“But not Poppy?” Daisy asks me.
“Not Poppy,” I say, “and I only told Rose six months ago. I would have told you sooner, but I was…am—I’m ashamed.” Tears build again. “You’re my little sister. I didn’t want you to see me like this.” I am the fuck up. The broken, pathetic one now. I can no longer dole out sisterly advice and expect the same admiration in return. Everything will change.
Her dark eyebrows bunch together, such an ugly expression for someone so beautiful. “You’re still the same person, Lily. I just…I have to get my head around this.” Her eyes flicker to Lo. “How long have you known?”
We meet each other’s gaze. How long has he known? How long have I known? Setting a date seems like trying to pin down when a growth spurt begins and ends. Immeasurable time.
Thinking about it reminds me of all the moments we’ve shared. From childhood to adolescence to adulthood. We have lived together, loved together, and fucked up together. I’m not sure many people can truly say that about someone else.
His eyes soften and he turns to Daisy. “Awhile.”
Awhile. That seems right.
Daisy opens her mouth to ask another question, but a Bob Dylan song starts playing from her pocket. She pulls out her phone the same time something vibrates near my leg. Lo fishes out his own cell.
A chime and another vibration go off and both Connor and Ryke look at theirs. We must have hit an area in the sky with good cell reception. Who knows how long people have been calling?
“It’s Mom,” Daisy says.
“My therapist,” Lo tells me.
“My mom,” Ryke adds.
We all look to Connor. His eyes flit up to Lo’s. “The private investigator. I have to take this.” He retreats to the back cabin where Rose sleeps. We still don’t know who leaked the information, but maybe we will now—not that it matters. What’s done is done.
Daisy’s phone keeps playing “Shelter from the Storm” and everyone sits on edge the longer they ignore their calls.
“Go talk to them,” I say.
Daisy sniffs and stares at her phone. “I just like this song.”
Ryke puts a hand on her shoulder. “Rose should talk to your parents first anyway.”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s okay.” She clicks the green button and puts the receiver to her ear. Daisy risks sitting by Melissa since she’s secluded in the most private alcove of the whole plane. (Besides the bathroom, that is.) Melissa stays frozen in her seat, uncomfortable and bit stunned by everything.
“I have to go pee,” I mutter, about to stand up. I can imagine the sheer horror on my father’s face. On my mother’s. I don’t think I can ever confront them.
Lo grabs my wrist before I rise from the couch. “You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“I just have to pee,” I tell him again, tugging his hand off me.
He gives me a look like do you really?
No, I don’t. I want to cry in solitude. I guess he knows this, and I understand his fear that I’ll avoid my emotions with self-love like I’ve done in the past.
It’s tempting.
I stay put and stuff my face into a pillow. The news replays in my head again, and I’m on the verge of tears once more.
“Hey, Lily.” Ryke comes over and nudges my side. “I don’t want to talk to my mom, so how about we play cards?” He glances to Lo. “And you need to talk to your therapist.”
“I can stay here.”
Ryke gives him a firm look.
He sighs, resigning more easily than normal. I must have drained him of energy. Lo rises and disappears to the bathroom.
“Lily? Cards?” He pulls out the deck from his pocket and shuffles.
I lower my pillow, sensing his tactics to distract me. “What kind of card game?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Go Fish.”
He looks like I’ve almost stabbed his soul.
“You said whatever I want,” I remind him, trying to wipe silent tears that keep falling against my will. I need permanent tissues stuck to my tear ducts. Like when you staunch a bloody nose. Would it work?
“That’s not even a two-person game,” Ryke tells me.
“But it’s still possible to play with two people.” I want the distraction without having to bust my brain learning a new game.
“Fine,” he says, relenting when I sit on the floor since there’s no coffee table. He deals the cards on the carpet, and I try not to dampen them with my tears.
“We’re flying over Georgia right now,” I hear Daisy say. “We shouldn’t be long.” Her voice shakes really badly. I don’t like that she’s talking to our parents first.
