A Ticket to Ride by Paula McLain

Author:Paula McLain
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

The next morning as we walked home from Claudia’s, Fawn said, “You’re awfully quiet.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“Really? About what? What has our witto Jamie got to think about?” she said, slipping right into her baby-talk impression of me from the night before.

“Shut up.”

“Shut up,” Fawn mocked.

“Leave me alone!”

“Leave me alone!”

I couldn’t bear to hear Fawn’s version of my voice coming back at me, weak and whiney. “Fuck off,” I said, flaring up.

“Fuck off.” Fawn wasn’t about to give up the game. It was working too well.

“Stop it, Fawn.”

“Stop it, Fawn.”

I couldn’t bear it a moment longer. I trotted ahead, trying to get far enough away from Fawn so that I didn’t have to hear her anymore, but Fawn tagged me easily. “Waah wah, where are you going, little baby?”

“I’m not a baby,” I said, spinning around.

“Really?” Fawn’s left eyebrow arced with perfect precision, like always. “Only babies run away.”

“You want to know where I was last night?” The words rushed, crowding each other to get out of my mouth, and it felt strangely good, that sensation of being out of control, strangely powerful. “I was with Tom. In his bedroom.”

“Bullshit.”

“I was too.” And then, “I fucked him.” Now I had done it, crossed a line into new territory where I said things like I fucked him. I couldn’t take it back; I didn’t want to take it back.

“You fucked him? You fucked Tom? You’re such a fat liar.”

“You’re the liar,” I said. “You were all, ‘Tom’s getting too serious,’ but he broke up with you. He told me all about it.”

“What?” Fawn spit the word as if it were acid. “He told you what?”

“That you were a freak, if you really want to know. That I was supposed to tell you to stay away from him.”

There was a split second of collapse, Fawn’s face changing, falling like something constructed of pick-up sticks, and then she was herself again, composed and detached and harder than ever. “You can both go fuck yourselves,” she said, and with that turned to head back the way we’d come.

I walked home alone. Once the anger dissipated, which took all of about three seconds, I felt dizzy, deflated. What had just happened? I hadn’t meant to say anything about Tom at all, and I certainly hadn’t meant to hurt Fawn, but I’d been forced to. Fawn had picked and picked at me. What was I supposed to do, just take it? That wouldn’t have worked either. Fawn didn’t want me to be a baby, but didn’t want me to stand up for myself either. There was no right answer, just like with Tom. What if I’d lied and said I didn’t want him to touch me, would he have done it then? Was that what he wanted to hear? No. If I lied, if I told the truth, if I said nothing—there was a tiger behind every curtain.

When I got home, Raymond was out, no note. Fawn was nowhere to be found. I tried to take a

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