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Would Mason resent them for trying to move on, for accepting my death so easily?
Maybe. But he’d have Izzy, so…
Would seeing Mason and Waylon hurt my parents as much?
An ache shoots across my chest at that, stopping me in my tracks just outside my room. Because no, no…
I really don’t think so.
Even if it did for some time, Izzy would’ve never let it persist. Not like me, who just…accepted it.
Izzy was the glue, not me.
I’m just the consolation prize.
The spare.
The unprepared understudy.
This role was never for me.
At the thought, a niggle of awareness creeps along the back of my mind—like a forgotten dream, just out of reach.
Frowning, I close my bedroom door behind me, and dig out my phone.
I would’ve felt it if I got a message, or if someone called…
Yet I still find myself checking, my stomach clenching when I see I’ve got nothing.
It’s been over twenty-four hours.
What the fuck did I do?
Because I had to have done something…
Said something.
Something big and bad.
I’m the one who ghosts, who shuts people out. Not Mason. Especially not with me. Never once in our lives, even on the rare occasion we did fight or bicker about something, did he ever disappear like this.
I mean, sure there was that time after the whole spin the bottle debacle. But that was…different.
I swallow thickly, shoving away the memory and the anxiety that comes with it—the nerves that mingle with whatever’s got Mason ignoring me—and bring up Spotify on my phone. Forgoing my earbuds, I grab the bulky headphones I keep on my nightstand and tug them over my ears as I cross the room to my desk.
I’d ended up switching my major and minor prior to the beginning of the fall semester. Based on where I was at with my business degree, and the free electives I amounted to over the last couple years, it was the perfect time to change gears.
I’d taken my midterms a week early so I could come home to help my parents with the benefit—at least, that’s the excuse I gave my professors. Really, I was just feeling homesick.
Shocking, right?
Now, though…now I kind of wish I just stayed on campus. Helped my parents from afar, instead of coming back here for two whole weeks.
Figuring I’d get a head start on the big final project for my illustration class, which will make up seventy-five percent of our grade, I pull out my sketchbook that I primarily use for plotting and outlining and drafting up concepts these days, and flip to the scene where I last left off.
Turning on my Wacom One—the digital drawing pad I’d saved up for all summer, and combined with financial aid, was finally able to purchase right before the semester started—I pull up a blank page, and get working on the next block in my comic.
Pearl Jam thumps in my ears, and I mouth along as I get lost in the scene playing out in my head, watching my fingers bring it to life on the drawing pad.