Ryke’s concerned gaze flits between Daisy and his cards. “Do you have a king?”
“Go Fish.”
“Lily’s taking a nap,” Daisy says.
Ryke picks up a card and then kicks my knee. “Your turn.” Right.
“Do you have a…” I stare at my cards. “An eight?” I look at the bathroom door, not hearing a peep from Lo. But he leaves the door cracked so we know he’s not doing something rash, like chugging alcohol or…worse. My chest hurts, like someone decided to stand on my diaphragm.
Ryke hands me his eight and grumbles under his breath about how this is the stupidest fucking game. But he’s partially concentrated on my sister in the corner.
“I can’t wake her up,” Daisy says, her voice growing more frantic and low. “Wait, please…I don’t want to…Mom.”
Ryke stands up before I can find the strength to put weight on my gelatin legs. He goes over to the four-chair alcove. He has to lean over a glowering Melissa to reach Daisy. “Give me the phone,” he whispers, but I can still hear his hostile voice.
“Mom,” Daisy says. “I have to go…But…I…Wait…I…”
Ryke grabs the phone from her before she has a breakdown. And at the same time, Rose is halfway across the plane aisle, her eyes dead-set on me with so much confidence and power that I immediately wish I was her. Strong and built like a fortress—able to withstand anything that’s thrown at me.
I meet her gaze, but I point to Ryke who now clutches my mother—or the phone that contains my mother. Rose understands. She grabs Daisy’s cell from him and immediately goes into crisis management mode.
“Mother, calm down. No,” she snaps. “No.” And that’s all I hear as she struts back to the cabin to talk in private. She said the one word that Daisy couldn’t.
I’m not sure I could either.
Daisy stares out the window. Ryke whispers something to her, and she just nods and gestures to me.
Ryke comes back to the floor, collecting his cards and fanning them in his hands. “It’s my turn, I think,” he says. “Do you have a ten?”
“Ryke?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happens, you’ll take care of him, right?”
He goes rigid. “I don’t know what that fucking means.”
“It means what it means,” I breathe. “He doesn’t have anyone besides you and me. I just need to know you’ll be there.”
“And so will you,” he snaps.
“Not if my parents force me into rehab or halfway across the country.” My mother will want to bury away this problem by transporting it to a different time zone.
“You’re almost twenty-one. You’re a fucking adult. Your parents can’t make you do shit, Lily.”
“I owe them—”
“For tarnishing the Fizzle name? For bringing you up with cash and luxury?” He keeps shaking his head. “You and Lo have it so warped. You think you’re indebted to your parents because they gave you everything you have. But they didn’t give you what fucking mattered. They owe you. They owe you for not asking why their daughter isn’t home. Why she looks distant and sad. Why she has barricaded herself in a fucking apartment with her boyfriend. They have failed you, and if they tell you to get on a fucking plane or go to rehab—where we all know you shouldn’t be—then you need to tell them
to go to hell. And if you don’t, Lo and I will. I promise you that.”
The right words stay at the back of my throat—thanks, Ryke. It’s a hard phrase to produce, especially when he delivers his opinions with such fervor and force.
I land on something though.
“Go Fish.”
He lets out a short laugh as he reaches for the deck. “You’ll be fine, Calloway.”
At least one of us believes it.
{ 32 }
LOREN HALE
I lean against the bathroom wall, staring at my pallid face and sunken eyes. I look like utter shit. I feel even worse. My left hand keeps shaking, and I have to clench my fingers into a fist just to make it stop. My father bitches me out on the other line for ignoring his previous calls.
“I’m in the goddamn air,” I remind him curtly, keeping my voice low so Ryke doesn’t hear. “Unless you’d like reception to magically be invented over the ocean.”
