I can’t even thank her because if I do, I may lose it.

It’s so cold out that it’s snowing. And I’m shirtless, but I don’t feel a thing. I’d make an Elsa-from-Frozen joke if I weren’t completely numb.

Benny and Rhett walk me up to our room, where the party is still raging. Benny creates a barrier around me that not even Chloe or Sofía can penetrate as I slip into my room and shut the door.

“Do you—” Benny starts.

“Leave me alone,” I say.

He nods. “I’ll be out there if you need.”

My mind is buzzing, and I try to lie down and close my eyes, but all I can see is Jack’s face, the shame splashed across it when he saw his best friend.

No.

It was me.

I’m the reason Jack was ashamed and afraid.

He couldn’t even look at me, and when he did, there was such hate in his eyes.

I grab the nearest sketch pad and the charcoal pencil on my desk and rip into the nearest blank page.

Charcoal blobs start in the empty corners of the paper, becoming hard, dark swirls obscuring the white like a curse spreading across a kingdom. Out of the thick ash of pencil shavings, two figures emerge, large and looming, with sad eyes sunken like shadows. The tip of my pencil shreds through the page. The minuscule fraying threads make thick black lines like bolts of lightning.

Tears swirl into the mess until I can no longer see what I’m doing.

I fling it across the room, and it smashes into Benny’s TV.

My chest heaves, in and out, in and out, rapidly.

There’s a knock on the door. I try to tell whoever it is to go away, but they ignore me.

I look up and see Rae.

“Baby, what happened?”

I fly up and into her arms. “I wasn’t enough …”

She wraps her arms around me, holding me until I can’t cry anymore.

Chapter 21

21

Jack won’t respond to any of my text messages, and at some point during the course of the night, he blocks me, because they no longer say Delivered and have turned from blue to green.

“What’s he doing?” Benny whispers.

“Staring at his phone again,” Rae says.

“He blocked me.”

“Oh, he’s giving us full monotone,” Benny says. “It’s an improvement from the silence.” He groans as he slides off his bed and waddles across the floor like a Disney witch with a bad back. “I’m hungover after last night’s massacre.”

Rae flings a pillow at him. “Insensitive bitch!”

“He’s right,” I say. “It was a complete and total massacre. Of my heart.”

“Oh my god, that was the most dramatically gay sentence ever uttered,” Benny says. “And I’ve uttered at least four of the top five.”