“I know I said I was worried about the liking a girl stuff, but that was only part of it. And, um, based on how I felt when we were kissing just now, a very small part.” I don’t want to tell her the rest. Because what if she confirms that it’s true? I don’t think I could take that. I wrap my arms around myself.
Amelia Grace scoots closer to me. “Scarlett, are you okay?”
“I couldn’t make things work with Reese,” I say. “Because I have all these problems. And if I’m too damaged for someone like him, how could I ever be good enough for you?”
“What are you talking about?” Amelia Grace looks at me like I’m speaking another language. How does she not see this?
“You’re supposed to want someone who’s kind and brave and makes you kinder and braver. And you are and you do. But what am I bringing you?” I shake my head. “You know what? I don’t even care anymore, just please stay, whether I’m good enough for you or not.”
“Stop it,” she says, so firmly it startles me. “Stop saying you’re not good enough. Who told you you’re damaged?”
Silence.
“Him?”
I still can’t answer. My eyes flick to the train track scars climbing my arms.
She notices. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. Your scars don’t make you damaged. Being in recovery makes you a badass.”
“I know that. I say that. In the mirror. It’s a really cool thing that I do.”
“Well, he wants you to forget. If you could see yourself the way I see you . . . You’re so wonderful, Scarlett.”
When she says it like that, I can almost believe her. Except. “But you’re, like, the best person in the whole world. And I can’t be like you. I’ll never be able to be that good. You should be with someone like Zoe.”
“Zoe’s really sweet,” says Amelia Grace. “But she doesn’t make me feel like I could take on the entire world.”
Wait. “I do that?”
“Are you kidding? You take care of Skyler and your mom and everyone, and you find the strength to do it even when you’re hurting too. And it’s been months since you cut, which is so amazing, because taking care of yourself is the most badass thing you can do, because how can you be there for the people you love if you can’t be there for yourself, and, oh, you DELIVERED A FREAKING BABY.” We both kind of laugh even though we’re almost crying. She brushes my hair out of my face. “You’re amazing, Scarlett. I wish you could see it.”
If I try really hard, I can see myself reflected in her eyes. Only, it’s not like any kind of mirror I’ve ever seen. This one shows some better superhero queen version of me. Maybe I am strong. And whole. Good enough for this girl who is so amazing, it’s hard to believe she’s real.
She brushes my hair away from my face again. But it’s not in my eyes this time. I think she was looking for an excuse to touch me. The realization makes me feel warm all over. My skin is singing, waiting to be touched again. I want to kiss her, but more than that, I want her to kiss me. I stare at her lips. Smile. I don’t try to pretend that I don’t want things. She takes a deep breath like this is something she has to work up the courage for, and it only makes me fall harder.
She kisses me.
And I think: How is it possible? For it to feel like a kiss is taking you apart and putting you back together again?
And I think: She tastes like cinnamon gum.
And I think: Please let me spend the rest of my life kissing this girl.
I take her hands when we finally pull away. “Don’t go. Please don’t leave when I’m just starting to figure all this stuff out. I don’t want you to go back to that place. Those people don’t deserve you.”
She sighs. “I don’t know how I can stay.”
I squeeze her hands like I’m trying to send her my courage. “We’ll figure it out.”
“And we’ll help,” says a voice.
Ellie and Skyler come climbing up the ladder. Amelia Grace looks, if possible, even more shocked. Her eyes go red and glassy.
Skyler and Ellie don’t sit as close as they usually do, but the fact that they’re putting aside their own stuff for Ames makes this that much more powerful. Ellie raps her knuckles against the wooden crate. “I call this meeting of the Southern Belle Drinking Club to order. Our first order of business: figuring out how to keep Amelia Grace at the lake house.”
Amelia Grace looks around the circle, meeting each of our eyes. Stronger with every one of us.
She smiles. “You really think I can stay?”
“Of course I do,” I tell her. “For a few weeks or forever or whatever you want. Mama already said it was okay. Will you at least think about it?”
Amelia Grace stares at the house for so long I worry she’s trying to think of a way to let me down easy.
“Yes. But I’m not the only one who deserves better than that place.”
Amelia Grace
How many times does it take for her to get pushed under before she can’t find her way to the surface again?
He honks the horn. Doesn’t even bother to get out of the car.
Mom jumps and picks up her bag. Aunt Adeline opens her mouth to say something, but Aunt Seema puts a hand on her arm. Adeline clenches her fists by her sides, nails digging into palms. I know the feeling.
Mom takes the long walk to the front door. It ages her in decades and pain and the taking away of pieces. I barely recognize her by the time she reaches for the doorknob.
I watch them through the blinds. He rolls the window down and leans an elbow out.
“Looks like a lot of cars for just you and Adeline,” he says with an almost-smile that is not and never will be a real smile.
He’s not yelling or hitting things. It doesn’t always have to be an explosion. Plenty of times, he ruins things just sitting still.
“You can go in and look around if you want,” she says, throwing up her hands. “I’m not hiding anything.”
