Page 50 of Late Fees

Pacing the room, I avoided her eyes. “Not ignoring, I just…if I open those letters, then everything changes.”

“Exactly. The two of you can get back together.”

“I’m with Oden now.”

She tilted her head forward. “Don’t give me that bullshit.”

“I just can’t open them, okay? Wyatt tore my heart open. I didn’t know it was possible for someone to hurt me the way he did. It scares me, Ronnie. It scares the absolute crap out of me. Oden will never hurt me like that.”

“Right,” she said, pressing her lips together and holding up the letters. “Because you don’t care about him…not like this.”

“Yeah, maybe not.”

“You really don’t want to know what Wyatt has to say?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And what happens if the letters stop coming, Till? What then?”

A deep sigh left my lips as I imagined the day that thoughts of Wyatt wouldn’t haunt me, and the idea of reading his words didn’t bring me to tears.

“If that happens,” I said, looking my best friend dead in the eye, “then, I will finally be free.”

She shook her head. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”

“Until then,” I said as I reached for the letters, and she gingerly placed them in my hand, “I’m going to do my best to focus on Oden. Despite what you may think, he cares about me. And I care about him, too.”

“Tilly, I just want you to be happy.”

With my other hand, I grabbed the thick envelope from my bed.

“Well…I think I’ll be happy here,” I said, lying through my teeth as I waved the envelope in front of me.

“If you say so,” Veronica said with a conflicted smile. “Listen, I’ve got to head home. We’ll talk later, okay?”

“Yep,” I said, sitting back down on my bed. In one hand, I held the letters from Wyatt, and in the other, the packet from a Big Ten university I never thought I’d attend. In one hand was the past, in the other my potential future.

Ripping open the envelope from the U of I, I forced myself to smile as I read the welcome letter inside. With a sigh, I placed the bundle of letters back inside the front pocket of my backpack and focused on my future.

Onlymy future.

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