Surgery had gone perfectly and my leg had been put in a soft cast and boot. Trevor and Camden had kept to their promise of staying but apparently staying out of my business with my mom wasn't a part of the deal and they'd called her while I was in surgery. Everyone was in my recovery room fussing and I couldn't do anything but mentally urge the nurses to get going on my discharge papers.
"I can't believe you didn't call me." Mom whined for the one millionth time.
"I texted Gaz." I drone and Gaz instantly looks furious.
"You said you were probably fine! Needing surgery isn't fine!" He shouts and it's the only yelling that actually hurts a little bit.
"I am fine. I didn't want you guys worrying and I knew you both had plans today." I look everywhere except for at him as I speak.
"Fuck plans, Zo!" He erupts. "You are more important than a goddamn grocery run."
"Can you guys please wait out in the lobby? They should be getting my discharge stuff together." I redirect and Gaz stares wide-eyed at me but wraps his arm around our mom's shoulders and guides her out.
Trevor and Camden look at me sadly.
"You really don't think you're more important than grocery shopping?" Camden grimaces as if in pain.
"I didn't say that." I state plainly but Trevor looks hard at me because I didn't need to say it.
The unspoken hangs dense in the room and I know there's nothing I can do to clear it away. It's the truth. I hadn't been important to anyone in what felt like forever. Not to my mom or my dad. Gaz was too far and too busy for me to matter. School had been a daily hell for so many years now. I only had me. Could only count on me.
A few minutes of uncomfortable silence later and the nurse walks in with my papers and a pair of crutches that they adjust to my height. Then they have another nurse wheel me out to the front of the building. Gaz helps me into the back of mom's SUV and I thank Camden and Trevor for bringing me to the hospital. They ask me to text when I get home but I know I won't so I just wave.
Mom and Gaza don't talk to me the whole way home which involves a stop at the school where mom gets the things I'd left in Mister Kyper's class from the front office and her driving my car home. When we get home I hobble all the way up to my room and close the door so I can change into different clothes; lounge shorts and a long-sleeved oversized shirt. I have to arrange some of my pillows so I can prop my leg up before I can lay down but when I finally do all I can do is exhale. Air rushes out of me like I'd been holding my breath from the hospital until now.
There's a knock at my door and Gaz announcing that it's him so I let him open the door.
"I just want to talk." He tells me cautiously and I give a half-hearted shrug.
"Why did you lie to me Zo?" He asks once he's sat in the armchair in the corner. I shrug again. "Zoda, what's going on?" He pleads.
"There's no way I can answer that." I sigh and examine the spaceships hanging above me so I don't have to look at him.
"When did it get to the point where you couldn't talk to me?" His voice is strained and even though I can hear it I don't want to see him crying.
"Probably sometime between when you left and now." I avoid actually answering and he gives a frustrated laugh.
"Come on. Just talk to me." He begs again.
"Ya know, when you left I was so proud of you. Like, my big brother in the Army," I give a small chuckle, "But I didn't get to feel like that for long because I started getting bullied at school. And I found out just today that it all started because one stupid girl got jealous of me at the beginning of freshman year. It was so bad but I learned to deal with it. More than that I learned to thrive in it." I look at him and see Gaz's awestruck look so I smile and look back up at my spaceships.
"Why didn't you ever say anything?" The sadness in his voice stabs me and I have to close my eyes to take a breath.
"What were you gonna do Gaz?"
"I don't know but I could have been there for you." He insists.
"To do what? Tell me all the things I already knew? That I'm not a slut. That dad didn't leave because he found out his daughter is a whore." When I look at him again he's horrified and I shrug. "It has been made abundantly clear the past couple of years that everyone hates me and nobody stays. Nobody." The tears burning the backs of my eyes brim but I look back to the ceiling before they can fall. "The only thing that people at school don't know about is mom's drinking. It kills me daily to see what she's become but at least they can't tease me about that too."
"And on top of all that you come to visit and it's like she's mom again. I'm not even worth anything to my own mom, Gaz." The tears start to spill down from the outer corners of my eye where they fall down my temples and begin to pool into my ears.
"That's not true." Gaz forces through his teeth and it makes me cry harder.
"Please just get out. Go do whatever you had planned with mom." I tell him as evenly as possible.
"Zoda?" His voice is painfully hurt but I turn my head even farther away from him.
It hurts trying to keep my breaths steady, pressing my lips together and biting them so I don't dissolve into the helpless sobbing that I feel raging through my body. Then Gaza leaves, closing my door behind him, and I dissolve. I wail silently with the trapped feeling wound through every muscle and thought whipping up into a hurricane through me.
I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how it was so difficult for everyone else to understand. I, Zora Vanguard, had been fighting for my goddamn life for four-ish years and all of a sudden some dudes at school want to come around and be like "hey, just kidding on that teasing you thing. Everyone has been brainwashed to hate you. Totes not our fault. We cool now?" My dad had betrayed me on the most fundamental level and irreparably damaged my ability to trust anyone ever again. And then my mom just mentally checks out from me and drowns herself in alcohol.
