“Or what?”
“Don’t make me tell Hart.”
“Then neither of us will have a line to the outside.” She shrugs and swipes her key card through our room’s security pad. Inside, I lean against the frosted glass door as she rifles through her stuff.
“They’re protecting my family, Alex. I can’t lose that.”
She turns. “Are you convincing me? Or yourself?”
I don’t have an answer, but I don’t think I’m supposed to. She passes me the cell and the battery’s hot to the touch.
“Use it,” Alex says. “But only because I’m generous and because you’re going to need me, and I prefer it when people owe me favors.”
The rest of the evening drags. We have dinner. We have therapy. We turn in homework and Milo never shows.
When I ask about him, Hart shrugs and says, “Maybe he had something to finish up.”
Maybe, but if that were true, Hart wouldn’t be watching me like he’s waiting for a reaction. I smile like there isn’t something festering inside me and follow Alex back to our room. We don’t say much. We’ve both been assigned more homework and I’m nowhere near finished with my chemistry notes when I quit. Milo’s in my head, but the cell is calling me. I want to use the phone’s internet.
I want to search for Griff’s name.
I stuff my hand between the bed and the dresser, wiggling my fingers until I can tug the cell from its hiding spot. It’s kind of stupid how much I’ve missed my own phone. Holding this one makes me feel more like myself.
“Just can’t wait to make that call, huh?” Alex doesn’t look up from her math homework, but I like to think she can feel me giving her the bird. I jump off the bed and shut myself in the bathroom.
“What?” she calls. “You shy now?”
I prefer to think of it as being practical. I can’t afford to give her leverage.
But yeah, there might be some shyness too. Griff is mine. Not mine in the sense that I own him. More like . . . it’s personal. What we had was something that belonged to me. Just me. And the loss of it sinks me to the floor.
I press my shoulders to the tiled wall and search Griff’s name. Top two results are local newspaper articles about his art school scholarship. He’ll be attending Savannah College of Art and Design in the fall, and even though both columns are basically the same thing, I reread them and I can’t stop my grin.
Griff always wanted to go to SCAD. It was part of his master plan, part of that happily ever after he wanted more than anything. And I want to concentrate on how this is wonderful and amazing and “a great example of a disadvantaged youth conquering adversity.”
But my brain keeps circling how close Griff came to losing it all.
Carson would’ve ruined that. Gladly. I traded myself for Griff. My future for his future. He will never know how close he came and I’m glad for that. Truly.
I think once you realize that safety is just an illusion, that family is just a word, and that everything is always on the edge of disappearing, nothing ever looks the same again. Because once you lose that belief, you don’t lose it just a little. You sink it ten thousand miles below your surface. In the muck. In the mire. And even if you resurrect those beliefs, they don’t look the same. They will never look the same.
Griff does though. As I’m scrolling through pictures of his drawings and articles about his art show wins, he looks exactly the same. Beautiful. Untouched. Not damaged. Damn sure not broken.
I close the cell’s browser and lie on the cold tile floor, stare at the ceiling until the minutes smear past and I’m chilled through. Alex turns the bedroom light off around one thirty, but I doubt she’s sleeping. She’s waiting, listening. We’re both watching each other now, hunting for cracks. If I were in her position, I wouldn’t lose this opportunity either.
The quieter she is, the better chance she can hear me.
Good luck with that, Alex, because there won’t be anything to hear. I downloaded an iCam app to the phone. The upside is I’ll be able to see Griff. The downside? He won’t be able to see me. I won’t be able to communicate any answers and the only way he’ll know I’m even there is when the cam goes live and the light turns on.
I check the phone’s screen: 1:55. Still a little more time.
I could so do without that. My heart’s already stuttering in my chest. If I get caught . . . best not to think about it.
1:59.
I sit up and open the app, plug in the address. The screen goes black, then gray, then fills with Griff and I can’t breathe.
His eyes flick to the top of his screen—probably noticing the web cam light—and Griff bites his lower lip once before his gaze drops. I can’t tell where he is. The surroundings are dim and people are passing by. It’s definitely not his bedroom, so . . . internet café? It’s awfully late for a Starbucks.