“Oh my god.” Nikki cackled as she skated up to us. “You guys absolutely ate shit, it was great.”
We scrambled to our feet, my whole body still reverberating from the impact.
“You sure you’re all right?” Brooklyn asked me, and in a seemingly thoughtless motion he reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
“I’m fine.” I heaved out a breath. “It was my fault, I’m sorry. I got a little too confident, I guess.”
Brooklyn rubbed the back of his neck, rolling his head around a few times. “Yeah, me too.”
Nikki slid me the most antagonizing smirk before skating away again, pulling Alec along behind her, who watched her with equal parts fascination and confusion.
“Anyway.” I felt that gross wad of tension ball up in my throat again, and I had to force my words past it. “What did you want to tell me?”
Brooklyn heaved out another sigh as he shook his head. “Are we good now?”
“Of course we are,” I told him.
Even though I’d come to the conclusion I selfishly wanted us to be more than maybe justgood. We’d unlocked our own Pandora’s box, and there was no way to stuff all the things I’d been feeling back into it.
“Excellent. Good. Great.”
His voice was soft, and all the colorful lights dotted his face as he gave me a weary smile. I didn’t know where I was, but I was not on earth; instead I was lost in the stars of his galaxy like a wayward comet. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get home. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Fourteen
When Nikki was sixteen, I found a half-eaten granola bar wrapped in a paper towel at the bottom of the bathroom trash can. It wasn’t the granola bar that bothered me; it was that it had been chewed and spit out.
Back then, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I’d convinced myself it was one of her weird teenage experiments, like when she tried to cut her own hair with kitchen scissors or decided she could “manifest” better skin by drinking celery juice for a week. But the truth had been right in front of me, and I hadn’t wanted to see it.
“Stop hovering,” she’d snapped one night when I followed her into the kitchen after dinner, pretending to look for a glass of water.
“I’m not hovering,” I’d said, which is exactly what a person who is hovering says.
She’d turned from the sink, face pale under the fluorescent light. “There’s nothing wrong, Nat. I don’t know why you don’t believe me.”
The words landed like a bruise. She didn’t sound angry, just tired. Tired of me watching. Tired of feeling whatever this was that she was feeling.
Sometimes that memory sneaks up on me when I least expect it, like tonight, when we’re all at the dinner table and everything is objectively fine and we’re talking about Nikki dyeing her hair.
“I want a change,” she insisted, pressing her hands into the table. “Some people cut their hair when they go through a breakup. I am, in a way, breaking up with my ED, but I don’t want tocutmy hair, because that’s too dramatic. So, I’m thinking red—but notredred, like an orange red.”
“Sure.” Mom nodded. “Why not like a chestnut brown or a black?”
“Black hair would make me look like Matilda,” Nikki stated, as if she’d already foreseen it and decided against it.
I sniggered. “Better Matilda than Leeloo fromThe Fifth Element.”
“Lee-who?” Nikki groaned.
“Not Leewho, Leeloo,” Mom sputtered between laughs, and eventually the three of us were cackling like hyenas, holding our sides with tears in our eyes. Moments like these were coming more often, but there was still a part of me that wanted to bottle it up in a jar and store it away, as if I would need it in the future. For what, I wasn’t sure, but there were times I found myself looking upward without even realizing it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Those moments still lingered.
“Fine, maybe I’ll just get a trim,” Nikki scoffed.
“You’re born to be a blond,” I reassured her. “Like Elle Woods.”
We finished dinner, and to my relief, no shoe had dropped.
“I have exciting news,” Mom said as we were clearing the table. Nikki had her hands elbows deep in the sink washing the Corningware while I scraped leftover chicken into Gracie’s bowl.
