I draw my knees up to my chest. “I go into their room, and Dad’s sitting there on the bed, staring at the tiny hotel TV, and there’s some stupid show playing, something about tearing down old houses, and it has this obnoxious, fake-smiling host, and Dad’s looking at the screen, obviously not watching it at all. God knows what he said to make her run like that. I still kind of wonder, but he’s never said, so I can’t help but think . . .” I swallow. “Anyway, so I ask him, like, ‘Should I go see if she’s okay?’ and he gives me this look filled with . . . like, wow, little tiny fourteen-year-old Olivia, you don’t understand what just happened. You don’t get it at all. But I sort of got it.”
My throat aches. I’ve spoken too long already. I rush on. “So I run down into the lobby, and I’m just in time to see the back of a taxi driving off. And me and Kat are like, okay, Dad, let’s call another cab, let’s go, but we can’t get him to move until after the plane’s supposed to take off. So we get a flight back in the evening, and by the time we get home, all her stuff’s out of the house. Never saw her again. Took a few weeks for Dad to get a number she’d pick up from, but they only talked once, and apparently she, um. Apparently she didn’t want to talk to Kat or me. Thought it’d be too painful.”
Matt doesn’t say anything.
I try to smile. I can’t quite manage it. “What’s your mom like?”
“I mean, not that bad. All I do is complain about her, but she’s not . . . I don’t know.”
“What’s her deal?”
He makes a noncommittal noise. “I guess all you need to know is that we visited Yale last summer for her twenty-fifth reunion, and at the end she basically said, ‘I’m humiliated that U of M is your reach school.’?” He sounds uninterested. “She’s always thought I’m stupid. I’m smart enough to see that much. But you get used to being a disappointment when you bring home my grades every year, so at this point, not a big deal.”
The resignation in his voice depresses me. Claire’s got a 4.0 GPA, but she has the people-smarts of your average twelfth-century warlord. And Juniper’s dad has a PhD, but God bless him, he couldn’t find an ounce of common sense if it jumped screaming out of his cereal bowl. Maybe Matt’s the world’s best judge of character. Maybe he’s one of those people you can drop into a giant city and they’ll know their way around within thirty seconds. I’ve always thought everybody’s a genius at something; you just have to dig it up and polish the hell out of it.
To me, right now, he seems a little bit of a genius at making me feel normal again.
“Matt?” I say. “Thanks for this.”
“For what?” His voice lightens. “Whining about my family? I could do this shit all day.”
I laugh. “Okay. I expect a five-page whine by Friday.”
“No problem.”
“Single-spaced,” I add. “None of that making-the-periods-size-14-font shit, either. I can tell.”
“Hmm,” he says. “Someone’s going to be a hard-ass teacher.”
“Believe it.”
The silence turns thick. Its back sags under what we’re not saying.
“So,” I say.
“So.”
“Look, I don’t want to mess things up, because I think this is a good . . . you know?”
“Yeah,” Matt says, “it’s a good.”
I smile. “And I need a good right now, you know? With everything.”
“Me too.” After a long pause, he says, “I don’t want to mess this up, either. This—thing.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s just, um,” I say, my palms itching with sudden heat. I turn off my brain and blurt it out: “I really like you, I think, and I—yeah.”
“I like you, too,” Matt says cautiously, as if he’s expecting me to go, Fooled you! I take it all back!
“Ah,” I say, breathless. “Okay.”
“Yeah.”
I clear my throat. “Can I maybe see you tomorrow?”
“I—sure. After school? I can catch up with you in the new wing.”
“Perfect. So I . . . yeah. Bye?”
“Bye, Olivia.”
But neither of us hangs up, and for a while, neither of us says a word.
Finally, he says, “Raining pretty hard.”
My gaze goes to the window. The thin rivulets of water shatter the outside world into an Impressionist’s painting. A breeze flows through the thin opening, stirring the air. “I love the rain,” I say. “Smells like waking up.”
I delayed as long as I could.
The sun has drowned in evening rain.
I unlock the door, my fingers choking the knob.
What will they say?
They’ll want to make the call . . .
(it’s over uncovered my love discovered) Will I grovel, my voice rough as gravel will I plead, my eyes dripping need will I put myself to shame?
Will they forgive him? forgive me?
will he forgive me for coming clean?
(please—forgive me)
(forgive me)
We perch uneasily in the living room.
An hour unfolds.
Every detail I didn’t detail; every problem they didn’t probe—I lay it all bare.
They tick silently like time bombs.
So there it is.
And they burst together.
Juniper Bridget Kipling—
Juniper!
Five months—
You’ve been lying right to our faces—?
I ice over. My words detach and drift, skiffs on a calm lake.
The lying didn’t take much. I’ve realized it would take me setting off fireworks in the house for you to even threaten me with consequences.
That is just untrue.
Do you realize how worrying—
Disbelief swims up. Yanks at my oars. Worry? You’ve just been watching as I turn into a train wreck. If you’ve been worried at all about how I’ve been acting, it’s been impossible to tell.
My mother’s fists are clenched.
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze out the fear.