When people say I’m lucky, what they really mean is that Nate is way out of my league. But I’m a little younger, so at least there’s that.
I leave the bathroom to finish dressing, and Nate follows me to do the same. I select a crisp white blouse, buttoned up to my throat, and I pair it with a tan skirt, because in New England, you’ve got only three months of skirt weather—four if you’re lucky. After sliding into a pair of pantyhose, I slip my feet into a pair of black Jimmy Choo stiletto pumps. It’s only after I’ve got them on my feet that I notice Nate is watching me, his brown tie hanging loose around his neck.
“Eve,” he says.
I already know what he’s going to say, and I’m hoping he won’t say it. “Hmm?”
“Are those new shoes?”
“These?” I don’t lift my eyes. “No. These are years old. In fact, I think I wore them on the first day of school last year.”
“Oh. Okay…”
He doesn’t believe me, but he looks down at his own shoes—a pair of brown leather loafers that really are years old—and doesn’t say another word. When he’s upset, he never yells. Occasionally, he will scold me for things I should not have done, but he rarely even does that anymore. My husband is admirably even-tempered. And in that way, I suppose I am lucky.
As Nate does the buttons on the cuffs of his shirt, he glances at his watch. “You ready to go? Or do you want to grab breakfast?”
Nate and I both work at Caseham High School, and today is the first day of school. I teach math, and he teaches English. He is probably the most popular teacher in the entire school, especially now that Art Tuttle is gone. My friend and fellow teacher Shelby told me that Nate topped the list that the senior girls made of the five hottest teachers at Caseham High. He won by a landslide.
We rarely carpool to work in the morning. It does seem decadent to leave from the same place and arrive at the same location and yet take two different cars, but he always stays later than me at school, and I don’t want to be stuck there. But since today is the first day of school, we are traveling together.
“Let’s go,” I say. “I’ll grab coffee at school.”
Nate nods. He never eats breakfast—he says it unsettles his stomach.
My Jimmy Choo pumps clack satisfyingly against the floor as I make my way to the front door of our two-story house. Our house is small—we had to pay for it on two teachers’ salaries—but in so many ways, it’s the house of my dreams. We have three bedrooms, and Nate talks about filling the other two bedrooms with children in the near future, although I’m not sure how we will achieve that on our current schedule of intimacy. I went off birth control a year ago, just to “see what happens,” and so far it’s been a lot of nothing.
Nate climbs into the driver’s seat of his Honda Accord. Whenever we go anywhere together, we always take his car, and he always drives. It’s part of our routine. Three kisses per day, sex once a month, and Nate is always the one who drives.
I am so lucky. I have a beautiful house, a fulfilling career, and a husband who is kind and mild mannered and incredibly handsome. And as Nate pulls the car onto the road and starts driving in the direction of the school, all I can think to myself is that I hope a truck blows through a stop sign, plows into the Honda, and kills us both instantly.
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Chapter Two
ADDIE
I WOULD GIVE anything if it meant I didn’t have to get out of this car.
I would cut off all my hair. I would read War and Peace. Hell, I would set myself on fire if only I didn’t have to walk through the doors of Caseham High. I can’t say it enough. I don’t want to go to school.
“Here we are!” my mother says brightly. And unnecessarily, because I can clearly see we are parked right outside the school. I’m not that dumb, in spite of everything that went on last year.
She drove me to school this morning in her gray Mazda, I think because she knew if I took my bike to school like I have for the past two years, there was no chance I would have ended up at the high school. So she took the day off from her nursing job at the local hospital and is babysitting me to make sure that I show up for my first day.
I glance out the passenger side window at the red four-story brick building that has become such a big part of my life over the last two years. I rub my eyes, exhausted because I woke up at stupid o’clock this morning to get here on time. I remember how excited I was on my first day of freshman year at Caseham High. And I liked high school—I wasn’t super popular and my grades were decidedly average, but it wasn’t bad at all.
Until it was.
I spent the entire summer babysitting for my neighbors’ kids and also campaigning not to go back to school in the fall. There’s only one public high school in Caseham though, and the private schools are way out of our price range. We could have tried to go to school in another town, but it would be too far for me to take my bike, and a school bus wouldn’t pick me up. My mother explained this to me with dwindling patience every time I begged her to reconsider.
“Maybe,” I say hopefully, “I could be homeschooled?”
“Addie,” she sighs, “come on.”
“You don’t understand.” I clutch my backpack to my chest but don’t make any move to unbuckle my seat belt. “Everyone is going to hate me.”
“They won’t hate you. Nobody is even going to remember.”
I let out a snort. Has my mother ever met a high school student?
“I mean it.” Mom kills the engine, even though we’re parked in a zone where you’re not supposed to leave your car, and someone is probably going to yell at us to move along any minute now. “Teenagers are only interested in themselves. Nobody is going to remember what happened last year. Nobody cares.”
She is so wrong. So totally and utterly wrong.
Sure enough, somebody honks at us. First, it’s a single honk, then a smattering of honks, then it seems like one person has sat down on their horn accidentally and isn’t getting up anytime soon.
“I can pull over somewhere else,” Mom offers helplessly as she starts the engine again.
What’s the point? If we pull over, she’s just going to give me a pep talk. I don’t need a pep talk. I need a new school. And if that’s not going to happen, this is all a whole lot of pointless.
“Never mind,” I mutter.
My mother is calling my name as I leap out of the car, but I don’t stop and turn around. My mom is useless. She says all the right stuff, but in the end, she doesn’t have to deal with this. She doesn’t have to deal with the fallout of what happened last year. Of what I did.
As soon as I’m out of the Mazda, I can almost feel everyone’s eyes staring at me. There are plenty of girls at the high school who dress for attention, but I was never like that. I always wanted to blend into the crowd. Today I am dressed in a nondescript pair of straight leg jeans and a gray T-shirt paired with an even grayer hoodie. There’s a rule at Caseham High that you can’t have any lettering on your butt (a rule that outrages many, many girls), but not only is my rear end free of glittery words, I have made sure that I don’t have any lettering anywhere. Nothing that would call attention to myself.
Yet every single person is looking at me.
The only positive is that my mother was forced to drive away, so she doesn’t get to see the stares and the whispers as I trudge toward the metal front doors, my backpack slung over one shoulder. I freaking knew this would happen. Nobody is going to remember what happened last year. Yeah, right. What planet does my mother live on?
I already know what they’re saying, so I don’t stop to listen. I keep my head down and my shoulder slumped as I walk as quickly as I can. I avoid eye contact. But even so, I can hear them murmuring:
That’s her. That’s Addie Severson. You know what she did, right? She’s the one who…
Ugh, this is just too awful. I can’t even.