Page 50 of 10 Things I Hate About Prom
“I didn’t…” Again, I can’t find the words.
“Didn’t what?” His voice is harsh in a way I didn’t think was possible from him. Not to me. This is what I’ve made him—angry and bitter and cold. Suddenly, his expression shifts as something clicks inside him. “Wait…is this why all of my promposals went sideways? Were you just sabotaging all of them?”
“No!” I reply quickly, as if that makes what I did any better. “Not the whole time.”
“How long?”
“Just since the pep rally.”
He runs a hand down his face, massaging at the tension in his jaw. “Fuck, Ive. Seriously?”
It’d be easy to break down and sob, beg for forgiveness. Standing my ground is harder. “I’m so sorry, Quin. So,sosorry.”
He plows right past my apology. “So, the whole thing with Coach Mills’s car…you did that on purpose?”
I shrug, the movement making me ache. “Kind of. I promise I didn’t know it was his car specifically, though!”
Joaquin gazes somewhere beyond the trees, so deep in thought his face has become unreadable.
“Why?”
I wish he’d asked me anything else—how I did it, how I planned it—anything except why. The truth I’d carried in my heart when I got here, a wish for a future with him as sweet as the funnel cake we’d eaten together last week, turns sour on my tongue. I may not have understood how I felt when I made the first move, but there’s no way I can tell him the full truth now. Even if he never speaks to me again. I won’t tear myself open, pour myself out to him, give him the rawest and most vulnerablepart of myself in the same breath I used to tell him I’d sabotaged him.
We won’t get our happy ending, but he still deserves better than that.
“Because it was her,” I mutter, the lingering bitterness I thought I’d squashed coming back with a vengeance now that the walls I built around my feelings have crumbled. Not the whole truth, but it’s not a lie either.
“For real?” he scoffs. “Danny’s a shithead for what he did to you, but you can’t put all the blame on Tessa for somethinghedid.”
“It doesn’t matter!” I snap. “They hurt me—shehurt me. You saw how terrible I felt after that. How I blamed myself and always felt like I wasn’t good enough—”
“You’ve always been more than enough—”
“It doesn’t matter!” I interrupt, ignoring the sincerity in his voice. “I’ve been afraid of love foryearsbecause the one guy who actually seemed interested in me only cared about me for two weeks, and threw me to the curb once someone better came along. And now I’m losing my best friend to her too.”
“You were never going to lose me, Ive,” he says, his voice tense, caught somewhere between frustration and sadness.
“Well, it feels like I already did!” I shout, tears stinging my eyes. “All we talk about is Tessa, about prom, about all of these promposals. And can you blame me for not wanting to see my best friend get publicly humiliated like every other Cordero High dope because he decided to ask out someone who gets off on crushing people like cockroaches?!”
He crosses his arms, voice quiet as his gaze falls down to his sneakers, unusually shy considering how fired up he’d been seconds ago. “It would be different.”
“What if it wasn’t?”
“Then it isn’t!” The vulnerability is gone as quickly as it appeared as he throws his hands into the air and lets them fall limply back to his sides. “And that’s my choice to make, not yours.”
“I…I know, but—”
“But nothing.” He stomps his foot as if to punctuate the statement. “You don’t get to do this, Ivelisse. You don’t get to be a freakin’ puppet master, pulling the strings on my love life.”
“I wasn’t…” I exhale sharply, cutting myself off as I pivot from excuses to focusing on what’s more important: apologies. “I said I was sorry, Joaquin. And I’ll say it a thousand times, and then another thousand more if you need me to, but please, letme—”
“Just stop,” he says, his tone clipped and to the point, a sense of finality to it. He turns his back to me. My fingers twitch, resisting the urge to wrap my arms around him. Cling to him one last time. Inhale and try to remember the scent of home before it walks away from me for good.
“You don’t get to do this,” he says again, his voice quiet but rattled, like it’s taking everything in him not to shout instead. “Not after I poured my heart out to you, and you pretended it never happened.”
“You…what?”
But he never hears my question, already gone by the time I’m able to squeak it out through the fog of confusion. I have noidea what he meant, and I guess now I won’t know. Again, I’m rooted in place, unable to chase after him even though every part of me screams at me to do it. But I can’t. I’ve hurt him enough for one day.
