“I’m not having this conversation again,” my mother snaps at him. “So drop it.”
I hear the fridge door slam, an angry thump. “No, I won’t drop it. You weren’t there this morning, Mandy. You didn’t see her face. How is she supposed to move on when every time she turns around, there’s another reminder of the nightmare she went through? I get that you feel guilty for sending her away, but it was for the best. She should’ve never come home. She should’ve stayed there and graduated at Somerset Prep. She wasn’t ready to come back and you know it.”
Mom says something else but I don’t stick around to hear it. I get back into bed, secure my earbuds, and hit shuffle on one of my longer playlists. I don’t bother to close my eyes, or even wipe them dry. Sleep is out of the question now. It’s hard to relax in the bedroom I’ve known all my life when my own father thinks I no longer belong here.
four
Sophomore Year
“WE WON’T STAY LONG. AN HOUR OR TWO, TOPS. Come on, Aubs, don’t be antisocial.”
She glowered at me across the kitchen table, where we were icing the shortbread cookies we’d made earlier. Aubrey loved to bake, but we always did it at my house because her mother had a thing about unnecessary messes. “I’m not antisocial,” she said, affixing a silver candy ball to the perfect icing swirl on her cookie. “I just don’t see the point in going to the park at eight o’clock on a Saturday night. What’s there to do there?”
I licked a blob of icing off my thumb and sighed. She was such an old lady sometimes. “Do? You don’t do anything. You just be. Everyone hangs out there on weekends. Paige told me—”
“Paige hates me,” she cut in, as she did whenever I mentioned my second-closest friend.
“She doesn’t hate you.” I said this as convincingly as I could, but my tone still rang false. Paige did kind of hate Aubrey, and I had a good idea why. Not only had Aubrey replaced Paige as my best friend back in middle school, she also had this mystifying bond with Paige’s boyfriend, Travis. I didn’t even understand their friendship, and whenever I asked Aubrey about it, she’d shrug and say something like, “Deep down he’s really sweet.”
If Travis Rausch was sweet, he only ever showed it to Aubrey. I wasn’t convinced he even had a “deep down.”
“Whatever,” she said, grabbing another cookie to ice. “Where’s Tobias? We need an impartial taste-tester.”
I went upstairs to find my brother, happy to let the subject of Paige drop. I hated being caught between them.
Tobias was in his room, damp from his bath and dressed in Spider-Man pajamas. “Are the cookies ready?” he asked the second he saw me.
“Yeah.” I stood in the doorway and pressed a hand on either side of the doorframe. “But to get to them, you’ll have to get past me.”
He gave me a gap-toothed grin and moved to duck between my legs. I crouched down to block him, but he squeezed past me and flung himself over my back, wrapping all four limbs around me. I rose slowly to my feet, acting like he wasn’t even there, and carried him downstairs to the kitchen. We found Dad standing by the sink, cracking open a can of beer.
“Help me, Dad!” I mock-cried, reaching back to poke a finger into my brother’s ribs. He wiggled, almost jerking me sideways into the stove. “I seem to have some sort of giant growth on my back.”
“Uh-oh.” Dad sipped his beer and leaned in to examine my “growth.” “Looks serious. I think I might have to go out to the truck and get my pry bar. That’ll take care of it.”
Tobias giggled in my ear as Dad pretended to excise him from my back. Aubrey watched us from her seat at the table, a small, wistful smile on her face.
Later, after a large percentage of the cookies had been tested and approved, I started working on Aubrey again.
“Just for an hour,” I begged. “It’s a five-minute walk down the street, and we both have to be home by ten anyway.” She didn’t respond, so I brought out the ace I’d been saving for when all else failed. “I heard Justin Gates hangs out there sometimes.”
A spark of interest flashed in her eyes. She and Justin had been semi-flirting at school for the past two weeks, smiling when they saw each other in the halls and accidentally-on-purpose walking by each other’s lockers. While I was happy for her, I couldn’t deny that ever since that day in the cafeteria, I’d been thinking about him too. I kept it to myself, though. I wasn’t the one he liked, and I didn’t want Aubrey stop flirting with him out of loyalty to me. If the situation had been reversed, I knew she’d feel the same.
“Okay,” she said with a long-suffering sigh, like she was agreeing only because I’d badgered her into it. “But I have to go home and change first. My shirt’s full of flour.”
My parents let me go with the usual warnings—no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, and text if I’m going to be later than ten. Aubrey’s parents had all the same rules, but unlike my parents, they didn’t bother issuing them more than once. They correctly assumed their kids would stay out of trouble without their reminding.
When Aubrey and I had dropped by her house so she could change clothes, we discovered Ethan playing video games in his eerily neat room. And before I could stop her, Aubrey somehow persuaded him to come with us to the park. I felt like throttling her. Who brings their little brother along on a spontaneous, sort-of-maybe date thing?
Aubrey. That’s who. But she was nervous, and she and Ethan had always been each other’s security blanket.
In any case, the three of us were now walking along the gravel path that snaked through Juniper Park, heading toward the stone fountain area, where everyone had gathered. The fountain was dry and had been since August, when some kids dumped in a few bottles of dish soap and made a huge, bubbly mess.
“Hey,” Paige said as we approached. She was sitting on the lip of the fountain, her thigh pressed against Travis’s and her fingers cradling a lit cigarette. When we reached them, she stood up and hugged me as if we hadn’t just seen each other in school yesterday. As she pulled away, her gaze landed on Aubrey and Ethan. “Hey,” she said again, but with much less enthusiasm.
Aubrey nodded at her once and then glanced around. A dozen or so people lounged around the fountain and on benches and grass, talking and laughing and smoking. Justin Gates wasn’t one of them. Looking slightly dejected, she sat down on the fountain edge a few inches from Travis.
“How’s it going, McCrae?” he asked her as Ethan and I sat on her other side. Travis called everyone by their last names. Probably even his parents.
“Oh, you know,” Aubrey said with a shrug. “It’s going.”
Beside me, Ethan coughed into his hand. Paige’s smoke was clearly aggravating his asthma. I bumped his shoulder with mine and leaned in to ask him if he was okay.
He nodded briskly. “I’m fine.”
I turned back to Aubrey, who was now staring down at her phone. Even in the shadows, I could see the blush staining her cheeks.