All Chapters of TANGLED:,Crazy For You: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Hazel povThe walk home was long. By the time I reached the house the tears on my face had dried. My eyes were still puffy and my head was heavy. I pushed the front door open and walked in and dropped my bag on the couch. I did not have the energy to carry it upstairs. I did not have the energy to do much of anything.I dragged myself to the stairs. I held the banister and went up one step at a time. My legs were tired in a deep way. Not the tired that comes from running. The tired that comes from fighting all day and losing anyway.I got to my room. I pushed the door open. I did not change my clothes. I did not take off my shoes. I just walked to the bed and threw myself down face first into the pillow.I lay there for a minute. The ceiling fan was turning above me. The room was quiet. The house was quiet. Leo was on a plane. Maya was still in class. It was just me and the silence.I reached for my phone and pulled it out of my pocket. I typed a message to Maya.Text me when you get

Hazel’s POVThe days in the hospital moved strangely. Not fast, not slow. Just long in a way that made the afternoon feel like it belonged to a different day entirely, and the night feel like it had no end.I was there for two full days before the doctor came in on the morning of the third, checked my chart, pressed two fingers below my collarbone, and said I could go.Maya came the first afternoon. She brought her mother’s soup in the same flask she had carried the last time, holding it out with both hands like it was something fragile. She sat in the chair beside the bed and talked—not about anything that mattered, or at least not anything she thought I needed to worry about right then. She talked about school, about a boy in her statistics class, about a teacher who had started wearing the same shoes every single day. She kept it light, and I let her. The suspension didn’t come up. I didn’t bring it up, and she didn’t either, and that was the kindest thing she could have done for m

HazelGetting back into a routine after three days in a hospital bed is not as easy as it should be. The alarm went off at seven and I hit it twice before I actually got up. My chest was fine. Just that low-grade reluctance that sits in you when you have been still for too long and the world kept moving without you. i seriously don't want to go to school.I got dressed. Made tea. Ate standing at the counter because there was nobody home to tell me to sit down. I checked my bag more times than necessary. Notebook, laptop, charger, the folder with the assignments I had not touched since before the hospital. I was going to have to go to each professor and explain and I was not looking forward to any of those conversations.I left at half past seven.---School was loud the way it always was in the morning. Groups by the gate, groups by the steps, someone's music coming through a speaker they had not bothered to put in a pocket. I walked through it with my head down and then I saw Maya.

Hazel Saturday arrived without warning and all at once. I woke up to the wrong side of nine, which I had not done in weeks, and lay there for a full minute before my brain caught up with the fact that there was nowhere I had to be. No alarm. No bus. No corridor scanning. I stretched out and stared at the ceiling and thought about the week that had just passed. Honestly, it had been fine. More than fine. The kind of fine I had stopped expecting. No Tiffany appearing around corners with her group trailing behind her. No cousin either. Both of them had gone completely quiet and I had no idea where they were and I was choosing not to care. If they had dropped off the face of the earth entirely that would have been ideal. The principal's resignation had changed something in the school I had not fully expected. Not dramatically. Nothing anyone could point to directly. But the specific tension that had been sitting in certain corridors, that feeling of being in a building where someon

HazelMaya lasted about four minutes before the crowd swallowed her whole.One second she was beside me heading toward the drinks table and the next she had been pulled sideways by someone who called her name and that was it. She went without looking back. I watched her disappear into the room and thought about the very specific promise she had made at the door.Stay together. First rule.That had lasted less time than it took to get here.I found the drinks table on my own. Someone had set it up along the far wall — bottles, cups, a row of things I was not going to touch. I stood at the end of it and looked over what was there and asked the guy behind it for a lemonade. He poured it into a cup and handed it across.One of us needed to stay reasonable tonight. Knowing Maya, she was already somewhere in the back half of the house with something fizzy in her hand working her way toward a version of herself that would need water and a long sit-down by midnight. I shook my head and almos