Free The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel by Sarah Miller Page B

wouldn’t move, followed by a rush of determination. He thought about a line he had read in both good and bad books: he took her. He almost laughed that he was thinking of that line, but as he thought it, the determination surged more, so he thought it again. Why not? He took her . His hands were moving. They were now on her neck, in her hair, on her face. He felt her swoon. We felt her swoon. It really was a thing you could feel. Her hips gave way, she felt heavier and lighter at the same time. Her softness was insane, but she was kissing him back hard .
    He kept kissing her and she kept kissing him. Some people kiss and it’s nothing, and Gideon and Pilar weren’t nothing. Gideon and Pilar weren’t necessarily Gid and me, but we didn’t exist anymore, anyway.
    I thought about what makes two people kiss well, and I wondered if he liked kissing her more than he liked kissing me, and I wondered also why he wasn’t thinking about that. People were clapping. I wished they would stop because the noise was prohibiting Gid from thinking about what I wanted to know. Instead, he was thinking, Do I like kissing Pilar, or do I like having everyone see me kiss the hottest girl at the party? Well, the hottest girl in the world, maybe . He didn’t pull away from her exactly, but he moved his mouth and, aware he was drunk, aware this was stupid, whispered into her mouth in feverish, sleep-talking tones, “The hottest girl in the world.”
    A voice—Cullen’s—shouted “The Alamo!”
    Was Pilar the hottest girl in the world?
    I thought maybe the party had gone suddenly quiet. For a second I was afraid something terrible had happened, like a drunk person had fallen out a window and everyone was just staring at a corpse and Gid was too numb to think or something, but even when he was too numb to think, I could see what he was seeing. But right now I couldn’t see him seeing anything. There was nothing left of Gid. Just the quiet. Just my head.
    Was he gone ?
    Gideon had slipped out of my head. I just sat there on my bed. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate.
    He couldn’t just all of a sudden disappear.
    But seeing as he had just whispered the words the hottest girl in the world against the lips of another girl, why didn’t I want him to disappear?
    I had a panicked feeling, like I’d lost my wallet with thousands of dollars in it, or like I was driving with no brakes. How was I supposed to know what he was doing now? What if he was heading off to sleep with Pilar? I had to know. What had I done?
    I lay awake. I waited for him to come back. I worried about what I would see when he did.
    He didn’t come back.
    He was gone for good.
    This was the most terrible silence. When I was thinking about wanting to get out of his head, I was just thinking about not being in pain.
    I forgot about this whole alone thing.
    I wanted to sleep, to escape, but what if he came back quietly and I missed him?
    I don’t know how long I lay there awake, longing to see Gid, longing to hear him, no matter what he was doing, just to know. The harder I found myself concentrating, the more sure I was he was gone.

Book Two

Chapter Eight
    I had kind of been hoping to sleep into the next day, but as luck would have it, I woke up at the tail end of afternoon—exactly the time of day when the upstate New York winter dishes out its most heaping helpings of annihilating despair. I lay in bed for a while, wondering how I was supposed to handle being this sad. It was hard to take it all in at once: Gid and I were over. He had kissed Pilar, and he had liked it. Not only had he liked it, he had whispered that she was the most beautiful girl in the world while he had kissed her. I had tried to get him out of my head, and it had worked.
    And I missed him.
    In my bedside table I found a Spice Girls pencil and a notepad from the Buffalo Marriott. I wrote on a piece of paper: Gideon Rayburn is a fucking dick. I wrote, Gideon Rayburn just wants someone perfect so