I Lost 90 Pounds, Only to Find He Tried to Give Me Away novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Eleven Drafts

Beck owns the lie on the spot and shows her eleven confessions he never sent; Callie walks away, and by morning her old photo is all over the freshman group chat.

I didn't say anything.

Betsy said it for me.

"Absolutely not. No. Who are you?"

"Beck Ormsby," he said. "I play jungle for varsity."

"Great. Love that. Why are you holding a lemon bar?"

"Because I said I would."

He was still holding it with both hands.

A few freshmen had followed us from the bonfire to see what came next.

A girl in a sorority sweatshirt had her phone out.

Beck saw it and didn't turn away.

"I'm in the guild chat," he said to me. "I saw his post on June ninth."

"Three guys wanted the login so they could set up a fake date and film you."

My stomach turned over.

"So I asked for it first," he said. "I meant to tell you inside a week."

"A week," I said.

"I know."

"It was eleven weeks."

"I know. I counted too."

His voice did that shake again on the last word.

I hated that I noticed.

"You said your mic was broken," I said.

"It wasn't broken. It just wasn't his voice."

"And every night I said goodnight to Carver."

"Every night you said goodnight to me," he said. "You just didn't know it."

Betsy made a sound.

"Oh, that's creepy. Callie, that's so creepy."

He didn't argue with her.

He put the lemon bar down on the low wall around the clock tower, very gently, on its napkin.

Then he took out his phone and held it out to me.

"I wrote it down," he said. "Over and over. I never sent any of them."

I didn't want to take it.

I took it.

It was a notes app full of unsent drafts.

The first one was dated June fourteenth.

"Callie, I'm not who you think I am, and I'm sorry, and please don't stop eating dinner."

The fifth one was from the night of the July thunderstorm.

The power went out at the bakery, and I'd typed to him for three hours by flashlight.

"I don't know how to say this without losing you, so I keep not saying it."

The last one was from yesterday.

"Tomorrow I'll be under the clock tower and you'll see I'm not him. You can leave. I'll understand."

I scrolled back up.

"You saw the picture," I said.

"Yes."

"The fair picture. In his post."

"Yes. Before I ever typed a word to you."

The girl with the phone lowered it a little.

"And you still took the account," I said.

"I took it so they couldn't," he said. "I stayed because it was you."

Everybody around us went still.

I could hear the bonfire crackling a hundred yards behind us.

I'd told him everything.

"Was any of it true?" I asked.

"All of it," he said. "Except the name."

"The name was the whole thing."

He looked at the ground.

Then he looked back up, because he wasn't the kind of person who looked at the ground.

I'd known that about him for eleven weeks too.

"You lied to me every night for eleven weeks," I said.

"Yes."

He didn't add anything to it.

No "but".

That almost made it worse.

I held out his phone.

He took it, and our fingers didn't touch, and I made sure of that.

"Don't follow me," I said.

"I won't."

Footsteps came up the path behind us.

Carver, with Sutton and half the circle from the cornhole boards.

He'd gotten his smile back.

"Oh, there she is," he said. "Did you meet your date? Who'd I give you to?"

Then he saw Beck.

He stopped.

For a second he actually looked surprised.

"Ormsby?" he said. "You took her?"

Beck didn't answer him.

Carver started laughing, the real kind, bent over with his hands on his knees.

"Dude. You took the fat girl account. On purpose. I thought it was a bot."

"Carver," Sutton said, and pulled his arm, but she was laughing too.

"No, this is perfect," Carver said. "Beck Ormsby. Help-desk Beck. You were in there all summer typing goodnight to her?"

"Yes," Beck said.

"For what? Points?"

"Because you gave her to people who wanted to hurt her," Beck said. "In front of forty guys. And you laughed."

The sorority girl's phone came back up.

Carver stopped laughing.

"Careful," he said. "My dad paid for your chair."

"I know who paid for my chair."

Betsy took my elbow.

"We are leaving," she said. "We are leaving right now, and nobody here gets to see you cry."

I wasn't going to cry.

I walked, and I didn't look back at the clock tower.

I didn't look at the lemon bar sitting on the wall on its little napkin.

I didn't look at him.

Back in 412, I took off the green dress and hung it up very neatly.

Betsy got into my bed with me, shoes and all, and held on.

"I'll kill all of them," she said into my hair. "I'm going to be a nurse. I know where everything is."

I laughed once, and it hurt.

I fell asleep at three.

My phone woke me up at 7:02.

Then it didn't stop.

It was the Marlow freshman group chat.

Four thousand members.

Somebody had posted two pictures side by side.

On the left, me at the county fair in my mom's red T-shirt, holding the funnel cake.

On the right, me at the bonfire in the green dress, mid-sentence, with Carver's face blurred behind me.

The caption said, "Carver Satterfield's catfish showed up."

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