hand on the railing. She looks back at me. “Mainlander?”
“Thank you.”
* * *
—
My bicycle is waiting on the porch of Addy’s house. Mom and I climb the steps and I look around at the woods and the inn and the road, but there’s no sign of anyone.
Mom says, “Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know.”
* * *
—
Inside, we curl up on the couch, Dandelion between us, and watch a movie, Wednesday’s words swimming in my head. Do I put myself in a box? Is that what I’ve been doing? I chew on my fingers, lost in thought.
The minute Jean Seberg comes onto the screen, my mom looks at me. “Now I recognize that haircut.”
Her voice pulls me out of my own head. I watch Jean Seberg’s bright face. “She looked effortless, and that’s what I want to be.”
“She does, and this film made her an icon, but she had an unhappy life.” My mom’s voice is soft. We are reading the subtitles. “She died at forty of suicide. She was missing for ten days before they found her body in the back seat of her car, three blocks from her Paris apartment.”
This hits me harder than it should. On-screen, Jean Seberg smiles and laughs and strides down the street, and some part of me still wants to be her, or at least this pretend version of her. “If I could dig a hole and hide in it, I would,” her character is saying.
I think, You never know what someone’s hiding. We all hide ourselves when we need to.
“Is everything okay with Jeremiah?”
The question surprises me, but I keep my eyes glued to the screen. “I did something really stupid and really hurtful that I wish I could take back, but I can’t.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. I feel bad enough. I just want it to go away, like somehow build a time machine and go back to yesterday and change everything so that it never happened.” I wait for her to say, Maybe you should try harder. Be a nicer, less complicated, less fucked-up person. Maybe you shouldn’t lock yourself away behind that wall you’ve built. All the things I tell myself.
Instead she says, “Oh God, we really are alike.”
I look at her.
“I’m just saying I have, from time to time throughout my life, been known to do stupid things that I wish I could take back and make right.”
“You’re perfect.”
“I’m not. No one is, thank God. Otherwise what a boring world this would be. There are so many things I wish I’d done differently at the time, including with your dad. But we can only pay attention, hope we learn something, try not to fuck up again—at least not in the same exact way—and keep going forward, knowing that we’re absolutely going to fuck up. A lot.” My mom rarely swears, and I raise my eyebrows. She smiles. “Sorry. The important thing is to do your best, always, to not be too hard on yourself when you don’t, and to let go of regrets. You have to trust me on this because I’m a lot older than you and I know things.”
I run my hand over my hair, smoothing it around the ears, around the forehead. “I get that I’m going to fuck up a lot, no matter what I do. And I get that I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. But right now I don’t want Miah to be some sort of life lesson. I want him to be more than that.”
“Then talk to him—even if he doesn’t want to hear it—until you’ve said what you need to say.”
DAY 25
(PART TWO)
It’s eleven o’clock and I am pedaling through the night to Miah’s house. I’m not sure what I’m going to say to him, but I just know I need to tell him how I feel.
So my dad has a girlfriend.
The words run round and round in my mind. I say them out loud, hoping this will stop the endless loop, and they escape into the air where I can see them, right in front of me, just out of reach. I want to take them back, but I can’t take them back because they’re true.
My dad has a girlfriend.
It’s not that I thought my parents were getting back together. I don’t actually know if I thought that or not. But this makes it clear that’s not going to happen and my mom and I were in the way.