Free Thousand Words by Jennifer Brown Page A

telling the truth and nobody had seen it, and I’d sworn I believed him, and we’d both promised to let it go, but in my heart I hadn’t. I couldn’t. Because in my heart, I didn’t believe him.
    Eventually I let him go back to whatever he had going on that was making him so “busy.” We hung up angry, and after that day, he and I could barely talk without our conversation eventually leading to that argument again. It was a nasty loop of me accusing him of lying, of never loving me, and him telling me I was immature and I wouldn’t understand what he was going through until I went to college. And one of us would hang up on the other and then three hours later we would text each other, tell each other how sorry we were, that we still loved each other, that we were both stressed out. That I needed to let the picture thing go because I was wrong.
    And then one day I saw Nate in the hallway at school. My heart thudded hard in my chest and instantly sweat popped out at my temples. I tried hard to play it off, because I was walking with some girls from cross-country, and I didn’t want them to notice that anything was up.
    But he looked right at me, gave a little half-wave, then shut his locker door and called out to someone I couldn’t see down a connecting hallway and rushed off. And that was it. He looked right through me. There wasno “gotcha” moment. No knowing stares. No leers. No comments.
    Maybe he really hadn’t seen the picture. Maybe Kaleb had been telling the truth this whole time. I felt insanely guilty for all the accusations I’d made.
    I called him that night to tell him how sorry I was. To confess to him that I knew he was telling the truth and that I should have trusted him from the beginning because he’d never done anything to make me not trust him and he didn’t deserve having me doubt him.
    A girl answered his phone.
    “Who is this?” I asked, my throat pulling tight and my fingertips tingling.
    The perky little voice at the other end said, “This is Holly. Who’s this?” And there was this chirpy giggling in the background… a different girl… and some murmuring and a bark of laughter that I would have recognized anywhere. Kaleb.
    It took a few seconds for my brain to drown out what was going on in the background and for my mouth to catch up with everything I was thinking, none of which was good at all.
    “Is Kaleb there? This is Ashleigh. His
girlfriend
.”
    I put extra stress on the last word, maybe too much because she made a snorting noise and then I could hear her say, away from the phone, “Kaleb, it’s your
girlfriend
,” and she put the same stress on the last word as I did. Like she was making fun of me. I felt like a little kid being teased bythe big kids in the neighborhood, and anger welled up in me so vigorously my throat felt closed with emotion.
    “Hey, Ash,” Kaleb said. He had the nerve to sound relaxed, which made me all the madder.
    “Having a good time?” I choked out.
    “Huh?”
    I took a deep breath, but it did nothing to steady my voice. “So who’s Holly? Let me guess. She’s a study partner.”
    There was a pause, and I could hear footsteps and the whine of a door closing, like he was getting to someplace private. “Actually, yeah, she is,” he said. “You’re not going to do this again, are you?”
    “Actually, yeah, I am!” I shouted into the phone, no longer in control of my emotions at all. “Every time I call you, you either can’t talk or you’re giggling with some girls and calling them your study partners, and it’s bullshit, Kaleb. Are you sleeping with them?” And there I was again, accusing him of doing something I had no actual proof of. It was like I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t trust him.
    “No,” he said, his voice icy and abrupt. “We’re part of a study group. There are two guys in there named Mark and Gannon. I’m not sleeping with them, either. Jesus.”
    “So what was she doing with your phone?”
    “It was on