“Hey, I’m just as fucking livid as you are.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I say, my voice slightly breaking. I don’t want to be talking to him while Lily looks one second from opening the hatch and jumping from the plane without a parachute. And every time I picture her crying like that—goddamn, I can’t start. I rub my eyes to push back the emotions. I want to kick the wall so fucking hard, and I swallow a scream that needs to escape.
“Whoever this motherfucker is,” my father says, “I will personally rip him a new asshole, Loren. You hear me? He’s not getting away with this shit.”
I have to ask. “Did you do it? Did you leak it?” One week after I told him, the news exploded across the globe. Is it really all a coincidence?
There’s a long pause. And then this: “You have got to be fucking kidding me. Did you not hear what I just said? I have busted my ass trying to find this fucker.” He growls a little. Yeah, it’s not him.
“Then who?” I ask. “Who would do this? What do they possibly have to gain?”
“Money,” my father says flatly. “We’re still working on some leads.”
I bring the phone away from mouth and struggle between not shouting and screaming my head off. No sound escapes, but I catch myself in the mirror, and I look like I’m fighting an invisible battle against a shadowed enemy. I look crazy and tortured.
“I have to go,” my father says quickly. “Greg is on the other line. I’ll talk to you soon. Keep your head up.” Words of encouragement from my father. Those don’t come often. So I take them.
We hang up at the same time. I lean over the sink and splash some water on my face. Trying to get my shit together.
I should call Brian, the therapist that Ryke and Lily believe I’m talking to about my deep inner thoughts. But I can’t discuss alcohol. Even the thought makes my stomach turn. Because Lily shouldn’t be worried if I’m going to relapse. The world is crashing down on her shoulders, and I don’t want to add to that weight.
I let out a long breath, bearing her pain that feels so much a part of me. We’ve become entangled, years and years of lies and childhood memories and stories all wrapped into one. I know her better than her sisters. I know her sometimes better than she does herself. I know just how much this is killing her inside.
And then one thought punctures me.
I’m here.
I could be at a bar. Passed out cold.
I could be in rehab. Away from her.
I have the chance to be by her side through all of this.
So go, you stupid bastard.
That’s what it takes. I’m out the door.
PART THREE
“One day, you're going to have to make a choice. You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be. Whoever that man is, good character or bad, is going to change the world.”
– Jonathan Kent, Man of Steel
{ 33 }
LOREN HALE
No one speaks in the car, from the tarmac to our house in Princeton, New Jersey. Melissa calls a taxi to bring her back to Penn, so at least we don’t have to deal with that.
Connor’s black limo gives us all plenty of room. Lily rests her head in my lap, trying to play cat’s cradle with my shoelace. She stopped crying sometime between our fifth game of Go Fish and when the plane landed.
I want her to call Allison, but she keeps saying she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. And I guess I have no right to force her to speak to her therapist when I’ve been avoiding mine. Regardless, I plan on calling Allison tonight whether Lily does or not. I have to ask about medication for Lil.
No one understands lows like an addict. And I fear the one she’s about to hit when she confronts her parents.
She holds up the intertwined shoelace in her fingers. “Your turn,” she tells me. “Go under my hands and grab it.”
“I’m going to mess it up.”
“No you won’t,” she says. “Just make sure to grab the right ones.”
Problem is, I don’t know which are the right ones.
Rose sits stiffly beside Connor, her cell clutched in her steel-grip. Lily told me that Rose has been in “damage control mode”—she even yelled at a reputable news producer for an hour before Connor pried the phone from her fingers. She’s been texting and emailing gossip magazines and lawyers since we landed.
Rose isn’t taking the leak very well. She keeps fixing her hair and smoothing her dress. Connor has to grab her hands to stop her. And as I look between the three Calloway girls—Rose in a frazzled state, Daisy drifting far away, and Lil with a sad, soft voice—I get it. I get what Ryke sees and what he feels. I have this insane wish to just make things right again, to plug all the cracks in our lives—just for the small, sliver of hope that these girls will be able to stand up on their own for one more day.