He glares at the house, thinking. “Just get in the car.”
“I drove?”
“Yeah, so get in your car.”
“Can we talk about this?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. My wife is a fucking liar. How would you feel?”
She swallows. “I need to go get Amelia Grace.”
His eyes pierce the house again. “Tell her to hurry up.”
I pull back from the window and lean against the wall. The front door opens. Mom’s eyes take longer than they should to focus.
“Are you ready?” she asks. And then she really sees me. “Amelia Grace, where are your things?”
I think about Scarlett, kissing me. How can I leave and what does it mean and was it just to get me to stay? I think about Ellie and Skyler too, this club and these girls. People who love me—all of me—who don’t ask me to get rid of any of my pieces. And I’m scared that maybe my mom isn’t one of those people. But I have to do this. Our town, our church—they’re more like my stepdad than I wanted to believe. Sometimes you have to decide to let go of things.
“I’m not going.”
“Amelia Grace, I know we were planning to stay till the end of the summer, but we need to go now.” She keeps her voice low, and her eyes flick toward the kitchen, where everyone is pretending not to listen. There’s something more embarrassing about being treated badly in front of people.
I need to make her understand what I’m saying. “I’m not going at the end of the summer, and I’m not going ever. I wish you wouldn’t either. You’re so different when he’s not around, don’t you see it? You deserve to be that wonderful all the time.”
Mom’s eyes well up. “Marriage is complicated. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“I hope I never understand.”
“Where’s your bag? I’ll put it in the car for you.”
“I said I’m not going.”
The horn honks outside.
“You’re seventeen years old. What are you going to do?”
My heart beats
faster. “I don’t know. Scarlett said I could live with her. I’ll figure something out.”
The horn blares again. Mom starts to look desperate.
“I need you to do this. Please, honey. You are tearing this family apart.”
I feel like I’ve been cracked open. I can only just keep from crying. “I’m not. I just—Please, you could stay too.”
“We can’t make it without him.”
“You haven’t even tried.”
“I have. Do you remember fourth grade?”
“Yes.” The midwife practice where Mom worked closed, and she was cobbling together work. I remember eating a lot of ramen for dinner and Aunt Adeline sending us grocery money a couple times. “I don’t mind not having a lot of money.”
He lays on the horn again—it tears through doors and curtains and resolve. She wrings her hands, glances back and forth between me and the window.
“Mom, please.”
“It’s more than not having a lot of money. If I hadn’t met Jay—Amelia Grace, I was going to have to send you to live with your grandparents.”
My tears spill over. I never knew that. Mom cries too—no, sobs—and pulls me close to her like she never wants to let me go. Maybe that means she won’t. That she’ll stay. “I love you so much,” she whispers into my hair. “But he’s my husband and the head of this household.”
I go numb.
He’s only been here for eight years. How can she possibly love him more than me? But a part of me knew this would happen. She always picks him. I don’t know why I expected things to be any different today.
I hear them drive away, but it hurts too much to watch. I sink onto the floor, alone. I’m crying so hard I don’t hear the girls coming. Just feel one set of hands and then another, and then all their arms around me, holding me together.
Ellie
Skyler sits at the edge of the dock dipping her feet in the water. It feels so strange to have had my first kiss and not told her. It’s like the tree falling in the forest thing. If I kissed a beautiful boy in the most perfect, daydreamy moment of all time, but I haven’t told my best friend, did it really happen?
She doesn’t ignore me if I talk to her, but this is different. Telling her would be like exposing the soft part of my heart. I need to know she’ll be excited for me. But I don’t know if I can wait another second.
I sit down next to her and dip my feet in too.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
She only barely looks at me. Am I really going to do this?
But then I think about the kiss and scraping my number in the sand and almost setting him on fire. This is not the kind of story you can keep to yourself.
“I kissed Andres!” I blurt out.
“Who?”
I blush. Right. “He’s this guy! Apparently, he’s friends with Bennett, and he’s been trying to meet me all summer, and he finally found me at the party!” I do a cocky little dance with my shoulders. “And I kissed him.”
“Wait, seriously?!” Her face lights up. Thank goodness. “This is amazing! I want to hear everything!” And then the sadness creeps into her face again, and she hesitates. “Did you tell Scarlett?”
“Not yet.”
She lets out a sigh of relief that makes me realize she was bracing herself.
“I mean, I’m sure I will,” I say. “But I wanted to tell you. You’re my best friend.”
The words “best friend” hang between us with a weight that feels significant. I have uttered the friendship equivalent of “I love you.” I’m fairly certain my lungs have stopped working. This is more nerve-wracking than when I kissed Andres.
“I’ve never had a best friend before,” I finally say. “I’ve been homeschooled most of my life because of tennis, and I’m totally cool with that choice, really, because tennis is everything. But, yeah. I’ve never had close friends and I’d never even kissed a boy, and Momma’s always told me all these stories about her and my aunts, and I wanted that so badly. Like, in my notebook, I didn’t just write ‘chanterelles, softball, blue nail polish.’ I wrote: ‘Chanterelles! Softball! Blue nail polish!’ It was a list of reasons I was excited to be friends with you. It’s kind of ridiculous how much I wanted it. But I’m a loser. And a weirdo. And I never thought it would happen for me.”
