Chapter 99: Broken

POV: Carly

She heard the whole thing.

Not clearly, not every word, but enough. His voice through the door, low and strained in a way she had never heard it before. Katy's voice cutting back. The back and forth of it muffled through the wood while Carly sat on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest and her back against the bed frame and her hands pressed flat against the floor like she needed the physical contact with something solid.

Then the corridor went quiet.

Then Katy came back in and closed the door behind her.

"Got rid of him." She said simply, sliding back into the room. "He'll be back but not tonight."

Carly nodded. She didn't trust her voice enough for anything more than that.

She had changed out of her cheer uniform while Katy was in the corridor, into a tank top and pajama shorts, moving through it mechanically without thinking. She had almost reached for the burgundy Henley folded on the shelf above her desk, the one he'd let her keep from that first night in his room, and had stopped herself and put her hand down and hated herself slightly for how badly she had still wanted to reach for it.

She climbed into bed instead.

She lay on her side facing the wall and pulled the blanket up and closed her eyes and told herself she was going to sleep now and stop feeling things. That was the plan. That was the entirely reasonable and achievable plan she had for the next several hours.

Her body ignored the plan completely.

She lay there with her eyes closed and felt every single thing she was trying not to feel and the effort of holding it all back while Katy settled back into her own bed was enormous and unsustainable and she knew it was unsustainable.

Then it broke.

It came out of her all at once, the way things did when they'd been held for too long. She pressed her hands over her mouth and curled tighter and felt the sobs come up from somewhere deeper than her chest, moving through her whole body, her shoulders shaking, tears running sideways across her face into the pillow.

She didn't want to be doing this.

She didn't want to be crying over him, not like this, not with this particular quality of grief that felt more like loss than anger. She was supposed to be furious. Furious was easier. Furious had somewhere to go.

This just hurt.

She heard Katy get back out of bed.

She heard Whitney sit up.

She kept her face in the pillow and her hands over her mouth and wished very hard for the floor to open up and absorb her entirely.

Katy's hand came to rest on her arm from behind. Light contact. Not pushing. Just there.

Carly shook her head.

"What did he do?" Katy said, very quietly.

She couldn't answer. Not yet. Not in any words that would come out in the right order. She just shook her head again and felt Katy stay exactly where she was without pushing further, which was somehow the right thing and made it worse at the same time.

She heard movement on Whitney's side of the room.

She didn't look.

The knock at the door made her jump.

Hard. Insistent. The knock of someone who had decided they were not leaving.

She scrambled upright, back pressed against the bed, heart going at a completely unreasonable speed.

His voice came through the door.

"Carly. I know you're in there. I can hear you breathing."

She and Katy looked at each other in the dark. Katy's expression was asking a question. Carly's answered it — she shook her head, fast and small, and pulled her knees back up to her chest.

Katy looked at her for one second.

Then she stood up, slipped out through the gap in the door, and pulled it shut behind her.

Carly sat on the floor in the dark and listened to the muffled corridor and did not move and did not breathe any louder than she had to and waited.

It felt like a long time.

Then the corridor went quiet again.

Then Katy came back.

"He's gone." She said. "For tonight."

Carly pressed her lips together and nodded.

"He'll be back." Katy added. Then, after a pause: "He cares about you. That part's real."

"Kat." Carly said. Her voice came out rough and wrecked.

"I know." Katy said simply. "I know."

She went back to her own bed.

The room was quiet again.

Carly stayed on the floor for another minute. Then she got herself up and climbed back under the covers and lay there looking at nothing, arms at her sides, trying to remember how to breathe at a normal rate.

She felt hollowed out.

Like everything she'd been carrying for the past several weeks had rushed out of her all at once and left the space it occupied completely empty. The happiness, the fear, the warmth of him, the specific joy of finally feeling like herself in someone else's presence. All of it sitting somewhere outside of her now, still visible but not accessible, like looking at something through glass.

She had never been heartbroken before.

This was what it felt like. She was sure of it. Hollow and shattered and bitter and exhausted all at once, a specific combination that she now understood was its own category of feeling, not reducible to any single emotion she'd had a name for before.

She stared at the ceiling.

Then Whitney said her name.

Quiet. Hesitant. Just the one word, barely above a whisper.

Carly turned her head.

Whitney was sitting up in her bed, picking at her fingers the way she did when she was nervous, her expression in the dark doing something careful and uncertain.

She cleared her throat. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Carly stared at her.

Ten years. Ten years of the closest friendship she had ever had, ending in a corridor outside a pep rally, and now at one in the morning with her lying in her bed broken over a boy, Whitney was asking if she wanted to talk.

She felt the anger surface through the grief and the combination of it was sharp and clean.

"Oh." Carly said. "Now you want to talk to me."

Whitney sighed. "Care—"

"When I'm at the lowest I've ever been." Carly said. Her voice was shaking. "When everything hurts and I'm broken and you've been proven right about everything you warned me about. Now I'm worthy of your attention. After weeks of me reaching out and trying to get a single word from you." She shook her head. "No. I don't want to talk to you. Not tonight."

Whitney's mouth opened.

Carly turned back to the ceiling.

She heard Whitney settle back against her pillow.

Nobody said anything else.

Carly lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling fan turning slow overhead and let the silence do what silence did, which was make everything feel exactly as heavy as it actually was.

She closed her eyes.

She tried to sleep.

POV: Katy

She waited until both of them were still before she let herself think.

She was good at that. Performing sleep while being entirely awake. She had spent enough years in enough circumstances where that skill was necessary that it had become automatic.

She lay in the dark and listened to Carly's breathing slowly even out, the specific shift from ragged to shallow to the rhythm of someone finally, exhaustedly, surrendering to unconsciousness.

She lay there and thought about the corridor.

About Niko Monroeson standing outside that door in a blood-stained shirt with his jaw tight and his eyes doing something she had not expected. Something cracked open. Something that had the specific quality of a person who was used to not caring about things, trying very hard to care about one specific thing and not knowing what to do with how much it hurt.

She had seen that look before. On other people, in other circumstances.

She filed it away with everything else.

She thought about what he'd said when she was turning the doorknob. The quiet of it. The way he said it to the corridor and not to her, like he was saying it to himself, like he needed to say it out loud to make it true.

I'm not giving up on her.

She stared at the ceiling.

She thought about what she had said to Whitney earlier, everything she'd said that she probably shouldn't have but had said anyway because someone needed to and she wasn't built for silence when something true needed to be stated.

She thought about it's a privilege to have long friendships and how that had come out of her mouth without her fully planning it and how much she had meant it.

She thought about all the people she had stopped being able to find across the span of a very long life. How many of those friendships had ended not from any single dramatic event but from the slow accumulation of distance and time and the specific cowardice of choosing not to reach across it.

She thought about Carly lying across the room, finally asleep, twenty years old and heartbroken for the first time, with no idea how much worse it was going to feel at thirty or sixty or a hundred and ten.

She thought about how glad she was that Carly didn't know that yet.

She turned onto her side.

She closed her eyes.

She let the night do the rest.