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“The boy who just left.”
I stood at the front door and looked back at Mateo, hoping he wouldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to hear Blaise’s name again tonight. I … I’d thought I wanted to hurt him, but I had gotten it so wrong. I hated making people feel bad.
And his last few words to me …
They hurt like a motherfucker.
“Blaise Harleen,” Mateo said. “Vera’s boyfriend.”
Mom looked over her shoulder at me with surprised brown eyes. “Your boyfriend?”
“Blaise isn’t my boyfriend,” I said, pressing my lips together so I didn’t seem both suspicious and hurt that Blaise had left. “Mateo’s just being a brat. Don’t listen to him. I would never date him.”
Lie.
“That’s a lie.” Mateo chuckled, stuffing another fry into his bratty mouth. “You always get so flustered whenever he comes around, and your cheeks get all red and blotchy, like they are now. I thought you were going to pass out at the sight of him the other night.”
I balled my hands into fists, my cheeks flaming. “Shut up. I don’t like him.”
Lie.
“She totally does,” Mateo said to Mom, heading back to his room. “She has a cru—”
Picking up a pillow from the couch, I hurled it at him and hit him square in the head. He snickered again and shut his door, leaving me alone to deal with Mom’s silent judgment about Blaise and his family.
She unfastened her name tag and carefully placed it on the counter, next to the brown bag of food, and didn’t look up at me. Not once. “Vera, you know what happened with the Harleens, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said quietly, staring down at my feet. “Don’t listen to Mateo.”
“I want you to be happy,” she whispered, looking back up at me and giving me a trying smile. Her eyes were creased, the tired lines growing deeper by the day. She did everything to make us happy, sacrificed her damn life for us. “And you have guilt written all over your face.”
The tears that I’d wanted to cry all day wavered in my eyes. I crossed my arms and stared at her for what seemed like forever. I never talked to Mom about boys, mainly because I had desperately tried to avoid them—or as Mateo would say, they avoided me, which was mostly the truth—but today … I needed someone.
Suddenly, I burst out in tears. Mom hurried over and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, brushing her fingers through my hair. I grasped on to her and held her as tight as I could. All this time, I had been trying to avoid Blaise Harleen because of what his parents had done to Mom, but … I couldn’t anymore.
I had lied to him today.
I had told him that our friendship meant nothing to me when I had the drawing he’d made me for my fifth birthday buried in my bedside drawer. For years, I’d kept it and wondered why his parents hated me so much. Was I the reason Mom had gotten fired?
“I don’t know what to do.” I sniffled, not even sure if Mom could comprehend anything.
After last night, I had begun to think that all this time, Blaise hadn’t forgotten about me either. Then, I caught him with Skylar and couldn’t even function. Why would he want me—me?!—when he could have her? I wasn’t like the girls he normally hung out with.
No boys—not even the losers in Calculus—even looked in my direction.
But tonight, Blaise had stayed with me the whole night, asked if I thought of him as a friend back then, and looked completely devastated when I said noto not feel hurt, to hurt him, which was so freaking wrong of me.
“Do what makes you happy,” Mom said. “Don’t worry about me, but be careful.”
“I know,” I whispered.
After hugging me for a couple moments longer, she walked back into her room to get ready for bed. She had an early shift tomorrow, so I wouldn’t have let her stay up much later with me anyway.
Deep down, I knew the only thing that I could do right now.
And that wasn’t crying into Mom’s shoulder.
I plugged my phone into the socket, sat on the couch, and pulled up a Google Doc because I didn’t have any more notebooks to spare. And then I wrote and I wrote and I wrote our story so far until tears raced down my cheeks.
