Chapter 6: Tell Me That You're Sorry

As Dad signed, I stared her down. I had finally found her in the crowd, sitting there with her perfect little family. Little did they know what everyone else knew about her. She looked sweet enough sitting there, laughing at a joke her mother had told. Her little brother was just as bad, the little pimp. He looked angelic too, with his tie on. I wanted to go over and scream, and wake her parents up. Their kids were completely fucked up, and they didn't even know it. It cracked me up.

Finally, we left. I had been counting down the seconds.

When I got home, I once again locked myself in my room, and hoped no one would annoy me. Easier said than done.

That night I forced myself to listen to his messages, and read his texts, and look at the times for the missed calls.

At this point the missed calls had reached twenty seven, I had thirty text messages, and twenty voice mail.

The calls were all about an hour in between. Every once in a while you would find a clump that were about five minutes apart. The text messages were random (some about fifteen minutes after each call), and voice messages right after most calls.

There were a lot of duplicate text messages, but my phone still counted them as one. Thirty different text messages. Wow. They were all very similar. "Call me, please," "I'm sorry," "Please talk to me," and "I love you."

The voice mail were another story. In a few he was crying, in a few his voice cracked. He sounded genuinely upset in all of them, and he said something different in each of them. "Please call me, I really need to talk to you," "Lauren, what happened was not what you think it was," "You know that I love you, and I would never do anything to mess us up," "Please, forgive me," and the worst: "I can't live without you, I love you." What the fuck? A couple were not even him. One was our song. I sat there while four minutes and fourteen seconds of "The Game of Love" by Santana and Michelle Branch droned on in my ear. That song made me start bawling. And then a few messages later, we had three minutes and fifty two seconds of "The Reason" by Hoobastank. That made me cry too.

I cried myself to sleep that night.