CHAPTER 47
Nastya
Everything is hell now and I deserve it, but I can handle pain if it’s pain of my own choosing.
***
Drew tiptoes around me now and I avoid him. I won’t put him in the middle of this. He belongs to Josh. I spend most of my time with Clay. Or alone. Being alone would be easier if I liked myself. But, right now, I don’t. Not even a little.
Fourth and fifth periods are the worst, because that’s when I have to see him and I can’t pretend that he never existed, like I try to every other moment of the day. As if that might help. As if anything might help. I could pretend that I don’t watch him, that I have enough resolve and self-respect not to let him catch me staring, but I don’t have the discipline. Every day I say I won’t look, but I do. The only good thing about it is that he never catches me looking.
Because he’s never looking at me. And he shouldn’t. I don’t deserve him.
The world should be full of Josh Bennetts. But it’s not. I had the only one.
And I threw him away.
***
One day Margot sits down at the kitchen table with me while I pretend to concentrate on reading a poem I haven’t comprehended a word of. My homework is getting done more these days. I can’t even tell you how many miles I run.
“It hasn’t escaped me that apparently you live here again,” she says.
I keep staring at the poem like the words will suddenly swim up from the paper and make their way into my brain.
“I’d ask you if you wanted to talk about it.” She just barely smiles and she’s trying,
but
it’s
pointless.
Because
everything is pointless right now. I’m pointless.
I even start going home on the weekends so no one will expect me at Sunday dinner. And maybe that’s the only thing I do that’s worth a damn.
No one asks me why I keep coming back all of a sudden. They just let me come.
I get another birthday present one weekend when I get home. Since I didn’t take the phone, my mother gives me a camera. It’s simpler, not as crazy as hers, but I don’t think it’s the camera she’s giving me, anyway. She’s giving me part of her. Trying to replace part of me. I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea but I’m starting to get tired of judging and second guessing everyone’s motives, because I’m starting to grasp the real problem and I know that it’s me. I don’t have Josh anymore. I’ve kind of lost Drew.
I need my mother. I want the warmth of that unconditional love so much that I’m willing to ignore the price, and for the first time in almost three years, maybe I can admit that, even if it’s only in my head.
We don’t talk yet, but maybe.
My mother shows me how to use the camera and we wander around taking pictures of nothing and everything. She doesn’t even drill me about format and composition. Sometimes my hand will stutter and ruin one but we ignore it.
On Sundays, I work on teaching my dad how to make pancakes from scratch instead of a mix, because it’s really just baking in a pan and it’s something I can do.
Nothing is perfect. It’s not even good yet, but maybe.
***
I miss him today. I miss him every day. I went to Home Depot tonight just to walk through the lumber aisle and try to breathe.
I’m back to hiding in the bathrooms at lunch. Clay props the door open for me again, but we pretend it doesn’t mean anything.
My hands are turning soft again.
Josh will be eighteen next week.
***
Josh
“Who’s it from?” I ask when Mrs.
Leighton hands me the last present on the table. We’ve eaten dinner and done the whole cake thing. I skipped the wishing.
Nothing in me wants to be here.
“It was on the porch this afternoon. It had a piece of paper taped on it, but all it said was your name. No card.”
I rip open the paper and now I want to disappear so I can be alone in this moment.
I want to be allowed to see this without anyone seeing me.
The frame I’m holding in my hands is a simple black gallery frame. It’s nothing special. The picture in the frame is what throws me, knocks me on the ground and kicks me around a little bit.
When I pull off the rest of the wrapping paper a photograph that had been stuck in the front of the frame falls to the floor. Drew picks it up and looks at it before handing it to me and I can tell he wants to keep holding it.
I recognize the picture. It was in a photo album on the bookshelf in my living room. It’s my mother with Amanda on her lap and they aren’t looking at the camera.
They’re smiling at each other, but you can still see their faces. They’re both beautiful and I realize that I forgot that they were; like everything else I’ve lost to forgetting, because there’s nobody left to remind me.
There are photographs all over my house. Everywhere. I didn’t put all of the people I loved away. They all still hang on the walls, mostly because they always have. I didn’t put them there, but I didn’t take them down, either. I left them where they were like nothing happened. But not this picture. This one has been tucked away in an album for years. I love this picture. I forgot that I did. And I can see this one. Not like the ones on the walls that I’ve walked by every day, so many times that they stopped registering a long time ago.
The picture in the frame is a perfectly rendered charcoal drawing, just like the photograph, only bigger. Even though it’s black and white, I watch my mother’s eyes crinkle with her smile and I see my sister breathe, and for a moment, I think they’re alive. It’s Clay’s work. There isn’t a question. And there’s only one person who could have given him that photograph. But she isn’t here, either, because she left me, too.
She has no right to do this. To make it harder for me to hate her, because I need to hate her right now more than I need anything.
“I forgot how hot your mom was,” Drew
says,
because
he
detests
uncomfortable situations and his way of dissolving the tension is to remind us that he’s an ass. And I love him for it.
Mrs. Leighton smacks Drew’s arm.
His father comes around and smacks his head and then pulls Mrs. Leighton to him and kisses her hair.
And I go home alone.
***
It’s been five weeks since she walked out of my house. I started counting the second the door closed. I wonder when I’ll stop.
***
“So who’s Corinthos having killed now?” Drew walks in after school and crashes on the other end of the couch. I switch the TV off because I’m not watching it anyway and I really just don’t care.
“So,” he asks, after waiting through the requisite fifteen seconds of silence, which is the maximum Drew can stand.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened between you two?”
“No,” I say, because it’s true.
Because it’s the last thing I want to talk about. Because I might actually cry if I do, and honestly, because I really don’t know what the hell happened. “I’m probably not.”
Drew nods and doesn’t argue. I know she’s been avoiding him, too, even in debate. “I miss having her around.”
“Get used to it,” I say and I turn the TV back on.