Page 191 of Swallow Your Sorries

When I leave Rin’s room, I head to mine on autopilot.

I’m about to flop face-first onto my mattress and hope I don’t wake up for a full twenty-four hours when sniffles from Aria’s bed alert me that I’m not the first one back like usual.

“Aria?” I ask tentatively, creeping closer to the dark lump shaking on her mattress.

Her sheets smell like alcohol and when I pull her duvet back, I see they’re stained green, and an uncapped bottle of Absinthe is clasped tightly in her fist.

She’s even a bougie drunk.

We hadn’t bought absinthe on our trip into town. There was no way I could afford it.

Had she gone back to the liquor store alone?

As I try to take it gently from her grasp, she gazes up at me and in the moonlight, her blue-green eyes look downright haunting.

“Don’t believe it, Elle,” she says with a whimper.

“Don’t believe what?”

“Anything they say…those boys.”

I dry swallow, settling on the edge of her bed to listen. I don’t even have the energy to make my own spit.

“They get bored with you, Elle. They get bored and they toss you away.”

Étienne? Has something happened again?

“And theydon’tcare. And you wonder how they could’ve cared so much before when they don’t give a singular fuck about you now? All the things you’ve done. All the things they’ve said. It doesn’t matter if it was real or not. Yet you torture yourself, mulling over every single detail, wondering if that was the moment you deceived yourself into thinking you were actually invaluable to him.” She shrugs and then laughs, but there’s no humour. “Imagine that? Being invaluable. Sopreciousone day and a bitch on the side of the road the next. Games. It’s all just little games. We’re all just little toys for little boys. Until they’ve outgrown us, that is.”

When her eyes flutter back closed, I gaze at the little Gant doll on my pillow and remember the little Elle doll he has of me.

Just a toy.

Disposable.

I think of Mum -who’s yet to call me back- and the way Jarett used her up and tossed her away like trash every chance he got.

That’s what I feel like right now. Trash.

What's weird though is that I’m ready to be put in the fucking garbage if it means I get a break from being, from feeling so fucking used up.

Because at this moment, it truly feels like nothing matters anymore.

Like nothing ever did.

Like nothing ever will.

***

The weekend dawns with new clarity.

Rin and Aria’s words hadn’t persuaded me. They’d guided me further down the path I’d already been treading along.

I can’t fall for Gant Auclair and I can’t waste precious time playing his stupid games anymore because where will they lead me? Other than straight into the discard pile come graduation because on what planet would the Auclair family ever accept a girl from bumfuck nowhere? A girl who leaked Gant’s mother’s sex tape? With her own father, of all people.

Ugh!I could kill Rin for putting those stupid thoughts into my head. Her points may have been valid, but I hadn’t thought of them before, and I hate that I’m thinking of them now. I’d only ever thought about Gant and I in a lust-filled context. I’d never even considered anything past that, like a relationship or a future and lately, my growing feelings for him have me daydreaming about what it could be like. But that’s just it. It can’t be like anything.

There are no future possibilities outside of Beaulieu’s walls. The real world is just beyond those iron gates and beyond the gates there is no Gant and I. So why am I allowing myself to slip into this little bubble with Gant now when I know it’s going to burst in less than a year? Hasn’t losing out on Cinderella’s role proven that? He and I are in two different leagues.

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