“What’s happening in there?” Seb asks, tapping me on the head.
“It’s a total shitstorm.”
He climbs into bed next to me, and my eyes dart toward the open door. I know Rafael Echevarria suddenly fancies himself a cool dad tonight, but catching me and Seb in bed together would be testing his limits. And possibly endangering Seb’s life.
“I’m fast,” Seb reassures me. “I’ll hear him coming up the stairs.”
“If he sees you in bed with me, you’re dead man walking,” I warn.
“I’ll take my chances.” He wiggles his eyebrows like a total goofball.
And even though I swore that our last kiss would actually be the last kiss, the habit is hard to break. Kissing Seb is comfortable yet still manages to inject me with a shot of adrenaline.
I wonder if kissing Harris would feel the same way.
Harris. Dammit.
I detach myself from Seb, and he blinks.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Analee . . .”
“It’s the truth!” I say. “I don’t know! I don’t know what this”—I motion between us—“is. I don’t even know what we’re trying to do.”
“We’re trying to get Chloe and Lily back, for one.”
“By making out in the privacy of my bedroom, where they can’t see us?”
Seb sighs. He has nothing. No answers. Neither do I.
“Is this about Harris?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
“Well, I don’t!”
“Are you guys official yet?” he asks.
“No.”
“Are you going to be?”
I stay quiet, and Seb shifts away from me. It’s such a slight movement that I wouldn’t have noticed if my entire body weren’t tensed up, like it’s waiting for an electrical shock.
“We’re going to meet,” I say. “In person.”
He snorts.
“What is that about?” I ask.
“What?”
“You know what. That bitchy snort.” I press the washcloth to my forehead. Suddenly I need it. I’m overheated and my temples are throbbing.
Seb is silent again, and it’s infuriating.
“Would you care?” I ask. “If Harris and I dated?”
I look at him. He stares up at my ceiling. I wait for another mini-eternity.
“Yes,” he says finally.
“Why? Why would you care?”
“I don’t know.”
“God. That is annoying.”
He laughs. “I was being serious.”
It’s like I want to tell him something so badly, but I don’t understand what it is or how to say it.
“I’m not sure how I feel about Harris,” I admit, which is the truth, but it’s not exactly what I wanted to tell him.
“Hmm.”
“That’s it?” I flip onto my side to look at him. “All you have to say is ‘hmm’?”
“I’m processing.”
What do I even expect him to say? It’s not like he’s going to declare his love for me right here in my bedroom, while I’m wearing a washcloth and tiny streams of water are pouring down my face. I don’t even know if I want a declaration of love. Also, let’s be honest. No one could truly love me. I come with way too much baggage.
“I guess you have to figure out what you want,” Seb says.
No shit. But I think I might know what I want, at least in this moment. I want a family. I want to walk down the hallways at school and not feel like a stranger. I want Seb Matias and his stupidly bright shoes.
Is this how Lily felt? Is this why she started dating Colton? To feel a connection to something outside of our two-person club? And is it possible for me to understand her but still hate her a tiny bit?
There’s a clomping sound on the stairs, and, true to his word, Seb is fast. He springs off the bed and kneels beside it, adjusting my washcloth.
“Mom and Dad want to know how you’re feeling.” Avery’s tiny body appears in the doorframe.
“I’m okay,” I tell her.
“And Dad says no funny business.”
Okay. There’s the Rafael Echevarria I know.
“No funny business,” I promise.
“Do you want me to wet the towel again?”
“No, thanks,” I say. I already look like a drowned rat.
“Did you take your temperature?”
“Not yet. I will.”
“Don’t forget,” she scolds, then pops back out of the room.
I expect Seb to climb back into bed with me when we hear her descend the stairs, but he lowers himself onto the floor more firmly, resting his hands on his knees.
“Gun to my head?” I say, my gaze lingering on the doorframe. “I would say that Avery’s okay. Annoying as hell, but okay. I think she’s maturing out of her brat phase, don’t you? I don’t want to say it’s my influence, but it’s definitely—”
“I think you should meet Harris,” Seb says out of nowhere.
There’s the shock I was waiting for. On a surface level his words shouldn’t hurt the way they do. He’s not saying anything explicitly mean. But the disappointment feels familiar. I feel like I’m back in sixth grade again and I’m watching him laugh at me. It’s a thinly veiled rejection. By encouraging me to meet Harris, he’s letting me down easy. He might as well have said, I would never want to date your ugly face, Anally, so Harris is the best you’re gonna get.
“I am going to meet Harris,” I say, my voice turning cold. “I don’t need your permission.”
Seb looks taken aback. “I know you don’t. . . .”
“Soon I think. The sooner the better.”
“Okay. . . .”
“Yeah. Okay.”
I want to shove him, hard, against the wall. No, that’s not enough. I want to take off one of his ugly neon sneakers and beat him over the head with it.
“Did I say something wrong?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Then why are you looking at me with dagger eyes?”
“I’m not,” I say, even though my eyes could probably pierce steel. I don’t have a reason to give Seb dagger eyes, though, so I’m going to deny, deny, deny.
“I’m still going with you to the wedding, right?” he asks.
