It felt so good to hear—to hear how much she cared about me, and that my life mattered.
“You are so important to this family. We all love you, so much,” Marie added.
They loved me? I knew they liked me, but love? My heart felt like it grew one hundred sizes. This familylovedme. I loved this family, too. It was the closest thing I’d ever had to an actual family, and it settled something in me to know they felt the same.
“Even Jackson?” I don’t know why I asked, or why I needed the confirmation. He had been my best friend since I was fourteen years old, but we didn’t tell each other that we loved each other. I had never really told anyone, not even Julie.
Marie was rubbing smooth circles on my back that made me want to fall asleep. “Yes, honey, especially Jackson.”
What did that mean? Especially Jackson? I couldn’t think about it for too long, because I heard him say, “Hey.”
I leapt out of Marie’s lap, running my hands under my nose and wiping my eyes with the neckline of my pajama top. “Hey,” I said as I forced a smile. “Merry Christmas!”
Jackson stood in the doorway to the family room, looking from Marie to me with a question in his eyes.
“Your mom braided my hair for me,” I said, trying to steer the conversation away from my crying.
Marie gave me a small smile, seeming to understand how self-conscious I felt about my meltdown.
“What’d she do? Braid it so tight it made you cry?” I could tell he was trying to make a joke to ease the tension, but I was desperate to change the subject.
“Why don’t we open presents, yeah?” Marie asked as she stood from the couch, squeezing my shoulder as she passed me. The woman even knew how to read me.
Jackson walked up to me, his hair still in disarray from sleep. “You good?” he said, quietly enough so that his mom couldn’t hear him from where she was grabbing the gifts under the tree.
“Yep, I’m great.” I gave him two lame thumbs up.
He gave me a wary look, but he left it alone.
Phil came into the family room five minutes later, and Jackson and I opened our presents while sitting on the floor. He got a new pair ofdrumsticks, clothes, and a pair of high-top black Converse to match mine—although his didn’t have the embroidered pizza slice.
I was gifted two new sweaters that Marie said Julie picked out, a new purse (also courtesy of Julie), and three books that Marie said were trending right now at Barnes & Noble.
After gifts we ate breakfast, which consisted of a massive stack of blueberry pancakes with bacon and eggs. Then we sat around the family room and played our usual game of Monopoly. It was different with just the four of us, but it was one of the best Christmases I’d had with them.
Later in the day we Facetimed Julie, and then I followed Jackson to his room to watch him play the drums. After he played two songs, he took a break to give me a quick lesson, which mostly consisted of me not listening to anything he said. I couldn’t remember how to read the music, so I just hit the bass drum as fast as I could while freestyling with the cymbal and the other parts that I couldn’t remember the names of.
At the end of the night, Marie and Phil said I could sleep over again, and after Jackson and I watched a movie, we went upstairs to get ready for bed. We were in the upstairs bathroom, both brushing our teeth in tandem at the double-sink vanity, and Jackson kept looking over at me in the mirror. I knew he wanted to ask me something, and after I spit and rinsed my mouth, I asked him what was up.
“Are you going to tell me why you were crying earlier?”
I wiped my mouth with the bath towel, then handed it to him. I didn’t want to tell him, partially because I was humiliated that he watched me weep like a little kid while sitting on his mom’s lap.
“It was stupid,” I said.
He looked at me like he didn’t believe me, then looked away.
“It hurts me to see you cry,” Jackson said in a low voice. He was pretending to fix his hair in the mirror, avoiding the way I was searching his face. Then he added, “If there is something I can do to fix what’s wrong, I want to know.”
My heart squeezed in my chest. Because that was the kind of friend Jackson was; he had always been a protector toward me in his own way.
I pretended to fix my hair in the mirror now, too, just so I didn’t have to look directly at him. “Nothing was really wrong. It’s just that your family is really important to me.”
He didn’t even skip a beat when he replied with, “And you’re really important to my family.”
I loved hearing it from his mouth just as much as I’d loved hearing it from Marie’s. I wanted to tell him that his mom said the family loved me—thathe especiallyloved me, too. I wanted to tell him I loved him, and that he was the most important thing to me.
I got that weird feeling in my chest then, as I noticed how much he had changed since freshman year; how much he was turning into a man. I squished it down quickly though, because Jackson was my best friend. This family meant everything to me, and I wasn’t going to mess it up just because of how much I wanted their son. So instead, I said, “Thanks, Jackson. Good night.” Then I walked past him and shut the door to Julie’s room, locking it before crawling into bed.
