Page 72 of I Hope This Doesn't Find
It was only years later, when the event had long passed, that I had even thought to bring it up with my mother as a joke. She was horrified.You could have choked to death, she’d scolded me.You should’ve said something.
But you were chatting with laolao, I’d replied.I was afraid of bothering you.
She had been silent for a long time. When she finally breathed out, her eyes were so sad and heavy I’d regretted bringing it up in the first place.Why are you this way?she kept asking, until I didn’t know if she was directing the question at me or herself.Since when did you become this way?
“Sadie,” Abigail says, yanking me back to the cabin, to the present. “There’s something . . . something I’ve been keeping to myself. I didn’t mean to, I swear—I know I should’ve said it way earlier, but . . .”
I stiffen, my pulse accelerating immediately. “What’s wrong?”
She wrings her hands. Steps forward, then stops a few feet away from me. Abigail Ong is never nervous, not before delivering a class presentation, not before a date, not before any major test. Except she’s nervous right now, her eyes flicking to the dark clouds rolling in beyond the window, then back to me. “The emails,” she says. That’s all she says at first.
I blink at her, not understanding.
“I sent them.”
I don’t process the words. There’s a faint ringing in my ears, all sound distorted, muted. I feel like I’m falling away from my own body, like those scenes in the movies where the camera zooms out and out from the person to the sky above them.
“Not on purpose,” she says, speaking in a rush, like she’s scared I’m not going to give her the chance to continue. “Not all of them. I was just—I was reading the draft you wrote to Julius, and I knew that he’d been bothering you for ages, and in that moment I thought . . . I don’t know, I was tired of seeing people walk all over you. It was only one email; it was onlysupposedto be one email. But then you had, like, hundreds of tabs open, and your laptop was lagging, and when I hit send, nothing happened, so I kind of just—I kept clicking and trying to send it, and then suddenlyallyour drafts were being sent out, and I couldn’t undo it . . .”
I’m frozen in place, rooted in my shock. “Wait,” I croak out. Squeeze my temples. “You sent the email?When?No, hang on . . .”
It’s all coming back to me, the details sharpened, everything different under a new light. When I’d rushed outside the classroom and come back to find my laptop moved. “Oh my god,” I say. Part of me still refuses to believe it. Waits for her to tell me she’s joking, she’s making it up.
“I shouldn’t have gone behind your back,” she whispers, her face pale. “I know. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I take full responsibility. I’ll—I’ll write an explanation to every single person who received an email from you. I’ll do anything. Just . . . please don’t be mad at me.”
“I don’t get it,” I say slowly, even as my heart pounds at breakneck speed, each thud painful. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”
“I tried to, I swear.” She holds up a hand as if making an oath. “But there never seemed to be a good time, and, well, I was convinced that I was doing what was right, in the long run. My whole life, I’ve believed that I know what’s best, but when the thing with Liam happened . . . It sort of occurred to me that my gut instinct might not be as reliable as I thought.” She pauses. Swallows. Eyes on the floor.
And even through all my shock and fury, I still feel a spasm of sympathy deep beneath my sternum.
“Plus for a while there,” she continues, “it seemed like everything would work out on its own. People started treating you differently, pushing you around less. And you and Julius had grown closer—”
The sound of his name strikes me like a whip. “He’s exactly why those emails should have never been sent.”
I’m shaking now. It feels like I’mbeingshaken, like there’s some invisible, overpowering force grabbing hold of my bones and nerves and muscles and jolting everything out of place. My teeth chatter; my fingers tremble. All this is so unnatural I don’t know what to do, whether to stand or sit down or march out of the room or scream my throat hoarse. Abigail and I never fight. She’s too chill about everything, and I’m too afraid of confrontation. The most heated argument we’ve ever had before today was over whether potatoes should qualify as vegetables.
“If he’d never read them, we wouldn’t have been forced to do all those ridiculous tasks and spend so much time together, and I wouldn’t have had to throw that party, and I wouldn’t have had the chance to like him. And now I do, god help me, and it—it really—it feels like—” I fumble around for the right words, the most sophisticated way to express the ache in my chest. “It feels likeshit.”
“Okay, whoa.” For a second, Abigail seems to forget we’re fighting. Her mouth falls wide open. “I thought you had, like, a firm no-swearing policy—”
“It’s horrible,” I continue furiously. “It’s revolting how much I care about him. Even now. I shouldn’t want this. I shouldn’t want him.”
Her jaw drops farther, her gaze catching on something behind me. “Um, Sadie—”
But I’m too angry to stop. “Out of all the people in this school, it somehowhasto be the one person who called me up just to taunt me when I had a fever and missed out on practice—”
“Sadie,” Abigail says again, louder.
“It’s like I’ve been poisoned,” I go on, my palms itching. “It’s like a sickness, and somehow, the cause and cure of it is him. I hate it so much, but I can’t even control my own brain—”
“Sadie.”
I freeze. Because this time, it’s not coming from Abigail. It’s a low, male voice, coming from behind me.
My whole life seems to disintegrate before my eyes as I turn around on my heel, and I’m praying it’s not him, it can’t be him,pleaselet it be anybody but Julius—
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. He’s holding out my cardigan in the doorway, and I can’t read any of the emotions on his face as he stares at me. “You left this behind at the campfire . . .”
