“You, too, can keep your crown,” she murmured back.
“Have you always lived here?” Juliet asked, eyes searching hers. “At the bowling alley?”
She found herself chuckling. Not that the question wasfunny, in an objective sense, but the concept of it was funny to her. “Uh, no.”
She continued to play, turning away from meeting Juliet’s eyes and feeling like she was staring straight through her, to look down at the keys.
“We lived in a lot of places around town.” She shifted from “Silent Night” into a melody she’d taught herself from an orchestra, after obsessing over symphony holiday songs one year. Something she played by ear that might not be a technically “correct” version of any song, but it was always a hit when she’dplayed it here. At least, for a certain crowd. Others felt it was a little too melancholic.
“Our mom…” She rolled her lips, staring pointedly down at her hands, at the way she moved. “She battled a lot of addictions. But her worst one, the one she could never kick, was men.”
With that, she aimed a humorless smile at Juliet, only to find that Juliet was shifting. For the first time tonight, she faltered in hitting the keys, wincing at the sound of striking the wrong chord.
Had she crossed some sort of unspoken boundary? Juliet had already spent hours and hours with her family today, was this somehow crossing some line?
It made her stomach twist uncomfortably, because – because she didn’t really talk about her mom, usually. What was the point? The only people she would discuss her with were Blythe and Emerson, and they already knew everything about her.
The only way her thoughts and feelings about her mother were ever brought up was in her music. Playing right now as she spoke made herfeelmore comfortable, even. She didn’t know what, exactly, was hardwired that way inside of her but it was.
“Don’t stop,” Juliet urged, nodding at the piano, where Darcy had paused, her hand resting on the keys.
Juliet didn’t walk away when she stood, but instead maneuvered so that she was straddling the bench, completely facing Darcy. Scooting even closer, somehow. One of her legs was behind Darcy, pressing against her right behind the bench, and she dropped both of her hands to Darcy’s thigh, warmly pressing against her.
Her stomach exploded in that fizzling, fluttering feeling, looking back down at her hands. She did what Juliet requested – what she really wanted to do – and kept playing.
After a few seconds, after she took a long, deep breath, she continued, “Me and Blythe are named after our mom’s favoritemaleromantic heroes,” she scoffed. “That should tell you a lot about her, I think. That’s… I mean, you know I didn’t graduate high school.”
Juliet slowly nodded, those dark eyes silently trained on Darcy’s face from only inches away.
“I was never really a good student. Couldn’t do math or science for shit, even when I would reallytry. I liked English–”
“All of the reading tracks, yeah,” Juliet supplied, her hands squeezing softly at her thigh.
“Yeah,” a fleeting smile tugged at her lips. “But… I don’t know. I fixate on the things that seem to stick in my mind to, like, a crazy degree.” Juliet knew that about her given her trouble sleeping. “And then focusing on all of the other things back then, the things I didn’t understand or didn’t really understand, felt like torture. I felt so… stupid. My mom made me promise I’d graduate. That was it. Make sure I get to the finish line.”
She shook her head, the same emotions from ten years ago sweeping through her. Tangling her up in worthlessness and anger, burning through her veins, and she pressed the keys harder, working it all out.
“When I finished my junior year, though, that’s when she took off. Met her newest guy. Totally dropped off the face of the earth. She’d done that before a ton of times, but only for a few days or a week. That time, she just didn’t come back.”
She did her best to recite the story as it was: a story. Just something that had happened, only the facts. But she could hear the intensity in her own voice and in the way her hands were speeding up as she played, pushing the tempo up around them.
“I just figured…” She rolled her lips, not wanting to look at Juliet. No, she tried her damndest not to be ashamed of herself, because she’d done the best that she could do.
Nonsensically, though, she felt more embarrassed saying this to Juliet now, than she would have six months ago. Six months ago, Juliet’s opinion of her was already garbage.
Now – now, she cared about it. A lot.
Her voice was hoarse when she continued, “I figured, if she didn’t care enough to stick around, what did it matter? She obviously didn’t really believe in me. Why should I go through another year of being called trash, another year of feeling like an idiot? Why should I keep a promise to someone who couldn’t keep the bare minimum promise to stick around until I was eighteen?”
The muscle in her jaw felt tight. Her voice was tight. Her throat was tight. Her shoulders were tight.
“That’s…” She forced in a deep, calming breath, before she confessed, “That’s why I need this so much.”
She got a little sloppy, hit the wrong key, and stopped, again. The silence in the room felt heavy around them in the sudden absence of the music.
“It’s not just for me, but – Blythe was supposed to go to college, you know? She had the grades and the cheerleading scholarship. But she’d have had to move away from here while I was still under eighteen. So, she didn’t go. She stayed here for me.”
It hadn’t been Darcy’s plan, either. She’d thought that after she graduated, she’d go to Nashville and see what happened. Maybe she and Emerson could go and figure something out. But… Blythe hadn’t left her, so how could she possibly leave Blythe? She couldn’t.
