“I did,” he says simply.
“Mel asked you to go. You did it for her.”
“Maybe that’s what I told myself.” His voice is as soft as mine. “It let me sleep at night. But you think I wasn’t relieved to be out of there? For my biggest worry to be making it to a lecture on time or my roommate snoring too loudly or hooking up with girls?”
My heart stops.
Luke clears his throat. “After you.”
I believe him that it was only after, but I can’t decide why he said it at all. Is he trying to hurt me or just tell me the truth? Is healwaystrying to hurt me?
“You’re an asshole,” I say, my voice still a whisper. He doesn’t apologize or take it back or defend himself.
“You’re not going to State in September?” he asks now.
“Not this year.”
“Why not?”
Because my life doesn’t get to start yet. Because I haven’t figured out a way to escape being me. “Not sure what I want to do,” I say.
I don’t want to talk about this, and I’m more confused than ever about what Luke meant about running away, so I go back to that.
“If you ran away, you wouldn’t have come home so often. You wouldn’t even be home now.”
“Assholes still have consciences,” he says. “When Ro ...?After he ...”
He can’t say the word, and I swallow.
“After Ro, I stayed home till January,” Luke says. “Mom was getting sicker and sicker, and I knew I shouldn’t go back, but I did. Made up some bullshit about not wanting to lose my scholarship. It was just too fucking miserable in that house.”
“That’s not your fault.”
Luke sounds a little bit angry when he speaks next. “Why are you so set on making excuses for me? You’re so obsessed with thinking the best about the three of us. Me and Mom and Ro.”
I flinch at his words.
Then he adds, “That’s one of the things I loved about you.”
Love.
We never used that word when we were together, but it was always there, this warm, bubbling lava underneath everything else.
And he saidloved,because this isn’t October anymore. And there were girls after me. And the only way he can make himself pretend to like me is by pretending to love me.
“When the semester finished, I signed up for more classes to make up for the courses I didn’t finish first term. Instead of coming home in May, I dragged it out to the end of June. When I was literally out of excuses, when she could barely stand anymore, that’s when I came back.”
His voice is thick with anger and self-loathing.
“I didn’t go to see her at all,” I say now.
“She’s not your mother.” The words should sting, but they only sound like the echo of Rowan’s words to me a year ago.
“She’s still one of the most important people to me,” I say.
“You thought she knew,” he says, and we both know what he means.She should know,a voice in my head says.
“I should still have gone,” I say. “I should have let her hate me as much as she wanted.”
