“Thank you,” Sandy said, keeping her eyes on the food. Because she couldn’t handle looking right at Aidan. “For letting me come here.”
Because where the hell had she been planning to go? She hadn’t been planning, that was the bottom line. She’d just wanted to get away from Hannah’s dad, lurking outside Ridgedale Commons. And so she just kept pedaling until she was sure no one was following her. She didn’t realize until too late that it was getting dark and she didn’t have a plan. Despite what she’d been thinking, she couldn’t sleep outside. Amazing how something like that could seem like a legitimate fucking option—whatever, I’ll just sleep outside if I have to—until you started working through specifics. Where outside? In the woods? On the sidewalk? To begin with, it was too cold. And it wasn’t like people in Ridgedale wouldn’t notice another person sleeping on the street. There weren’t any other people on the street.
Sandy was hoping Aidan wasn’t going to make her eat. She wasn’t sure she could make herself swallow anything. But she was thirsty as hell. Couldn’t remember the last time she’d had something to drink. Felt like never. Sandy polished off two of the fancy glass bottles of lemonade Aidan had dropped on the bed, one after the other, before she looked back up. When she finally did, Aidan was staring at her with wide, freaked-out eyes. For the first time, he was getting just how fucked she was. She must have seemed like some kind of animal, drinking like that. She sure as hell felt like one.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping at her dirty mouth with the back of her dirty hand.
“Nah, it’s cool,” Aidan said quietly as he sat down on the bed next to her. He was looking down at his own perfectly clean hands, probably wishing he’d never invited Sandy over. He’d said he wanted to help, sure. But it was one thing to play at the edges of her fucked-up life. It was another thing to take up center stage.
“I can take off, you know,” Sandy said. She felt bad, putting all this shit on him. “No hard feelings. I don’t want you to feel, like, necessary.”
Aidan took the bottle of lemonade—Sandy’s third—from her hands, took a sip, and handed it back to her.
“Oh, I’m not necessary,” he said, turning to look at her. “I’m fucking essential.”
In the morning, when Aidan kissed Sandy goodbye on his way to school, she knew it might be the last time she’d see him. That maybe it should be. But the plan was for Sandy to slip out later, after Aidan’s mom and little brother had gone; she was supposed to meet up with Aidan after he was out of school.
“See you later,” he said. “I’ll text you.”
It had made a difference, Aidan being there. But when you lived in the middle of a shit-storm, the question wasn’t whether things were going to fly apart, it was when. The least Sandy could do was keep Aidan clear of the shrapnel.
After he was gone, Sandy pulled her mom’s journal out of her backpack and lay on the floor, tucked behind his bed, praying his mother didn’t charge in to toss the place for drugs or something while she was there. Jenna had already told Sandy some of what was in the journal, enough for Sandy to have known the exact place where the whole fucked-up story ended. Enough that Sandy would have sworn nothing she read could make it worse. But she should have known better. With Jenna, things could always get worse.
What if Jenna had decided that she couldn’t take the memories anymore? That was all Sandy could think once she was done reading the journal. What if coming back to Ridgedale had been about Jenna finding an ending instead of a fresh start? No, Sandy didn’t believe that any more than she believed that Jenna had taken off. And maybe that made her as stupid as anyone else who fell for Jenna’s shit. But she didn’t—wouldn’t—believe it.
Sandy had a flash of a memory then: her and Jenna dancing. She’d been barely ten, and they’d been in their shitty apartment in Camden, the one with the gas stove with only one burner that worked and that wack-ass blue-green mold streak on the living room wall. That day the sun had been so bright in the window that the place hadn’t looked so bad, especially with Jenna trying to teach Sandy how to cha-cha. Jenna had her black hair piled on top of her head, a cigarette pinched between her red lips, as she swung her hips back and forth in her worn, skintight leggings, trying to get Sandy to match her steps.
There wasn’t much that Sandy remembered from her childhood, but the particular bump in the road that came before that dancing stood out because it had rolled right over her tenth birthday. Her welcome into double digits had been totally forgotten in the three straight days Jenna hadn’t gotten out of bed and wouldn’t stop crying even though Sandy brought her endless Diet Dr Peppers and wine and Cheetos. Some guy—another guy like all the other guys—had broken Jenna’s heart. But by that afternoon—when Sandy was ten years and four days old—they were dancing. And Sandy knew once again that they’d make it. At least this time.
“You’re getting it! You’re getting it!” Jenna had squealed with delight when Sandy had been able to follow along. “Look at you! That’s it!” Jenna had looked so happy as they’d danced to the blasting Kid Rock that was definitely not meant for the cha-cha. So happy she might burst. Because that was Jenna: so bad and then so, so good.
Jenna wouldn’t kill herself. It wasn’t possible. She always rebounded. And she rebounded hard. She might have come back to Ridgedale looking for something or someone, Tex, maybe. If he’d looked out for her back then, maybe Jenna thought he’d do it again. That Sandy could see Jenna doing—dragging them here because she had some twisted idea that her knight in shining armor would still be hanging around all these years later, waiting to rescue her once and for all.