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Everly’s mother shook her head, the layers of her blond hair feathering her chin. “She pulled away from me. She thought I was being mean, but I was trying to protect her.”
“From what?” Stanton flipped to the next page in the album, then the next one, and the next one. As if he were trying to find Everly.
“The world.” Her mom’s hands snapped into fists. “The world is cruel. People are crueler.” Her mouth tightened. “I know my daughter thinks the sun rose and set around her grandmother, but my mother didn’t live in reality. She ignored the way people looked at her, responded to her. Once at a restaurant, she complained to the server about the booths being too narrow, and when I went to the bathroom, I heard him talking to his coworkers about how my mother shouldn’t be eating a burger if she cared about fitting in a booth.” The expression on Penny Winters’s face clearly conveyed how horrifying she found this.
Stanton regarded her, his head tilted thoughtfully to the left, spilling his thick curls across the top of his ear. “What did you do?”
Everly leaned forward a little more, curious to hear the answer. Grandma Helen would have torn them a new one. Everly’s mom had probably agreed with the waiter.
“I didn’t tip him.” Her mother’s lips pursed. “You shouldn’t talk about people that way.”
“What they were saying, though…” Stanton seemed to be deliberately choosing his words, as if he were picking his way through a minefield. “That was wrong, too, right? Food doesn’t have moral value. We shouldn’t be judging what others eat.”
Everly’s mother tensed. “I know that. But that’s not how people act. And not everyone has a thick skin like my mother did. Not everyone wants to be a spectacle. It doesn’t feel good. And she encouraged Everlyto be the same way.” Her fingers smoothed down one of the pictures. “I was trying to save my daughter from being hurt.”
Everly backed away from the doorway. She didn’t want to hear any more.
When she glanced up, her eyes caught Logan’s. She hadn’t realized she was in his line of sight. He waved her over, but she turned and ducked outside.
She dropped onto one of the loungers and angled her face toward the sky. There were so many stars visible tonight; they flickered like fireflies against the darkness. She counted them, one by one, anything to chase her mother’s words from her head.
Hearing her worry, learning that every time she shamed Everly for her size, for the fat on her body, for who she was, for how she looked, she was doing it out of love, to—in her mind—protecther, filled Everly with anger. And the way she talked about Grandma Helen? Her grandmother had never forced her point of view on Everly. All she did was make Everly feel normal. Like she fit exactly as she was. Just because her mother was always fixated on how everyone else saw her didn’t mean there was anything wrong with ignoring that.
It was healthier not to care.
Part of Everly wanted to burst into the house, to yell, to force her mother to understand that love should never make anyone feel wrong, feel smaller. Sady would have loved that. Talk about an excellent TV moment. But Sady had left hours ago for a meeting. And some conversations weren’t meant for cameras. Some words should not be recorded. They should exist in one moment and thenpoof,disappear. They should be captured only in memories that would never quite get at the truth of them.
Everly refused to bare her soul for her mother, to speak words to her she couldn’t take back, for the benefit of an audience.
She’d reached one hundred stars when Logan wandered onto the deck. Everly held up her hand. She wasn’t in the mood to be filmed.
He flashed his palms to prove they were empty.
“I didn’t know you could exist without your camera.”
He shrugged. “Everyone’s taking a break.”
“Thanks for not pushing me to talk to my mother after what she said to Stanton.” Everly’s shoulders were bunched at her ears and wouldn’t quite drop. “It almost makes how she acts worse, to think she’s doing it out of love or something.”
“What do you mean?” His voice was so soft Everly had to lean forward to hear him.
She didn’t have the energy to detail the endless passive-aggressive comments, the new clothes she’d find on her bed every week that became more and more shapeless, more dated, the frustrated looks she shot Everly whenever her volume rose above a whisper.
“Let’s just say it has been my mother’s mission in life to find a Mute button for my grandmother and me.” She’d never managed it with Grandma Helen, but untilOTPSwandered into Everly’s life, she’d succeeded on her daughter.
Shaking his head, Logan lowered himself into the chair next to her so they were eye level. She could feel every inch of the space between them.
“It’s hard when the people who should know you best can’t see you clearly.” He rubbed his hands together, his eyes skirting her face. “My last girlfriend thought because I was good with a camera and followed her to LA that I wanted to be in the film industry. When I took every PA or photography gig I could get on her sets, and worked overnights, and got shit on by celebrities, that it was all for experience. But it was for her. I wanted to make us work. When she broke things off and I moved back east, she was shocked. It was like she had no idea who I was. What I cared about.”
Everly scowled. “Well, she sucks.” Without meaning to, she scooted a little closer to him on the lounger. She had no choice about opening up toOn the Plus Side’s entire viewing audience—which, by proxy, meant opening up to Logan—but this was the most he’d ever shared with her about himself. It made her feel connected to him, as if every word were a thread, a new stitch, knotting them more tightly together.
“It worked out in the end. I met Sady on one of those crappy jobs, and that changed my life.” His gaze settled back on Everly’s face. “But that didn’t make it any less painful.”
“How are you so sure it’s not true?” The wind practically swallowed her voice. “All the things my mother says about me?” This wasn’t the first time he’d suggested Penny Winters was wrong.
“I’ve been watching people through a camera lens basically since I could carry one. It teaches you to see things differently. Seepeopledifferently. I think it’s harder to perform for a camera than an audience. It filters out the false stuff.” He cast his eyes over the yard. His hands hung clasped between his knees. “Some people have a light. No matter what shitty stuff they’re dealing with, it can’t be snuffed out. You have one of those.” Everly had never noticed how long his eyelashes were. They brushed against his scruffy cheeks with each blink. “It’s kind of… I don’t know… hypnotic.”
No one had ever described her that way.