“If you want. I don’t care. Don’t do me any favors.” I know I’m being a bitch, but I can’t stop it. It’s bubbling out of me like hot liquid magma.
“What’s with you? Of course I want to go with you to the wedding.”
“Great. That’s settled, then.” I slap the washcloth off my head and get up. “I’m going to help with the gift bags. You should probably go back home.”
He gets up from the floor, looking so lost that I almost feel sorry for him.
“It’s fine,” I find myself reassuring him. “I’m just . . . tired.”
The longer I stay in this bedroom with Seb, the sicker I actually start to feel.
We walk downstairs silently, and I mentally tick off the names of all the people I hate. Harris, for putting me in this awkward position in the first place. Seb, for having zero interest in me and turning my life into this confusing catastrophe. But most of all myself, for caring about whether Seb likes me or not. I don’t understand. A few months ago I couldn’t care less what happened to Seb. On-again, off-again with Chloe? Didn’t make a difference to me. If he got run over by a bus, I’m sure I would have felt a flicker of sympathy, but that’s as far as my emotional attachment went.
Now he’s making me feel things. It sucks.
When we get to the door, he turns to me. “See you tomorrow?”
I wish I didn’t have to. Even looking at him jumbles my brain. I can’t tell whether I want to make out with him or slap him. Both sound equally appealing.
“Yup.”
He nods, shuffles his feet. This is the moment when he’d normally kiss me good-bye, but now it’s . . . weird
. It’s like now that Harlow and Dad are free of tension, Seb and I took it over for ourselves.
“Bye,” he says. He extends his hand, and I’m slightly horrified. Is he giving me a handshake? But then he grazes my arm instead, halfway between a pat and a squeeze.
“Bye,” I say. For a moment I’m tempted to undo the damage, press him against the door and have my way with him. But no. I have to be smart. I have to detach myself now before I get in any deeper.
When he leaves, there’s nowhere for me to go. I don’t want to talk to Harris right now. I don’t want to be around Dad and Harlow’s happiness. Instead I go back to bed and turn off the lights in my room. I almost, almost consider calling Avery in and inviting her to sleep over again. That’s how desperately alone I feel. Instead I curl up into a ball and shut my eyes tight, willing myself to fall asleep as soon as possible so that I can stop thinking.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“ANALEE!” HARLOW CALLS FROM THE bottom of the stairs.
A primitive growl escapes me. I will begrudgingly admit that Harlow isn’t the worst person in the world. But still, the sound of my name coming out of her mouth will always trigger my deep-seated animalistic rage. I walk over to my door to poke my head out.
“Yes?” I ask, perfectly pleasant.
“I was going through some stuff in the bedroom closet, and I found a box that belonged to your mom. . . .”
Kaboom.
The Mom bomb is always unexpected. Even though she’s always on my mind, she’s also the last person I expect to hear about. I’m used to everyone avoiding her in conversation, shunning the topics of moms and cancer completely. On the rare occasion when someone mentions her, like now, it sends a jolt through my system.
“I didn’t look through it,” Harlow says, “but I thought maybe you might want to.”
Before Harlow and Avery moved in, Dad and I donated a lot of Mom’s stuff to charity. Everything else, the stuff we couldn’t bear to part with or look at, went into a cardboard box and up to our cramped, musty attic. Dad was in charge of the bedroom closet, but he must have missed this box.
“I’ll take care of it,” I tell Harlow.
She nods and heads back into the kitchen. When she’s gone, I creep into the hallway, a mix of dread and excitement worming its way into my stomach. Finding things of Mom’s, things I’ve never seen or maybe forgotten about, is almost like having a new conversation with her. I want to look inside the mystery box, but I want to savor this moment. Because in this moment there’s something new to discover about Mom, and once I look through the box, it might be the end. It might be the last thing of Mom’s that I’ve never seen before.
I go into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I can’t quite consider it Harlow and Dad’s, although as I walk in, I realize it is. All traces of Mom have disappeared. The room smells like Harlow’s essential oils, and Mom’s antique headboard has been replaced by a hanging purple tapestry that Harlow bought at a yoga retreat.
I find the box in the back of the closet. I recognize Mom’s loopy, uneven handwriting on top of it: Happy Things.
I’ve never seen this box before in my life.
Gingerly I open it, my hands shaking as though I’m doing something illicit, like I’m about to uncover a stash of cocaine. I never know if I’m violating Mom’s privacy by going through her old stuff, but I figure she would have gotten rid of anything she didn’t want us to see. Besides, she was an open book with us. The queen of over-sharing.
There is no cocaine inside the mystery box, only a mess of envelopes and papers. Photos are scattered on top, one of a young Mom and Dad laughing in a candid moment, one of me in a set of plush Mickey Mouse ears at Disney World. Pictures of friends and family, of Mom wearing a marinara-sauce-splattered smile when she was young.
Below the pictures I find dozens of open envelopes with Mom’s name on them. My breath catches in my throat, but I don’t stop to think. I dive in and open the one on top of the pile. It’s a letter written to her from Dad. The date scrawled on the top corner tells me he wrote it when she was sick.
