Page 106 of Little Lies

It had caught him off guard but she’d held his hand and smiled at him and he wasn’t a fake boyfriend anymore, he was just a boy holding hands with a pretty girl with a beautiful smile and sweet dimples and her subtly kind heart and a love for sunflowers and Pop-Tarts and big families and he wanted to kissher.

But he’d scared her off instead on Thanksgiving by crossing that line. She’d grabbed his hand to comfort him, and he’d gotten carried away. End of story.

He should have forgotten Halloween like she’d asked him to.

No less embarrassing though. He tried to mention it once in the week following Thanksgiving, but she just said they should focus on studying and barely met his eye.

That was the only thing she wanted to talk about. They hadn’t had a single nonacademic conversation since that night.

While he was running circles trying to find the right way to fix this, she’d been running circles in his head—he was dizzy on her. He would say he regretted it, but the weirdest part was . . . she was welcome to twist his mind to her will and stay as long as she liked.

Too bad she’d become distant and no matter what he did, she kept him ten feet away even when they were inches apart huddled over the last pages of her notebooks. It was a miracle she kept tutoring him, but that was where their relationship peaked and fell off. No more dates. No more chatting about themselves. No more sneaking into windows. Nothing.

Business. Just that.

The remaining public semblance of their fake relationship was when she sat at their lunch table. But even that she sometimes opted to spend it in the library instead, politely but firmly turning him down whenever he offered to join her.

He’d just gotten a taste of her real smiles, but they were back to square one with her carefully guarded, blank expressions.

Spending months around each other like that and suddenly she wasn’t fully there. He wasn’t sure how to act right: every step was off balance, food tasted off, sleep was restless. All because she wouldn’t stand too close or look him in the eye or say anything deeper than academic jargon.

He’d messed up, bad, and day by day he was becoming desperate to fix it.

His exams flew at him like a fastball and miraculously he caught them all. Tully may not be the same as before but she was a miracle worker. She will have transformed him from half failed to straight B’s and a couple A’s if these exams went as well as he felt they did. A full scholastic metamorphosis.

He’d never had a reason to be confident in his abilities but he walked out of that last classroom after his final final and he knew that his dad would be willing to fund him anywhere that would accept him. It was a huge victory, one he didn’t want to celebrate alone.

He’d been resisting Tully as best he could, but Nathan never claimed to be a strong man.

“Have you guys seen Tully?” Nathan’s eyes ran over the faces in the crowd of eager students ready to ditch the high school hallways for their ski slopes or tropical vacations. Tommy stopped whatever he was saying and shook his head.

“She’syourgirlfriend, man. It’s your job to keep track of her.”

If only she made that easy. Nathan ran a hand through his hair.

Kimmy at least offered Nathan the courtesy of looking around to appease him. “What about the library? I thought you guys worked there after school.”

“Not today, it’s Friday and I don’t have a game today.”

Kimmy gave him a weird look, like she had no idea what that meant, but Nathan was too distracted to notice. “Maybe she already left.”

They followed their fellow students out of the school into the white-covered parking lot. Their winter was delayed all through November, but as soon as December hit so did the snow. A fresh layer had taken over the cars while they were taking their exams and some of the vacation-eager kids had started collecting snowballs and tossing them at each other’s heads.

Nathan barely glanced at them as his eyes focused on the white car that wasn’t normally white parked exactly where Tully had this morning. The snow on it was undisturbed, and she was nowhere in sight.

He didn’t want to miss her, so he turned around and walked back towards the school. “I’ll see you guys later,” he called over his shoulder and dodged a stray snowball.

“Hey, wait!” Tommy yelled. “Are you coming to the party tonight?”

“No, and don’t wait up for me.” Nathan waved off Tommy’s opposition and reentered the thinning school. No one was eager to stay behind now that they had new vacation plans ahead of them for the next few weeks.

Tully wasn’t among them, and she wasn’t near her locker.

He scoured the hallways hoping to find her until the only place he hadn’t touched was the library. Maybe Kimmy was right after all.

He entered through the still-unlocked doors and saw Mrs. Pritchard sitting in her usual spot, stamping books. She looked up at him and frowned.

“What are you doing here, boy? You should be out getting drunk.” She said it all with the straightest face. Nathan hadn’t gotten used to her sense of humor yet, but he laughed and shrugged anyway, hoping it was a joke.

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