#olipoprps

Well, to be fair to the factual events, Kitty told him. 

No one was supposed to know that she had taken photos from her cousin who lived back in Georgia. Her Aunts were smart enough to keep Katie off of social media until she was at least eighteen, and Lord only knew what kind of wrath Kitty would face once they found out that she had gone behind their backs to use their daughter’s face for a silly high school tactic. They would wonder why she didn’t just talk to Ryder as herself, without going through the hullabaloo of assuming a false identity.

“You’re such a beautiful, smart young woman, Kathy. Why would you do this to yourself?,” they would wonder. Of course they would wonder -- her blood Aunt, Maureen, was homeschooled and never had to suffer the humiliation that could come from public practices, and her Aunt by marriage, Torie, had received her GED due to being on the road for her Bluegrass band. Neither of them knew what high school was like. Neither of them knew what people were like. Most of all, neither of them knew what Kitty (”It’s Kitty, Aunt Ma. Kitty.”) had been through to make her skin stone to protect from the cool stream that fueled her heart.

It had been a moment of clarity between she and Ryder. One night at BreadStiX where, for once, she could be open and honest about something so important to her that it drummed in her ears for hours -- even after they had paid the bill and parted ways with a hug. For once someone could relate to what happened to her, and it didn’t hurt that it was someone with a warmth that radiated into the deepest caverns of her icy core and shook away some of the frost that had been built up. 

And then he rejected her in the middle of the media room and her fingers ached from the cold. It was enough to make her want to erase the identity of her version of ‘Katie’. It was enough to make her hate the foreign version of herself that Ryder Lynn preferred over the living, breathing version that he seemed so invested in the night before. Kitty knew that she had to end it all and she had to make sure that it hurt just as much as his own rejection had -- because she let him see a part of her that no one else had and he had to know that it was a mistake that she wouldn’t make again.

She told him before first period, in the middle of the hallway as if none of it had ever mattered. He had approached her at her locker with a guilty expression and she knew that he was going to change her mind without even meaning to, so she had to act fast.

“Your Katie is a lie. I made her up. Here, have a look for yourself. I’ve already deleted the account, so. No point in mourning.”

For a brief moment the pain that flashed across his handsome face was almost enough to send her into a full-blown apology. It was almost enough to make her admit that she had only created the account to get closer to him after she realized that maybe they had more in common than they thought since both of their crushes had left them behind in favor of each other and maybe it was fate telling them something. That she thought his Bieber hair was actually kind of cute and she would love to have his arms around her at any time. But that was the story of someone else -- someone who had less to lose and more to gain from a quick high school romance with the new Quarterback who still made eyes at the pretty brunette with a heart of gold to match his own.

When he finally put two and two together and realized the impact of her words the expression on his face changed from one of pure, pained shock to absolute loathing and Kitty knew that she had made her mark. He threw her phone into her locker (she didn’t flinch when she could hear the smack of the screen against her bible) and matched her look of practiced indifference with his own angry stare. And then, finally, he said the three words that Kitty had been waiting for.

I hate you.

And later, when she was lying all by herself in the plush comfort of her bedsheets, she would close her eyes and pretend like perhaps they were a different arrangement of words. That maybe, just maybe, the second one had a different recipe of letters that were so familiar on her computer screen, but had completely lost all rhyme or reason when it came to real life interaction. Kitty would pretend that, instead of her phone breaking against the spine of her bible, it was handed back with a sincere smile that told her it didn’t matter if there were two different images, but one heart, and he knew that. 

But it wasn’t later and she wasn’t alone in her bed.

She was standing in front of Ryder Lynn who was still seething, but looked lost for words, let alone actions. He had made his statement. He hated her, and Kitty couldn’t judge him because yet again it was something else they had in common. Because sometimes she hated herself, too.