you found some better place and i miss you
After Julian leaves, Lizbet goes to bed and fails to sleep. She doesn't cuddle with Math like he suggested, preferring her solitude -- or at least, that's what she tells herself as she lies there, staring at the ceiling.
It is okay. It's not like he threw it in her face; he didn't make fun of her, or worse, pity her, which she'd worried about a little. No, he'd admitted how much he liked her back, and that was a warm rush, a little ego boost she doesn't want to admit to needing. Just a little. So it's...fine. She can understand not wanting to hurt someone -- maybe if Diwaniya lived in Middle Area, she'd feel the same, but she's been very honest with herself about how she feels about the end of that relationship, and it's already part of the past...she misses him, though. But...maybe there is some unwritten code of behaviour that nobody's told her about and just expects her to know. She's complained before about the fact nobody's ever told her "these things"...it's such a ridiculous complaint, she decides, and she won't voice it again. She remembers crying on Liz's shoulder because she didn't know that that was how you were supposed to feel--
Some things, she thinks, maybe you have to learn on your own. Learn by doing. From experience.
"Make mistakes, Elizabeth. And learn from them."
She'd been so bewildered by that advice the first time she heard it from her mother -- of course her mother, who had done a lot of work with teenagers, and didn't that feel like a callous thought, to imagine herself another patient or project -- but it makes more sense now. She thinks. Or maybe it doesn't and she just thinks she understands because she wants to understand, she wants everything to make sense.
She wants this to make sense. She understands -- why, then, does it still bother her?
She rolls over and resolves not to think about it any more.