“Mmm.”
After she’d left, Anna touched my face but said nothing.
“She’s so mean!”
“Don’t hold it against her,” Anna said.
“Well, I don’t like her. I don’t have to like her!”
“No, you don’t. But you do have to listen to her.”
I pouted. “Why? She hates me. And she loves everyone else.”
“She loves us all.”
“Then why doesn’t she act like it?”
“Because love doesn’t always look nice.”
I folded my arms even tighter. Did Anna think I deserved to be slapped? Because I was bad? That’s what it sounded like. My chest swelled with bubbles of shame. Maybe I was bad. All those mean thoughts in my mind, wanting to hurt people. My grandmother knew about Soren, maybe she knew other things. The kinds of pictures I liked to look at on the computer. The kinds of things I liked to read.
“Take this.” Anna waved a spoonful of frothy liquid before me.
I twisted my head. “It looks gross.”
“It’s milk of magnesia. And you definitely want to take it because if you don’t, Gram’ll come back in here and do something worse.”
“Like what?”
Anna grinned wide, the happiest I’d seen her. She rubbed her nose against mine. Eskimo kissing, we called it at school, but I never let anyone do it to me because I hated being touched. But Anna was different. Her skin was very soft, like the velvety folds of Pilot’s ears. The shame bubbles popped and my heart went all tingly. Anna was better than my mom. Maybe I loved her.
“I don’t know,” she said teasingly. “She might give you an enema or something. Wouldn’t that be awful?”
The tingling stopped and black dots danced in front of my eyes. I definitely did not want that. I opened my mouth wide. Anna stuck the spoon in.
*
Later, when I felt better and lighter, a thunderstorm washed across the state. Heavy drops of rain pummeled the earth like sniper fire and the air smelled bright and raw like ozone. I stood at the window and watched one of my grandfather’s spit cans roll off a pine bench and straight into the back pond, where it bobbed around before sinking. My grandmother’s herb garden was completely underwater. Half the plants had been washed away or flattened. I smiled.
Light footsteps approached. I dove back under the covers as Anna popped her head in again. She’d called in sick to her job at the local library so that she could take care of me.
“Still not feeling well?” she asked.
I pressed my cheek against the pillow and made sad eyes.
She sat beside me, soft thighs touching my knees. The fear-anger-confusion that lived inside me subsided, like the lowering tide.
Anna rubbed my back again.
I felt happy.
chapter
seventeen
matter
“You can go if you want,” Jordan tells me. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
My heart skips a beat, not in a lovey-dovey way, please, but in a holy shit, ladies and gentlemen, mark the date and time, Winston Winters is being pushed away before he can withdraw sulkily kind of way. I feel a little sick, actually. How did this happen? I’m not dense. Being pushed away implies I’m making an effort to stick around.
Something is very wrong.
I take a steadying breath and pull out my phone. A quick check confirms what I already know, what I can already sense—it’s late.
Later than it should be.
The sick feeling intensifies. I’m too keyed up. Anxious, maybe, I guess. Although “anxiety” is one of those words people at our boarding school throw around that’s hard for me to connect with. Kind of goes hand in hand with that whole “worry” thing. I don’t get that, either. Why get worked up over the bad thing that hasn’t happened yet when there’re plenty of bad things that have?
Take Teddy, for example. He’s a day student, but he and Lex have been tight since the first day of school, so I know him pretty well. The guy worries about everything. It’s draining to see. Never mind that his family is beyond nuclear-ideal—I stay with his folks during vacations or whenever I can get away with not going back to Virginia—he’s loaded, drives a 3 Series BMW, gets perfect grades, and even if he didn’t, what would it matter? Teddy’s a three-generation legacy at Brown, and really, if grades were going to make or break his college success, he’d be better off at public school, where his über-achievement and 4.3 GPA might actually impress somebody. He can’t see that, though. Instead, the guy’s on every SSRI in the book, pops Ambien just to sleep, and practically faints anytime a girl says hi to him. At sixteen. It’s ridiculous. Literally nothing bad has ever happened to him. He just thinks it will. As if thinking will help.
Thinking never helps. I know that.
“Teddy,” I asked him once, back when I still thought it was important to try to fit in, “will you feel less bad when a girl rejects you if you worry about it ahead of time?”