Page 3 of The Lucky One

“It’s not my fault he cheated.” I huffed out a breath and raked my hair up for a ponytail. “And I’m tired of her thinking what I did was the same. Paul and I were on a break! Plus, Jon wasn’t some stranger I met downtown. Jon was—”

The hair tie ripped and flew across the hall. “Crap!” I turned to my locker and closed my eyes to take a slow, controlled breath. Something I found myself doing more often than I’d like to admit. When I turned around again, Danielle passed me another hair tie from her locker.

“I know you don’t think that Jon cares about me but he does,” I told her. “What we have is real.” This time the ponytail held. It was messy and greasy but I didn’t care.

“Oh, Emi...” Danielle thrust her hands into the pockets of her cooking pants. “I just... I don’t want you to get involved with the wrong people again.”

“He’s in rehab, Danielle. He won’t be hanging out with Marna and them ever again.”

I pushed back the shame crawling up my throat. I’d been at Marna’s myself when the cravings got so bad I nearly caved. Luckily no one was there and the back door was locked.

“If he stays sober.” Danielle pinched her lips.

I slammed my locker door closed. “He will.”

“For now. But staying sober is a lifelong commitment. You can’t be naive about this and believe all the stories he tells you.”

Stories. That’s what everyone thought—that I was a naive little girl, not seeing that I got led on by the fake narrative Jon served me. But they were wrong. I was the player, not the played.

“Anyway.” Danielle closed her locker and threw me a sly smile. “Prom is only two months away! We should get started on our vision board. I have so many ideas for your hair. It got so long again. I can cut it if you like but it’s healthy enough, and...”

All the way to class she kept talking about how long she’d been waiting for prom, but my mind was stuck on its own track. Were Jon and I even dating? Would he take me to prom? And what would happen with us after my exchange year was over in June?

A stupid shred of skin on my finger had been bothering me since first period. I bit the side of my nail to get rid of it.

“Emily? Why aren’t you saying anything?” My counselor Caroline rested her notepad on her lap and leaned forward in her chair.

“Sorry, what did you say?” I shoved my hands under my thighs to stop myself from picking at my skin again.

The room was plain except for a well-tended plant and an abstract painting with randomly speckled colors. Depending on my mood, I either liked the painting or found it repulsive. Today I was leaning toward the latter.

“You seem a little distracted. Did something happen?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

I hadn’t complained when Gena and Henry set up these meetings at school. I wanted nothing more than to feel fine again. For him—for us.

And I wanted to repair the trust I had broken with Paul’s parents by sneaking out when I was grounded and going to a house party in the middle of the woods. The hours of torture they must have endured, thinking something had happened to me...

I thought if I stayed home, got a job and attended these meetings, I could heal the damage. But trust doesn’t work like that. Once broken, there will forever be this little shard burrowing in your brain, stabbing daily reminders at you. It was in the way Gena questioned me about every detail of my day. The way I woke from nightmares about Jon rejecting me after all.

“Are you sure?” Caroline asked, and I had to keep from rolling my eyes. Conversations with her were a minefield of truths. Despite my attempts to hide my feelings, she had this uncanny knack for picking up on everything. By now she knew about eighty-eight percent of what had happened, yet she didn’t look at me differently. Probably because of that twelve percent I hadn’t told her yet.

“You said time would help, but I don’t feel any better.” I shifted on the spot, pulling out my hands from under my legs. Why did the artist think it was a good idea to blend red and pink? The sharpness of the red clashed painfully with the delicate softness of the pink, almost swallowing it.

“It’s only been two months, Emily. What happened to you was traumatic. Don’t be harsh on yourself, okay?”

“I know.” I sighed. That was what everyone told me. But it’s hard to go easy on yourself when there’s so much guilt in your heart and you don’t know how to fix it.

I knew who could, though. He could fix anything broken in my heart. And it was only a matter of days until I would finally see him again. My legs wiggled impatiently in my chair.

“You looked excited for a moment there. What are you thinking about?” Caroline asked.

I was thinking how Jon would laugh at your nullachtfünfzehn (a German saying for totally generic) advice. But there was no way I would tell her that.

“Jon’s coming home in a few days.”

Now it was Caroline sighing. “Right, but be prepared for it not to go how you imagine, okay? You don’t know how Jon is doing or how he feels now that he’s sober. It could be a lot for him.”

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