Page 116 of Landon & Shay: Part One

I gritted my teeth together, feeling sick to my stomach. “You don’t think I’m good for her heart?” How was that possible? I did the right thing. I didn’t keep secrets and crap the way Camila’s husband had. I’d been upfront and completely honest about the situation at hand. I did the right thing.

But still, in Camila’s eyes, I was not good enough for Shay.

“It’s not that, sweetheart,” she promised. Calling someone sweetheart while telling them to stay away from your daughter felt like a new kind of insult. “I just, I can tell you’re troubled. You’ve been through a lot of personal traumas—no fault of your own—but Shay doesn’t need that kind of energy in her life.”

“The same way she didn’t need your energy of not believing her and Maria about your fucked-up husband for years?” I spat out. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh, and I definitely didn’t mean to cuss at her, but my chest was hurting. My mind was a mess. I did the right thing. I told her what her husband was doing. I didn’t lie. Yet, somehow, I was the troubled one.

“I see why you’re upset. You care about my daughter. Just like I do. But if you really care, you’ll let her go, Landon. You’re off to college in a few months anyway, right? And Shay needs to focus on her future.”

“I can be her future.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You have to be her past. She deserves a fresh start. A new beginning. Please,” she pleaded, “I’m begging you to leave her alone. In the future, you’ll thank yourself for not placing your heavy bags against her shoulders.”

“You should leave now,” I said, feeling my chest aching from her words. I stood as tall as I could, and she frowned as she put her sunglasses back on.

“I’m sure you think I’m an evil lady, and maybe I am. Maybe my mind is so messed up that I still don’t know right from wrong. But tell me…would you want your daughter dating a boy like you?”

“You don’t know me.”

“No…but I know your kind—damaged. Please, Landon. I’m begging you. Don’t damage my daughter the way my husband damaged me.”

She walked away, leaving me alone with my thoughts, which was never a good thing.

I wondered how many times a person could hear they were damaged before those words planted themselves against one’s mind.

First Monica, then KJ, and lastly, Camila.

I hadn’t been able to sleep after talking to Shay’s mom. The next morning, I woke up, dragging my feet, feeling like a zombie who’d spent the whole night overthinking every single thing about myself.

Each flaw that I held was sitting at the surface of my mind, replaying itself over and over again in my thoughts. Even though Shay’s father was a complete waste of space, he told me I wasn’t good enough for his daughter, and Shay’s mom said the same exact thing. When two parents thought you weren’t good enough for their kid, that hit you hard.

Maybe they were right. Maybe I wasn’t any good for their daughter. Before me, Shay wasn’t acting out. Yet, the moment we began the bet, a wildness released from her soul. I wasn’t sure it was due to me, though. Maybe it was due to the fact that she’d been a caged bird for so long, and she was finally allowed to fly, but the gut-wrenching feeling was still there within me.

I couldn’t stop my mind from telling me how I was too fucked-up in the head for someone like Shay. I couldn’t stop my thoughts from drowning in self-doubt.

“You’re shit,” it told me. “Someone like her could never love someone as broken as you,” it taunted. “She just said she loved you to end the bet, not because she really cares.” That was the thing about anxiety and depression: there was nothing logical about it. When my brain started to spin the webs of self-doubts, it spun fast, spinning me round and round into its webs of lies. The panic in my chest made it hard to focus on my surroundings. When I got to school, I went to stop by Mrs. Levi’s office to have her smile and feed me some mumbo jumbo about self worth and how I wasn’t a complete failure, but she was in a meeting with another student.

As I walked away from her office, I heard Shay calling my name from behind, but instead of turning to face her, I kept my pace up. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to talk to her. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to talk to anyone.

I headed to the football field and went straight to the bleachers. I gripped the railings, put my head down, shut my eyes, and tried my best to shut up the noises inside my head.

Sometimes it worked. That time, it didn’t.

* * *

I skippedmost of the school day, only showing up for theater rehearsals. As I walked into the auditorium, Shay was right there with worry in her eyes.

“Hey. Where have you been?” she asked.

“Just skipped school, that’s all.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I don’t need a reason to skip school; I just did.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Landon.”

“Yeah?”

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