But here I was, screaming on the inside for someone - ANYONE - to apologize for all the bullshit they'd put me through even though I know it wouldn't help anything and on more than one occasion I'd been told the transgressions didn't really exist. Or in the case of the bullying, it existed but they had been manipulated so it didn't really count.
Eventually, I cried myself to sleep. I couldn't tell you when it happened. It just did. I cried until there was no more energy left in my body to stay awake.
*
I woke up to knocking at my door. A constant and impatient knocking.
"Wha?" I grumble sleepily, propping myself up on my elbows. The door opens immediately and Trevor rushes in.
"Why didn't you text me that you got home?" He demands and I huff, collapsing back onto the bed.
"I think we both knew that wasn't going to happen. Besides, you want to be moving on from this. Thanks for the special princess treatment today Sir Knight." I give him a small salute.
"What are you actually saying right now?" He's angry and I don't have enough energy to surmise why.
"I feel like I've been suuuper clear." I squint my eyes in confusion.
He growls and begins to pace.
"Trevor what are you doing here?" I huff again in exasperation.
"I'm trying to figure you out."
"I'm not a research project." I sit myself up in bed and lean back against the headboard. He glares at me, nostrils flaring, and paces again.
"I'm nice, you hate it. I show you the truth that no one actually hates you, you have a mental goddamn breakdown. Cam is heartbroken-"
"No offense but fuck Cam's broken heart!" I interrupted. "You don't get to emotionally fuck me up for years and then get 'upsetty spaghetti' about the fact that it worked."
"That's never what he wanted." Trevor tries to clarify.
"And yet he did!" I snap. "You all did. I don't care that Kelsey was the one that started it all. I care that so many people, so many people who know nothing about me believed it until I just became the school whore and no one questions it." The rage returns with a fiery blaze in my chest. "My dad left because he'd been cheating on my mom for almost six years. He started a whole new family in another state and abandoned me but because you morons blindly hated me my worst moment in life was turned to hurt me more. I don't know what I have to do or say to get it through your guys' thick skulls!" Blind rage takes over. "I'm so used to everyone hating me. I'm so used to being lied to and abandoned that I don't trust you. I don't trust Camden or any one at school. I don't trust my mom or Gaz at this point. And you all just think it's some no big deal thing that you've been ruining my life for years. School. My dad. My mom. I have to fight for me because I'm the only one that I have!" I'm shouting so loud I can hear my own voice ringing in my ears.
"Zora, I-" Trevor stumbles over himself rushing to kneel beside my bed.
"Nooo!" I sob. "Why don't you get it? What do I have to say!?"
"No, I get it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I can't fix it." He cups my face in both hands and wipes my tears with his thumbs.
"Why are you doing this?" My breath catches and my body gives a slight jolt.
"Because suddenly I've never wanted someone to hurt less in my life. Because you're super irritating but I still like you and that's confusing as shit." I squint at him and he laughs. "See, why did that look so cute just now?" My head reels back at the absurdity and his hands fall to rest on the bed.
"You like me?" I shake my head to get my thoughts in order. "But you hate me. We have only ever argued. You defended them."
"I know. I was wrong for that. I just-... Zora, when you know things as a certain way and you let yourself float at the top you kinda do and say and believe a lot of dumb shit. Maybe, I need you to yell at me more." He grins at it actually makes me laugh. "Wow."
I stop laughing and frown, "What?"
"I've never heard something that sounded as beautiful as you just did. And I know that sounds so stupid but holy shit is it true."
"You're an idiot." I say plainly and he shrugs.
"Yeah probably. But I have permission from Cam and I need to find out why you affect me the way you do."
"Permission?" I scowl and he grimaces.
"I could have said that better but look, Cam really did like you. Actually, he still really likes you but I talked to him. After you said you didn't think you were more important than I grocery trip," he looks at me pointedly and I maintain that I hadn't actually said anything like that. He tells me it was heavily implied and continues. "Cam saw that what he'd done even though he had been a clueless idiot. He had helped make you feel that way. That's why he's heartbroken."
"He rather be cool than commit social suicide." I shrug.
"Yeah that used to be the case." Trevor grins.
"Maybe you guys should still care. It's senior year. Don't mess it up right at the end. I'll live." I scoot closer to the center of the bed just a few inches and start to pick at my nails, focusing on them as hard as I can.
Irritation radiates from Trevor but he takes a calming breath.
"For someone who complains that no one is listening to you, you don't listen very well." He moves to sit on the small edge of the bed beside me and cups my face in his hand, looking down on me just the little bit that I'm shorter than him. "I'm not going to spend another moment of my life letting people talk shit about you or spread false rumors. From now on I'm on your side and Cam will be right there too."
He looks deep into my eyes and even though every panic alarm in my high security system of a brain is going off, I stay still and quiet just looking back at him.
"Even if you have no one else, you'll have me." He wipes stray tears from my face.
"I don't know why I would dream this." My voice is meek, soft, quiet. "And I still think I'm going to wake up."