Free Sloth by Robin Wasserman Page A

dry. And he knows that she will never let him see her pain.
    “It’s not pity,” he argues.
    ”Yeah, but it’s not—” She stops herself. There is a long silence. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says finally. “I’m fine. You did your little good deed by coming here, so you can forget your guilty conscience. ”
    It would be so easy to fix this, he thinks. All he has to do is take her back, tell her he loves her and he understands everything she did to him. Tell her he’s ready to start over again, that the past doesn’t matter.
    But it does matter. A car crash can’t erase anything that happened, or the choices that she made; it doesn’t change the kind of person she is, it doesn’t make it any easier to trust her again.
    ”You should get some rest,” he says. “We can talk about this tomorrow. I’ll come back and—”
    ”Don’t. ”
    “I want to. ”
    “I don’t care. “ She turns her head away from him and closes her eyes. They’re done.
    “She’s feeling a lot better,” Miranda said, shrugging. “I’m sure pretty soon everything else will be back to normal. And the two of you . . .”
    “I don’t know,” he said dubiously, although he had the same hope. It’s why he kept trying, in hopes that, if nothing else, she’d eventually get tired of pushing him away.
    “I could tell her you were asking,” Miranda offered.
    “No, don’t bother.” He looked down at his notebook, where a mess of numbers and letters sprinkled the page inan incomprehensible pattern. “Maybe we should just get back to work.”
    After all, nothing in his life made much sense anymore; at least when it came to algebra, there was an answer key in the back of the book.
    Beth pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, nudging the car just over the speed limit, and tried not to think about the two meetings she was blowing off or the stack of homework she’d face when she got home again. Today had gone from bad—an encounter with Kane that had rattled her even more than her first ever detention slip— to worse as she’d bombed a pop quiz, forgotten her gym uniform, and almost lost the Spirit Day prizes. She’d found them at the last minute, but had been forced to miss the culminating Spirit Rally in favor of her first detention, where she’d cowered in the back row under the glare of a tall, gaunt boy with pale skin and greasy hair who kept whispering something about how hot she’d look in leather.
    It would be nice to say it had all been worth it, that she’d managed to erase some part of her imagined debt to Harper, and she was able to start feeling good about herself again, or at the very least that she could put the day behind her, sleep long and hard, and hope the next day would be better.
    But she just felt unsteady. Maybe it was the detention, maybe it was the four cups of coffee she’d downed since morning, maybe it was Kane—her supplier, she reminded herself. She tried to shut it out, but the image popped into her mind yet again: the empty box on her nightstand. Kanewas the only one who knew about it—the only one who could ever suspect what she’d done.
    And if he hadn’t given her the pills, she reminded herself, none of this would have happened. She hated him— almost as much as she hated herself.
    Little wonder that she couldn’t face her meeting, haggling with a bunch of overly enthusiastic volunteers about how to stage the next day’s auction, where to hang the banners, which last-minute details to delegate and which to ditch. It was too depressing, especially since she used to be one of them, trying hard, worrying, taking all that nervous energy left over from waiting for college decisions and funneling it into something productive and mildly entertaining. Now she was just acting the part. And it was getting old.
    She couldn’t face going home; the house was always either too full of people, noise, and clutter to think straight, or it was empty and too quiet.
    So she’d