Empty by K. M. Walton Page B

finally crying. No, I’m dripping humiliation. I reach up and wipe my cheeks. What an asshole. I want to push Brandon down a flight of stairs and have him smash into pieces at the bottom. I want him so broken that he’s unrecognizable. Unable to hold any other girl down and tell her to “stay still.”
    With a shaking hand, I reach into the bag of chips. Each handful fills my mouth with greasy, salty calm.
    The bag is gone.
    What else do I want? A sandwich, maybe? As I layer ham on cheese, I force myself to think of good things, like I’m pretty sure that I nailed my audition. Actually, I’m excited to see the talent show list tomorrow morning, which is funny, because if someone had told me yesterday that I would care about this list, I think I’d have laughed in their face. Maybe even added a knee slap.
    But I want to make it.
    I swallow my last bite of sandwich and allow the food to fill up every empty space. A deep sense of calm settles over me. I feel safe. And as I sit in my food-induced peace, it comes to me—I know why I care. When I was up onstage, I got lost in the moment. My voice filled the auditorium. No one mooed. No one made an inappropriate joke or sound of any kind. After I finished, everyone in the auditorium clapped and hooted.
    Standing onstage, with people cheering for me, filled me with so much contentment, even more than any bag of chips or sandwich could. I overflowed like a pot of spaghetti, bubbling with intensity, boiling over the stage. That was me. An intense, boiling pot of spaghetti.
    •  •  •
     
    I literally run into Brandon as I’m rounding the corner on my way to lunch. As in, I knock him down and he lands flat on his ass. I burst into nervous laughter.
    This pisses him off. “Dude! What’s your problem?” He pulls himself up and scowls, glancing around to see if anyone saw him crash into the Adele-wall. The hallway is almost empty because the bell already rang, which is why I was hurrying in the first place. I’m late. To lunch. My favorite period.
    “I didn’t do it on purpose, Brandon.”
    He takes off his baseball hat, runs his hands through his hair, and puts the hat back on. “I have a game today.”
    I have no idea what that has to do with anything. “Huh?”
    Looking through me, he says, “I have a game, and I don’t need any injuries effing it up. Scouts are coming today.”
    “Oh.” I feel small right now. Like a flea on a rat. And the rat is Brandon Levitt.
    He jogs down the hall, ending our first post-sex conversation. Clearly he wants to forget what he did. Clearly he has nointention of apologizing. Clearly he wants nothing to do with me. Clearly he is a total dick.
    This hollows me out again. Air and life have left my body. I’m empty. I don’t know how I’m standing. I should be a big pile of flesh—a misshapen mound of skin in everyone’s way—needing to be shoveled into a trash bag and thrown into the Dumpster behind the school. By two people.
    I somehow make it to the cafeteria and Cara plops down next to me with her usual salad. “They haven’t posted the list yet. I just checked.”
    I’m in midchew so I nod. I want to believe everything is back to normal between us. She’s definitely acting regular right now. But I wonder if Cara would still sit with me if Sydney or her friends were in this lunch period. I imagine me sitting alone with my tray while Cara sits with her skinny, gorgeous new friends.
    My eye twitches in reaction to my vision-o-awful, and I cringe.
    “Stop making faces, Dell. I know you made it. I don’t know about me. That freshman kid may have beaten me. Do you think they’d have two piano players?” She looks down at my tray. “What are you eating?”
    “You were way better than him, Cara. And it’s called a salad.” If I make it into the talent show, I’ll need a cute dress,so I decided to go on a diet. I should try and drop, oh, I don’t know, like, a hundred and fifty pounds so I look normal