Skyler smiles. Really smiles. Not the sad, deflated ones she’s been forcing for the past week.
“I really missed being your best friend,” she says.
“Oh, thank goodness! Me too!” I hug her, but I’m so happy right now I feel like a human glitter-bomb, so I almost knock both of us into the water. “I’ve been feeling like that scene in The Golden Compass.”
“When Lyra tries to walk away from her daemon familiar?”
“YES. And, okay, what I wrote in my notebook was awful, but I really, truly didn’t mean it the way it sounded. And I don’t know why I feel this weird desire to make people like me when it seems like they don’t. It’s like, ‘Challenge accepted.’ Which is stupid, because you’re the best friend I could have ever asked for. So, but . . . do you forgive me?”
“Yes. And I’m sorry too. I’m . . . kind of the worst about holding on to things when I’m upset.” Sky puts her hand on mine and gives me a sly smile. “Now tell me about this kiss.”
Skyler
It must have been hard for Ellie to come find me and talk to me like that. I know because I can imagine how hard it’s going to be to talk to my sister. But I owe her the truth. Everything got better when I told Mama. I cling to that fact.
When I find Scarlett, she’s in the living room at the main house, working on this really intricate quilt she started in art class last year. She stops when she sees me. I jump right into it.
“I’m sorry for what I said. About everything in our family having to be about you.”
I wait, nervous, but between baby Isa being born and all the stuff with Amelia Grace, I feel like there’s a chance that we could be okay.
Scarlett’s face softens. “I’m sorry too. I know this year has been ridiculously hard for you, and I’m sorry I said everything was easy for you. Honestly? I’m jealous of how well you handle things.”
She nudges me with her elbow, and my heart is so full. It almost makes me not want to tell her the next thing.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Yes.” I say it way too fast. She gives me the eyebrow.
“You sure you’re okay?”
I shake my head. “I wanted to talk to you about why I feel like I have to do everything on my own. The real reason.”
“Okay.”
Something about the way she says it, so gently, makes my eyes well up with tears.
“Sky, are you sure you’re okay?”
Say it. Just say it.
“It’s my fault you started cutting!” I blurt.
I’ve done it. Oh, gosh, how I’ve done it. If me needing things tears my family to pieces, me telling my sister this? It is the atomic bomb that ends us.
I want to take it back.
I watch Scarlett’s eyes—soft, worried, resolute. That is clearly not an option.
“Sky, why would you think that?”
“Remember when we went to the county fair? And I said all those terrible things to you?” My voice is just above a whisper. If I say these things quietly enough maybe they won’t cause as much damage.
You’re a ruiner. You ruin things.
“I saw you that night when I went downstairs to get some water. In the kitchen.”
Why is it so hard for you to just be happy?
“You never would have taken out that knife if I hadn’t been so awful to you that day. You started cutting, and it was all because of me.”
Anything else I was going to say gets lost in the sobbing.
“Sweetie, no.” Scarlett stands in front of me and puts her hands on my shoulders. “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to hear it: You are not the reason I started cutting. The stuff with McC
loud had a lot to do with triggering it, but it was me, and my brain and my anxiety conspiring against me. There was just a lot of stuff happening in my life then, and I couldn’t handle it.”
I feel like a person who has grasped at a life preserver and only just realized they’re not going to drown.
“It really wasn’t me. You promise?”
“Yes,” she says. “That wasn’t even the first time I did it.”
“It wasn’t me. Ohmygosh, it wasn’t me.” I repeat the words like that will help me believe them.
But if it wasn’t me, then that means that it was okay to be angry that day. That I can say strong words without dismembering someone and I can want things, like to fall in love with a boy, or to get new medication for my arthritis, without driving cracks into our family’s foundation. I’m allowed to need things and want things and feel things.
“Ohmygosh,” I say again. And then my legs won’t hold me up anymore, and I’m sitting on the floor by the coffee table, and Scarlett is sitting next to me with her arms wrapped around me, and we are both crying, but it doesn’t feel like hurting. It feels like healing.
“I love you. I love you so much,” I say.
Scarlett squeezes me tighter. “I love you too, you weirdo.”
She has to say things like that so she doesn’t let herself get too vulnerable, but I know. The covering up only shows the softness more.
“Oh, and Scarlett?” I say.
“Yeah?”
“You’re stronger than you think.”
She tears up all over again. “Thank you. And also, good grief, this conversation should have come with a waterproof mascara warning. Is there anything else you want to tell me, because my makeup is pretty much massacred at this point.”
“Oh. Actually, yeah. I had sex with Jonah last year, but I didn’t tell you because I was worried about how you’d handle it.”
Her eyes bulge. “Holy hell, Sky.”
“Pretty sure that’s it though.”
The Summer of Impossibilities Page 26