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Half Truths - chapter 17

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Chapter Seventeen

The first thing that she does, when she gets into her car, is absolutely nothing.

Grace puts it into drive, smoothly pulls away, and spends the entire journey with the radio turned up as loud as she can, to try and drown out the ringing in her ears.

When she pulls up at her house, in the empty drive way because her parents aren’t home yet, Grace sits, staring into space.

You stay away from her, you fucking maniac repeats in her head, and Grace worries that if she closes her eyes, she’ll be able to see the look of utter dejection on Hannah’s face, when Grace walked away without explaining anything.

And by now Mamrie will have made her side of the story perfectly clear.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Grace screws up her fists abruptly, and slams them down on the rim of her steering wheel a couple of times, hard enough for her bones to jar.

None of this is fucking fair.

In her room, her clothes are everywhere, and there are papers slipping out from her desk, and the whole place is a mess, which reflects Grace’s current state of mind with on point accuracy.

She throws herself down onto her bed, and calls Pearl, because who else is there to call?

It connects after only a couple of rings, and Pearl clears her throat, by way of greeting.

“I’m trying to decide whether you calling me now is a good thing or a bad thing… survived?”

Grace rolls onto her back, and pinches at the bridge of her nose, trying to remind herself that someone, somewhere, will be having a worse day than her, and being dramatic about it won’t help anyone. However it doesn’t do much to stop the break in her voice.

“Uh. No. It all went to shit, to be honest.”

Pearl breaths out a big sigh, and groans once, before starting to talk calmly and methodically.

“What happened - I can’t believe that Hannah wouldn’t hear your side of the story; the number of times that we’ve talked about how making a few mistakes doesn’t make you a bad person…”

Grace bites her lip, and screws up her eyes, because she is done with letting Mamrie Hart make her cry, she promised herself that she wouldn’t cry anymore. She forces her words out, trying to keep the emotion at bay.

“We didn’t even get to that point. Mamrie walked in before I could even start talking about it - we were in their house.”

“Oh - what and she went straight to the explosion?”

Grace puts her hand over her eyes, as the emotion replays and the embarrassment of being caught swells.

“We were, uh, we were making out, a bit.”

Pearl makes a noise that sounds like a verbal eyeroll, and then mumbles “jeez, Helbig, time your moments, why don’t you…?” Grace cuts across her, pushing on, because she doesn’t want to hear about how she shouldhave played things. Grace anticipates that she’ll have enough time to reflect upon that.

“And so she yelled at me to get out, and, and my nerve failed, I guess. I left. And so by now Mamrie will have told Hannah all about my fuck ups, and probably convinced her that I’m not gay, or I’m using her, or doing it for attention, or any of that old bullshit, and… fuck, I knew that this was a bad idea - I’m not going through all of that again.”