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She weaves down the docks, keeping her head down, until she gets to the house. Then she stops in front of me, right in front of the bench, and stands there. Eyes blazing.
“I’m not going back there tomorrow,” she says. “I’m not going back to school.”
I take in her eyes, her fear. There we are—mirror images of each other—the last way I wanted us to get here.
“They pretend they’re not talking about it,” she says. “About my dad. About me. It’s worse than if they just said it to my face. Like I can’t hear them whisper about it all day anyway.”
“What were they saying?”
“Which part do you want to hear?” she says. “How Brian Padura asked Bobby after chemistry if my father was a criminal? Or when Bobby punched him in the mouth for it?”
“Bobby did that?”
“Yep…”
I nod, a little impressed with Bobby.
“It gets worse from there,” she says.
I move down the bench slightly, making room for her. She sits down, but on the edge, as if she may change her mind and get up at any moment.
“Why don’t you skip tomorrow?”
She looks at me, surprised. “Really?” she says. “You’re not even going to fight me o
n that?”
“Would it help?”
“No.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re off the hook for school tomorrow. If your day was anything like mine, you deserve to be.”
She nods, starts biting on her nails. “Thank you,” she says.
I want to reach out and take her hand away from her mouth, hold it. I want to tell her it is going to be okay, that it will all get easier—one way or another. But even if it would comfort her to hear it, it wouldn’t comfort her to hear it from me.
“I have no energy to cook anything, so your only form of nutrition tonight is coming from two extra-cheese pizzas with mushrooms and onions that are on their way to us in thirty minutes or less.”
She almost smiles, which cracks it open in me, the question I know I need to ask her, the question that I hope will help me figure out what has been looming so large in my mind since getting off the phone with Jake.
“Bailey,” I say, “I keep thinking about what you asked me earlier, about what your father meant in his note to you. What he meant by you know what matters…”
She sighs, apparently too exhausted for the eye roll that would usually accompany it.
“I know, my father loves me. You made your point,” she says.
“Maybe I was wrong about that,” I say. “About him meaning that. Maybe he meant something else.”
She looks at me, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“Maybe he wrote that because you know something,” I say. “You know something about him that he wants you to remember.”
“What could I possibly know?” she says.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” she says. Then she pauses. “Everyone at school seems to agree with you though.”
