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There was a long pause, then my mom smiled. “Sometimes the things that are best for us don’t seem like good things right away. But give it time, and you might realize this is actually going to be a blessing.”
I couldn’t keep sitting there and listening to her. I knew she wasn’t, but everything she said somehow felt like gloating. Each word was making me more and more frustrated.
“I actually don’t have much of an appetite right now, mom. I’m going to go check on my weeds.”
She sighed but cleared the annoyance from her face. “Okay, honey. Be careful. It’s dark.”
No shit. The thought surprised me. I wasn’t the type to talk back to my mom, even in my own head. I really needed to find a way to put everything behind me so I could get back to normal.
I wheeled myself outside, thinking how getting back to normal wasn’t normal at all. It would be getting back to living in a practical bubble—of letting my conditions define me.
I used to think of my mom as my protector and my caretaker. But now, when I thought about going back to how things were, it seemed more like she’d be my warden.
I flicked on the porch light so I could see my little garden. Even my weeds weren’t coming through for me. All but one was withering and almost definitely dead. I added some water to the whole bunch, anyway, just in case there was some little seed of hope in one of them left.
Before I headed back inside, I saw a dark figure walking down the road toward Tristan’s house. I squinted, then realized it was Tristan. I didn’t understand why he would be walking at first. Our school was at least five miles away. Then I felt the bulge of his car keys in my pocket.
I sighed.
He deserved worse for the things he’d said. I didn’t need to feel bad for him. Besides, he was way too drunk to drive, anyway. I decided I’d drop his keys at his doorstep tomorrow.
I watched him go, feeling strangely empty. I kept thinking he’d look my way. He had to have seen the back-porch light on. But he walked the whole way to the gate to his house and behind the trees without so much as a glance in my direction.38TristanSaturday came and went in a blur. I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol, and I wasn’t even sure why. All I did was lay in my room, sober for the first time in what felt like weeks. Completely sober.
I felt reality come swimming back to me stroke by stroke.
I saw what a fucking disaster the house was. Cups and trash still sat where it had been left from my party on Thursday. Old food was left out. The front yard was trashed, and there were tracks of mud where people had torn up the yard in their trucks.
I didn’t feel the least bit bad about any of that. Every ounce of destruction just felt like a small punch back at my father.
But I thought I’d feel justified by now for what I’d done with Kennedy. For once in my miserable life, I’d done the right thing. So why did it feel so shitty?
No matter how hard I tried, I just kept remembering the way she’d cried in the cafeteria—the way she’d broken in the parking lot when I threw my stones.
I found my car keys on the front porch Saturday morning, and maybe something about that had been what convinced me not to crack open a beer for breakfast. I doubted Kennedy had meant anything by giving them back, but they’d just looked like a reminder to me—a reminder of how being too much of a pussy to face any of this sober had made everything worse.
There was a knock at my door on Sunday.
I ran my hands through greasy hair. I was pretty sure I hadn’t showered, but I couldn’t quite remember. When I pulled the door open, Logan was standing there. “You’re really embracing this whole grunge thing, huh?”
I walked away from the door, leaving it open so he could follow me inside. I ran my arm across the couch, knocking some cans out of the way so I could sit.
Logan did the same on the love seat, sitting down. “You know I don’t usually try to tell you how to do your shit, but I feel like I’ve stayed out of your business for long enough to earn at least one exception.”
I leaned my head back. Listening to Logan lecture me on how thoroughly I’d screwed up was the last thing I wanted right now. He didn’t even know the full truth. Nobody really did.
“First of all,” he said. “Are you going to clean this up before your parents come back, or what?”
