“We’ll be there in a couple of hours. Is everything okay?” she asks, her voice laced with concern.
“No, it’s not. I—” I cut myself off with a cough. “I’ll be fine until you get here. I’ll tell you everything.”
And when I have all of my artwork carefully stored away into my portfolio, and every single one of my belongings is packed into the suitcases I brought to college with me, I wait for their text to tell me they’re here.
I immediately block Danielle and Adam’s numbers, deleting our chat history and clearing all the pictures I’ve taken of us out of my library. Every memory we’ve made together is tainted with the words spewed out of their mouths.
I watch the clock tick down, slowly counting the moments until my parents once again whisk me away to protect me from my problems. Like they did when I was in school, I’m sure they didn’t expect it to continue on to college.
When my phone finally,finally,rings. I carefully balance all of my bags and carry them out of my room. I won’t be setting foot in here again. I shut the door behind me, waiting until I hear the automatic lock engage, and I drag my suitcases to my parents’ car, with not even a shred of dignity left to my name.
While my dad drives, I watch the fading lights of campus disappear into the night sky.
“Do you want to talk about it?” my mom asks when we reach the halfway point.
And I do. I tell them everything. From the first moment I met Adam, to hearing him and Danielle talk about how pathetic I was. The cheating, the nights I spent in Adam’s room, the nights at the library with Danielle.
“Oh, honey,” my mom says, her voice sad, and I catch my dad’s eye in the rearview mirror. “It’ll all be okay. I promise.” I don’t know how she can promise that when it feels like my life is disintegrating right in front of my eyes.
My dad pulls into our driveway and helps me get the stuff out of the back of his truck. Tomorrow, I’ll worry about everything. Tomorrow, I’ll email my professors and come up with some lame excuse for why I can’t make it to class. They’ll probably fail me, and at this point, I would be okay with that. I don’t want to go back to campus for any reason. So if failing my first semester of college is what it takes to help me get the rest of my life back on track, so be it.
I fall asleep in my childhood bedroom, the exhaustion from the day settling deep into my bones as I fade into blackness.
36
ADAM
The spreadsheet on my computer is blurry, and no matter how many times I rub my eyes, I can’t distinguish the thin lines between the columns. The highlighted column flashes, waiting for my formula, and I type it in, waiting for it to compute the total. It’s busy work for my microeconomics class, but something he’s drilled into our heads that we have to know to go into a business-related field. It’s not horrible, Excel does all the work. It’s making sure the formulas are right, that’s annoying, and extremely detail-oriented.
It works, thankfully. If it hadn’t, I probably would have shut the computer in annoyance and lost all of the work I’ve done thus far.
I refuse to check my phone or the clock that is currently face down on my desk. If I break once, I’ll continually check it until I hear from Hunter. I need to be productive while he’s gone, since I haven’t been doing as much as I probably should for my classes.
Who could blame me, though? Would they want to work on Excel spreadsheets and accounting logs if they had someone like him in the same room? Exactly, no. They would not.
But he’s out with Thomas. Breaking up with him as I think about it, and I shouldn’t be so gleeful, but I am. Sue me.
I work on one more formula, even though the numbers are starting to look wrong from how long I’ve stared at them. When I get that one completed, I save my work. Twice, just because I’m paranoid, and the thought of going through that fuckery again is enough to make my eye twitch.
My fingers itch to grab my phone, but I made a silent promise to Hunter that I would not interrupt his time with Thomas. He doesn’t need the extra stress of wondering what I’m saying in his messages at the same time he’s talking to him.
A part of me does feel bad, for Hunter, not for Thomas, because I know how much Hunter hates hurting people. It’s in his nature to soothe and comfort, and knowing that he hurt someone, and now he’s going to have to look that person in the face… it’s going to be a lot. The only thing I can do is be here for him and comfort him like he always does me.
The mention of him comforting me has me reaching for the children’s book propped on the edge of my desk. The one his mom gave me, and that he promised to read aloud to me. It’s childish, the thought of a guy reading aloud to another guy, but that’s just Hunter. He doesn’t care how something seems to the universe; he only wants to be helpful and useful. It’s going to be his downfall, but I’m going to be here, ready to catch him.
I flip through the pages, tracing my fingers across the words and the illustrations. My mind is flying with the imagination packed into every single page.
I wonder how different my life would have been if my parents had cared.
My mother, in her desperation to keep my father and his money, caused the destruction of almost everything. If only he hadn’t mentioned divorce that night at the dinner table, socasually and cruel in his nature, maybe she wouldn’t have gone off the deep end.
The threat of losing her wealth and her esteem was too much for her.
I still don’t know why she tried to kill me as well, the wine glass carefully poised in front of me. I was never allowed alcohol, it was strictly prohibited because my dad didn’t believe I was strong enough to hold it, not like a true man would.
But that night, she placed the glass in front of me, and a glass of bourbon in front of my father, after we sat at the table and listened to him talk about his long day dealing with investors and whatever the fuck else he did for work.
I watched them sip, pretending like my mother wasn’t falling apart right in front of my eyes. My father succumbed first, so quickly I didn’t even realize what was happening until it was too late.
