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“Your dad just took you?” Logan asks. “That sounds...”
“Illegal?” I finish for him with a fake smile. “Yeah, Dad was okay with that. Not sure how it all happened, but a few phone calls and Grams was the owner of a brand-new non-potty-trained three-year old, complete with a birth certificate and social security number. I’m like an American Girl doll on crack. Did you know that my paperwork says I’m adopted from overseas?”
Logan cracks a grin because what else do you do to this? “Where from?”
“China,” I answer, and he laughs.
“I’m lying on the overseas adoption part, but not on the rest of it.” It feels strange to distinguish for people the truth from the lies. “It’s all crazy, but the messed-up part? It’s weird to not know who I am. Like what my real name is or see my real birth certificate, assuming I had either of those. Sort of sucks to think that no one gave a crap that a three-year-old disappeared off the face of the planet.”
Logan shifts from one foot to another, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. It’s happening. He’s pulling away and that creates an ache deep in my chest that hurts worse than my shoulder or head.
“How do you know he’s really your dad?”
“I don’t, but you have to admit this...” I motion to the pink room with stuffed animals “...is a lot better than what I could have grown up with. Bathing and eating, as it turns out, are seriously cool.”
Logan nods as he scans the room. “What happened to your mom?”
“Don’t know, and I can honestly say, I don’t care.” Dad took a picture of me and my mother from that day to remind me of where I came from in case I ever got the silly notion to search for my birth mother.
Dad wasn’t lying about our condition, wasn’t lying about how I was dirty from head to toe, had absolutely no meat on my bones, and had hair that may have never been washed or brushed.
Logan’s trying to swallow everything I’ve said and he’s choking on it. There’s a reason why I lie so often. People can easily accept a lie over the truth, especially when the truth deals with things they just don’t want to acknowledge. Like drugs or poverty or abandonment or me.
Lies can be pretty and sparkly. The truth is often disgustingly raw.
People turn away and tune out what is raw and real, they turn away from the truth.
Sitting on the bed so exposed to Logan isn’t quite working for me anymore so I lie back on the bed and throw an arm over my eyes. If I lie here long enough, I can try to believe the lies I tell myself. Like I’m okay. Like Grams is okay. That someday, I’ll have normal.
“Do you mind turning off the lights when you leave? And I’d also appreciate it if you could keep all of this to yourself. My father worked hard to keep my grandmother a secret and so have I. You don’t have to think of it as doing it for me. Do it for her.”
Logan
I do what Abby asks, flipping off the light, and then do something she doesn’t expect. I slip onto the bed next to her, on my side, and watch her in the glow of the streetlight seeping in from the curtains. Her arm remains over her face, and her chest rises as if she’s sucking in deep breaths. Over a week ago, I would have said that Abby wasn’t capable of pain, wasn’t capable of tears. Now? I have no idea how Abby’s capable of a smile.
“Go,” Abby says quietly.
But I don’t. I stay.
“It’s nowhere near the same.” I pause, intending to tell her about the diabetes, but then change my mind. The diabetes scares people and the last thing Abby needs is scared. “But when my parents separated I was seven, I didn’t see my mom for three months. Both Mom and Dad play it off now, but I knew then it’s because...for a time...she didn’t want me.”
Abby’s arm falls from her face to the bed and her head flops in my direction. “You have never talked about their divorce.”
I shrug and think back to when Abby realized at the bar that I don’t talk much at all.
She rolls to her side, mirroring my position. “Do they hate each other? Do you see her? What’s your dad like?”
I scratch my head, feeling like I’m drowning under the questions. “They get along now. Took Dad a few years though. Mom left him for someone else and Dad was still in love with her. It’s not something he got over easy.” It’s not something he got over.
“Is she still with the other guy? And what changed her mind about you? And—”
“Why are you pushing me away?”
She blinks at the change of subject. “Because around me, you’re in danger.”
I waggle my eyebrows at her. “I thrive on danger.”
“This isn’t a game. It’s time for me to stop pretending that I’m a normal girl who has a normal life with normal friends.”
