“Did you say sorry?” he asked. “Maybe you can stay if you say sorry.”
“I tried. But—”
“Sam?” Her mother appeared behind him, eyes never even looking at Caela as she placed a hand on her son’s shoulder. “You should be in bed, sweet boy. Say goodbye to Michaela.”
Sam’s lower lip quivered, and it broke Caela’s heart. That, by far, was the thing that made her feel the guiltiest.
“Bye, Michaela,” Sam mumbled as their mother led him away. It took everything in Caela not to throw one of her schoolbooksacross the room in an outburst of emotion. She finished tying up the garbage bags and put her camera in its case.
She was out on the front porch, in the chilly night air, by the time Bonnie finally replied to her text.
Kinda busy. What’s up?
Caela quickly typed,They kicked me out because of what happened tonight.
Oof. That sucks.
She waited for a beat, but Bonnie didn’t text anything else. So she asked,Can I come crash on your couch? Please?
It was a few minutes before Bonnie replied.I’m actually not home. After the cops dropped me off, I went out to see Jay.
Jay was the latest of Bonnie’s creepy jerk boyfriends. They’d only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks, so Caela was surprised—and crushed—by Bonnie’s reply when she asked her to come back to help her.
Wish I could, but I told Jay I’d hang here.
Caela stared down at her phone. She was being kicked out of her home. Bonnie knew what had happened to her dad, knew that she had no real relationship with her grandparents, who were the only other family she had, knew that she had nowhere to go.
AndBonnie was picking a boy she barely knew and barely liked over her?
Maybe she didn’t understand or thought Caela’s mother and Rob weren’t serious. So she tried to call again. And again Bonnie didn’t answer. And after that, she didn’t reply to a single text message, either.
Caela felt eyes on her. Turning around, she found Rob staring at her from the kitchen window, arms folded over his chest and glaring. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. Caela wondered if she’d gone to bed, not even bothering to stay awake to watch her child drive off.
Caela hoped that she felt guilty, sending her only daughter away with nowhere to go.
But that seemed unlikely.
Caela threw her possessions into Jennette’s trunk and slid into the driver’s seat. Then she just sat there, frozen, because she wasn’t even sure which direction she’d turn once she pulled out of the driveway.
She looked at her phone again. She hadn’t spoken to Eliza in nearly two months. Even if she had, Eliza lived in a tiny two-bedroom house with both her parents and her older brother. They wouldn’t have room for her. And Grady had already askedhis parents if she could live with them back in the summer, before she left Ohio, and they’d said no. Even if that was an option, the idea of being their third wheel—constantly being reminded that they’d kept how they felt about each other from her, that they’d waited until she was gone to get together and then all but forgotten her—was too painful to even consider.
Her grandparents were old and just as strict and rigid as her mother. Her dad had told her plenty of stories about how eager he’d been to move out as soon as he was eighteen, and she knew they’d barely spoken after that. They’d be just as disappointed in her as her mother was, if they even took her in at all.
Bonnie was all she had left.
And her “bestie” was seemingly ignoring her at her lowest, most vulnerable point since her dad’s death.
When Rob started flashing the porch lights—as if trying to remind Caela that she could not, in fact, live in the driveway forever—she finally set the phone aside and picked a direction at random.
East. She’d drive east.
All Caela could think as she tossed the dagger earring out the car window at two in the morning was that it was her fault. Her fault that she’d let her mother down, let Sam down—maybe evenlet Bonnie down somehow, though she wasn’t sure what she’d done to disappoint her. It was her fault she’d drifted away from Eliza and Grady. It was her fault she had no one and nowhere to go.
Caela was a failure. She was a disaster.
And that was why she was alone.
IRIS
