Betsy Wickwire's Dirty Secret Read Online Free Page A

elevator pinged. People started shuffling toward it. I glanced out at the parking lot. Mom’s silver Audi was still idling away beside the “No Idling” sign. She flashed her teeth at me again.
    Don’t tell me I’m going to have to get on the elevator now too.
    I held the door so an old guy with a bad foot and the lady—whose babies were both crying now—could get on. These were the type of people who needed doctors. I followed them, then turned and watched as the elevator door closed me in.
    What did I need a doctor for? My heart was stillbeating. I usually remembered to breathe. I was a little on the skinny side maybe and my face was kind of mauve in places, but that was to be expected. Hermits get that way. What was Dr. D’Arcy going to do about it? Tell me to eat more? Cry less? If I’d wanted to, I could have figured that out myself. Unless she could surgically remove Nick from Carly’s face and drug him into loving me again, Dr. D’Arcy couldn’t help me.
    The man said, “What floor would you like?”
    I looked at the panel. It went up to 12. “Twelve, please,” I said. I wanted to give Mom time to get back on the road and start fretting about something else.
    I’d had no intention of coming here. “Why?” I’d said the first time she suggested it. (Or at least my face had said why? I hadn’t actually bothered opening my mouth. Like a lot of other things in my life, speech had recently become irrelevant.)
    Mom used a voice she usually saved for conversations with our cat and said, “Betsy, honey. You’re just not yourself.” She’d made it sound like that was a bad thing.
    The elevator stopped at the third floor and I held the door again so the man and his cane could inch out. He smiled like I was some shining example of today’s youth. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad.
    I’d had a chance to do a lot of thinking during the week I spent sucking on my sheets after the “incident” atJitters Coffeehouse. I didn’t accept visitors. I didn’t go on Facebook. I didn’t have pesky things like boyfriends or best friends or work or parties or food or sleep to distract me. I only had my thoughts. I didn’t manage to come up with solutions to all my problems, but I did figure one thing out.
    I knew I didn’t want to be myself any more.
    Who would? Who in their right mind, after that, would want to be Betsy Wickwire?
    The lady and her howling babies staggered out at the fifth floor. One of the kids clearly needed a diaper change. It dawned on me that if someone got on the elevator now, they’d think I was to blame for the odour.
    Ironic, really. It was probably the one stinking mess I wasn’t responsible for these days. During my little exile, I’d tried to blame Nick for the state of my life. I’d tried to blame Carly. I’d even tried to blame the manager for waking me at five-thirty in the morning to fill in for Marybeth. (I mean, if Jerry hadn’t asked me to work on my day off, I’d never have caught Nick and Carly. And if I’d never caught them, I could have just carried on in blissful ignorance. Would that really have been too much to ask?)
    But this wasn’t their fault. I knew it. It was mine. I was the one who got myself into this predicament. I was just so in love with being Nick Jamieson’s girlfriend— and everything that went along with it—that I let myselfbe an idiot. I’d honestly thought we were perfect together. I’d really tried to be perfect.
    The door opened again on 8 and I covered my eyes as if I had a migraine. “Going down?” someone said.
    I pointed “up” with my thumb. The door closed and I carried on alone.
    Well, not really alone. As always, I had Nick and Carly with me. I was spending more time with them since they’d nuked my life than I had in all the years I’d known