her that night than simply sidestepping her naked body as the juniors clutched her arm and chortled, but as I gazed at her saddened expression contorting her features, I stopped myself. “Things just happen,” I said instead of the truth but the truth held venom, it held the agony of hindsight, and I decided to protect her from that, shortening her burden to simply believing that her only crime was matchmaking gone horribly, horribly wrong but in a very different way. Debbie almost looked like she was about to cry, her ashen cheeks slowly blushing to a more rubicund hue that nearly matched the fiery shade of her tresses, and her eyes became glassy, beginning to well by her bottom eyelashes and she unclasped her hands, letting her wrists hit against her hips. “Yeah, because of me,” she whispered, her voice sounding pinched and familiar; familiar because I had just heard that tone in my own voice a few minutes ago as I thanked Orion for the hoodie I still adorned. “And now he’s downstairs and he’s just—”she started to cry now, two fat tears trickling down her cheeks and leaving gleaming wet paths in their wakes, and her chin started to quiver, faintly, but I was too stunned to response to her tears n0w as she spoke—“he’s just standing there like nothing ever happened and I . . . he was even flirting with another girl.” “Evan Dillinger is . . .” I swallowed, forcing the word from my throat as the lump reemerged and my muscles began to constrict around it. “He’s here?” She just nodded, downheartedly, as another tear slithered from her glittering, blue eyes.