I think the six of us—we’re all strong. We’re each just a different kind of strong. But we all have a different kind of weak too. And I’m figuring out how to bottle my weakness to help them all.
I’m not going to be the villain of my own story. That shit is done.
Rose’s phone buzzes. She stares at the screen, Connor reading the text too. “We have a little hiccup,” she says.
Lily’s hands fall to her lap, tangling the shoelace herself. “What?” Her worry cracks her voice. I rub her arm, and she holds onto my bicep for support.
“Our parents are at our house,” Rose says. “They’re waiting for you.”
Lily bolts upright, shaking her head fiercely. “I can’t, Rose. I need another day.”
Gilligan, Connor’s driver, remains quiet behind the wheel, leading us down our street. Only a couple blocks away, news vans line the curb, most likely camped out by the gate.
Daisy presses her nose to the window. “Holy shit.”
Lily’s eyes widen at the scene.
She can’t handle this right now. That much is certain. I look to Ryke and he just nods once. “Gilligan,” I call to the front and tap the privacy screen. It lowers so I can see his bald head. “Change of plans. We’re going to Philly.”
***
Ryke’s off-campus flat has brick walls and hardwood floors, a Philadelphia 76ers poster hanging in the dim living room, fit with leather beanbags, a big screen television, and a decent-sized sound system. I’ve been here only a few times before, and it’s hard to remember that this isn’t just another random apartment. It’s my brother’s.
After a quick call to Allison, I get an approval to give Lily a sleeping pill. She falls asleep in the spare bedroom, quicker than I thought she would. Crying must have exhausted her already.
When I return to the living room, I take a swift glance outside. No news vans or camera crews. Not many people know that Ryke Meadows is related to me, and in this instance, it comes in handy.
Connor and Rose talk in hushed whispers on the couch, sometimes even switching to French. He told me that the private investigator is still working on finding the leak. Same thing my father said about his connections. A part of me feels hopeless by the news
—like maybe we’ll just never know. Another part of me thinks maybe I shouldn’t know. Because I have a penchant for hurting people who hurt Lily or me. And I don’t want to be the guy who threatens someone else’s future anymore. I don’t want to become my father.
“I just got off the phone with a friend,” Connor says.
“You have other friends?” I ask with a frown. Why, out of everything, does this bother me? Maybe I’m too fucking emotional right now. I rub my eyes, trying to pull myself together.
“Acquaintance, contact,” Connor tells me, “whatever you want to call him.”
Ryke walks over and hands me a glass of something amber-colored. I stiffen and give him a look. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s tea.”
I barely relax but take the glass anyway.
Connor continues, “My contact told me there are cameras outside my apartment. I just wanted to let you know that they’re seeking all avenues to get information.” Even Lily’s sister’s boyfriend—a far fucking stretch.
Daisy sits on the hardwood floor, the remote control in her hands as she stares at the blank television. I can see her curiosity. She’s the one still halfway in the dark, and all the answers lie in that box. She offered to be brought back to her house, but Lily and Rose refused. Their parents are as bloodthirsty for information as the media, and we all know they’d sink their claws into Daisy if they had her.
So she stays with us for now.
I stare at the floor, trying to piece together a semblance of a plan. First things first. I turn to Connor who relaxes against the couch. His arm stays around Rose’s shoulders, and I realize that he’s subtly massaging her neck so she’ll be more at ease.
I didn’t want to drag him through all of this, and with his usual impassive expression, I can’t tell if it bothers him that paparazzi have invaded his apartment building.
“You’re not related to Lily or me. If you want out, you should probably leave now before things worsen.”
I expect Rose to spit at me for untethering her own boyfriend from this complicated matter. Because it’d mean that Connor would have to leave her too. But she’s busy texting on her cell, inhaling sharp breaths every so often that sound like knives slicing her lungs. I even saw her pop some kind of medication.
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