six

                                        

                                              
FEBRUARY 
"YOU SHOULD'VE STAYED," Isaac remarked from the passenger seat, staring out of the window, only occasionally glancing towards him. Since he'd first fastened his seatbelt, he hadn't stopped moving around and the constant shuffling in the corner of Hadley's eye, disturbing his usually lonely space, was beginning to bother him. "Ines Crawford and some of her friends came to the restaurant after you left."
"So?" He asked, staring out of the windscreen. The sky was a chalky white, drained of colour, and grey clouds were looming in the distance. 
"She was asking about you," Isaac murmured gingerly. He ran a hand over his short light curls and gave Hadley a sideways glance, his pale green eyes glimmering. They weren't like Spencer's. Spencer's eyes were darker, bolder, quicker. 
"The last thing I need right now is a girlfriend," he muttered. His knuckles were turning the same colour as the sky. He noticed Isaac looking at his hands and relaxed his grip on the steering wheel.
"Yeah, but it's Ines Crawford," Noel chimed from the back, a nervous laugh caught in his voice. "Have you seen her?"
"I've known her since middle school," Hadley replied lightly. "I've seen her."
The boys fell silent. Isaac, biting the sideways edge of his thumb, nodded at nothing in particular and turned to stare out of the window while Noel lowered his head and looked at his hands. 
Evan, who was sitting beside him, shrugged her shoulders, brushing a slender hand through her ink-coloured hair. "Maybe it's for the best to leave that one alone," she tried, and, though he wasn't looking at her, he knew she was scrunching her nose. She was trying to keep her voice breezy. "She used to go out with Spencer, right? So it'd probably be more of an alliance than a relationship."
When Hadley didn't respond, offering no word or expression or gesture, Isaac cleared his throat, shrugged his shoulders and glanced towards him, letting his gaze linger. "You should've stayed out," he said, brushing past their discussion and studying Hadley's profile. "The others said the same."
"I had a headache," he murmured, stopping at the traffic lights and gazing out of the window. "I slept like shit the night before and then Elodie came over for a surprise visit in the morning, and it threw me all out of balance."
There was a shift in the air that he could feel like a hand on the back of his neck. He could feel Evan and Noel sharing a glance behind him; could feel Isaac's eyes darting towards them. For a thoughtful moment, nobody said anything and Hadley savoured the brief silence. It was the first time he'd mentioned her name to them in weeks.
"Um," Evan began cautiously, steadily, as if afraid that she might frighten him or startle him; the way someone tiptoes so that a nearby bird doesn't fly away. "Elodie came over on Saturday?"
Since it had happened, since they had expressed their initial grievances and offered their support for any potential sorrow he might feel, they had all been tiptoeing around his breakup and he was convinced it was because they had no idea how to approach him. He supposed that they had been hoping that he would feel like opening up to them, that he would feel like rambling about how angry she had made him or how deeply she had wounded him or even that he might offer some hollow lies about how he never loved her in the first place and was already completely over it, but he hadn't said anything and they didn't know how to respond to his silence.
They couldn't decipher whether he was hurting or disinterested, if he was shielding some kind of burning rage or consuming dejection behind those increasingly blank expressions, that cool gaze, that newfound insouciance. They didn't know what to offer him and he knew that they discussed it behind his back, that they whispered to each other and called each other on the phone to figure out if he was having some kind of private nervous breakdown. They found his composure suspicious but, afraid of disturbing it, they didn't say anything about Elodie and they said very little about Spencer, only ever mentioning his name in their braver moments.