Page 87 of Wish You Were Her
She didn’t want to flee Lake Pristine. She wanted to stay.
She had the strange feeling that she had left her chance at peace behind.
Chapter Twenty-Four
By lunchtime, Jonah had had enough.
He was able to dodge the last of the remaining reporters, but he was sick of cars slowing down so Old Man Mason or his schoolfriends’ fathers could lean out of the window to congratulate him, or try to shake his hand. He hated how Mrs. Heywood quietly asked him if he was going to make an honest woman out of “the actress.” He despised the looks, the stares and the whispers. He was used to the small-town experience of Lake Pristine.
But this was something else entirely.
He pushed through festival-goers and burst into the small tent reserved on site for festival employees and volunteers. Simon was standing up against the far wall with a bottle of water, talking with Kerrie and Skye. Jonah stalked toward his ex-friend without a second care and grabbed him by the neck.
“The hell?!” squawked Simon, spluttering and spraying water everywhere as Jonah shoved him against the flimsy tent wall.
“Give me a good reason not to maim you right now,” Jonah said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Because I’m struggling, Si.”
“Let go, you lunatic.”
“No. You fucked up. What were you thinking?”
He could vaguely hear Kerrie and Skye demanding that he let Simon go, but he was too far gone. He stared at his oldfriend, a friend he had always made allowances for. Jonah had been forced to fight his way out of special needs classes, where his disability had been foolishly considered synonymous with unintelligence. Simon, who had struggled with reading, had been his lighthouse in the storm. They had made mischief together. Jonah had overlooked the exceedingly rare occasions where Simon had lashed out at him, and only him, attributing it to the idea he was a lot to deal with as a friend. After all, that was all he had ever heard as a kid. From teachers to absent fathers, he had been told he was “a lot.” So he took Simon’s sporadic flashes of meanness as the tollbooth fee on the road to having a friend.
But this latest act was too much for Jonah to unimagine. It was unforgivable. And Jonah was starting to realize that he had been the only one accepting Simon’s weaknesses while everyone else got the sunshine. And then he had made a huge mistake with Allegra.
“You’ve fucked everything, Simon,” he snarled, and he couldn’t quite manage to keep the hurt from bubbling up as he spoke. “You’ve brought a shitty tornado down on her.”
The smallest flickering of shame passed through Simon’s gray eyes before outrage took its place. “Of course this is about her!”
“She’s the one having her name and pictures splashed all over the world,” Jonah hissed. “What did you think would happen? Do you have any idea what these people are going to do to her? What they’ll print about her?”
“I wasn’t thinking, Jonah,” snapped Simon, bitterly. “Clearly! Clearly, I was not thinking. Some editor calls me in the middle of the night. Said there are pictures of me, someone put them on the internet and identified me. Asked for some confirmation. I didn’t know what to do!”
“Say ‘no comment.’ Hang up! God, Simon, you’ve never had a scam or cold call before? Just hang up the damn phone!”
“Why are you even mad?” Simon shoved Jonah, hard enough to dislodge his grip but not enough to unbalance him. “You get to look like a hero and I look like a creep!”
“Youarea creep, Simon. You paraded her around like an ornament and then backed her into a corner.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Simon said, staring into Jonah’s face as though he were seeing his friend for the very first time. “I’ve always had to make excuses for you. I’ve always had to teach you shit! And she picks you? It makes no sense.”
Jonah could tell that the confusion was real. While Simon wore sunny, affable masks for most of the town, he had always been honest with Jonah. He could tell that his old schoolfriend couldn’t understand the supposed injustice of it all.
“You stole a kiss and then got pissed o—”
“Stole a kiss?” Simon laughed, a hollow sound with no humor. He threw a look to Kerrie and Skye. “Listen to him. Loves to use his big words and stupidly formal phrases. To lord it over us that he’s read everything in that shop. Fucking Cyrano right here.”
“Well, what can I say, Simon. Some of us actually read the books, we don’t just use them to flirt with customers.”
“Do you even know what flirting is, you sad freak? Because let me assure you, that’s not what Allegra was ever doing with you. And it seems like she’s fled this place as fast as possible. Think she wants to get away from you. You and your weird little fucked-up brain—”
Jonah punched him right on the jaw and he went down like a house of cards in the breeze. Simon was momentarily disorientated, then rage and adrenaline took over his body. He tackled Jonah to the ground and they began to scrap, landing blowsand cursing between hits. Jonah was doing more damage. He could hear Skye laughing and Kerrie shouting for help, but he had no intention of stopping. Neither, it seemed, did Simon.
They rolled on the ground and Simon even grabbed a fistful of Jonah’s dark curls before the latter was suddenly and sharply hauled away from Jonah. The look of surprise on Simon’s face was almost comical, but when both of them realized who had broken up the fight, they grew demonstrably more serious.
George Brooks stood over both of them with enough rage and disappointment to fill the entire festival site.
“Jonah,” he finally said. “Come with me, please.”