Dear Cris,
Today I was thinking about our first date. We tried to get into La Sardine on a Friday night without a reservation. I had saved for a month to afford the meal, but when we got there, the wait was two hours long. As soon as the host told us, you said “Hell no!” so loudly that every customer stared. I was too busy laughing to be embarrassed. Then I remember you winked at me and said you were going to take me out instead.
We went to the grocery store in our fancy clothes, and you bought ingredients to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I didn’t want to tell you how much I hated peanut butter. I would have gladly eaten a pile of dog crap if you served it to me. I was already yours, the moment I saw you, before the date even started.
All my love,
Raf
Something shatters inside my chest. I set the letter down. It physically hurts to read this, to picture Dad living inside a memory when in reality the love of his life was leaving him forever. I hurt for him. I hurt for Mom when I think about her reading these. I even hurt for Harlow. As much as I complain about her, as much as I resent the way she’s made herself at home here, this house pulses with stories and memories of Mom. They haven’t gone away with the change in decor. They’ve been hidden, stuffed into a closet, but they’re still here.
I wonder how it made Harlow feel to find this box. She claims she didn’t look through it, but she chose to tell me about it instead of telling Dad. Since the day she moved in, I always resented Harlow for encroaching on our space, but it must have been hard for her, too.
I fold the letter up, to be just as I found it, and stuff it back inside the envelope. There are so many other letters in here, filled with memories that Dad has never shared with me. I want to read every single one of them, to soak up all of the stories about Mom that I’ve never heard, but I don’t think I can. They’re not mine to take. It’s up to Dad to decide whether he wants to share them someday or keep them trapped inside this box.
I dig through more letters, pictures, and some old Mother’s Day cards that I gave to Mom over the years. I stop when my fingers scrape against canvas. Underneath the mess, buried at the bottom of the box, is a piece of art.
It’s an oil painting of Mom. The colors are bright and over-the-top, her hair streaked with blue and red, her face splotches of vivid hues. It shouldn’t work, but it does. A rainbow exploded all over the canvas, and the end result is unmistakably Mom. I don’t think anything else has captured her essence so beautifully.
Did Mom hire someone to paint her before she got sick? When would this have happened? My family doesn’t really “do” art. Mom used to buy wall decor on clearance from T.J.Maxx. She was too impatient to wander around an art museum when there were errands to run.
I run my fingertips along the edges of the painting. My eyes drift over Mom’s wild hair and chin and shoulders, down to the signature in the bottom right corner.
There it is, in her flawless script: Lily Nadarajah. I should have immediately recognized that this painting was hers. The blazing colors, like the canvas was set on fire, the bold strokes.
If Lily painted this, why haven’t I seen it? I’ve seen everything Lily’s ever drawn, painted, or sculpted. I flip it over, because I know Lily always dates her paintings on the back. This was done two and a half years ago, during Mom’s surgery and fifth round of chemo, when she didn’t look like the woman in the painting anymore.
It’s so Lily, I realize. It’s so Lily to paint Mom the way she was, colorful and happy, instead of what she became at the end.
I think about what Mom said, about how people are too scared to give in to sadness. Looking at this painting now, I don’t see just Mom. I see Lily, much more clearly. This painting was Lily’s way of preserving Mom the way we knew her. It was Lily’s way of helping Mom remember who she was before the cancer tried to wipe it away.
Lily always poured every emotion into her art. I know paint
ing this must have been hard for her, so hard that she couldn’t talk to me about it. Why didn’t I open my eyes and consider how she was dealing with Mom’s death? Mom was right. I could give in to the sadness, but Lily tried to erase it. That doesn’t mean she didn’t care. When I look at this painting, it’s obvious that she did. I just couldn’t see the way she cared.
I imagine Lily holed up in her studio, giving herself over to her feelings in the place where she felt safest. I imagine Mom getting the painting and seeing herself outside of the muted hospital colors.
This painting doesn’t make everything okay between us. Lily was my friend, and she wasn’t there for me the way I needed her to be. But maybe it’s not as simple as I thought it was. After all, I was my mom’s daughter. Everyone expected me to grieve. I took time off from school, I met with the counselor, I had relatives coming over to clean and cook and hug me even when I resisted them.
But who was there for Lily? Who helped her process what she was feeling? Her parents aren’t exactly the warm, cuddly type. She didn’t have any friends in school besides me. She never asks for help when she needs it, opting instead to paint her cries for help.
It’s possible that she felt even more alone than I did, and the thought makes me sick.
I have the uncomfortable thought that maybe it takes two to ruin a friendship. Maybe I never recognized Lily’s grief because I was too busy drowning in my own.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE MORNING AFTER I FIND her painting, I run into Lily, literally, when I’m walking out of the school bathroom. My face slams into her shoulder, and she almost topples over backward.
“Argh!” I grunt, cupping my hand over my nose. Oh my God, it hurts. Please don’t let it be broken. I can just imagine giving my wedding toast all bandaged up like I’m Two-Face. I check my hand, and a smear of blood stains my fingers.
“Oh my God,” Lily says. “Analee, are you okay?”
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