Heart Bones - Colleen Hoover Page 0,18
naturally, but the smell is overpowering all the other foods. My father starts in on the questions as soon as I take my first bite of a pancake.
“What have you been up to since graduation?”
I swallow, then say, “Work, sleep, repeat.”
“What do you do?” Sara asks. She asks that in a rich way. Not, “Where do you work,” but “What do you do,” like it’s some kind of skill.
“I’m a cashier at McDonald’s.”
I can tell she’s taken aback. “Oh,” she says. “Fun.”
“I think it’s great that you chose to work while still in high school,” Alana says.
“It wasn’t a choice. I had to eat.”
Alana clears her throat and I realize my honest response made her uncomfortable. If that bothers her, I wonder how she’s going to take the news that my mother died of an overdose?
My father tries to skip over the moment and says, “I guess you changed your mind about summer courses. You starting in the fall now?”
That question confuses me. “I’m not enrolled in summer courses.”
“Oh. Your mom said you needed summer tuition when I sent her money to cover the fall.”
My mother asked him for tuition?
I earned a full ride to Penn State. I don’t even have to pay tuition.
How much did he give my mother that I never even knew about? There was obviously a cell phone shipped to me at some point that I never received. And now I find out she asked him for tuition to an education she never even cared enough to ask me about.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to come up with an excuse as to why I’m here in Texas and not in the summer classes he paid for. “I signed up too late. The classes were full.”
I suddenly have no appetite at all. I can barely finish the second bite of pancake I took.
My mother never asked me about college at all. Yet she asked my father for tuition money that probably ended up in a slot machine at a casino, or running through the vein in her arm. And he paid it without question. If he would have just asked me, I would have told him I could have gone to community college for free. But I didn’t want to stay in that town. I needed as far away from my mother as I could get.
I guess that wish came true.
I put down my fork. I feel like I’m about to be sick.
Sara sets her fork down, too. She takes a sip of her tea, watching me.
“Do you know what you’re going to major in?” Alana asks.
I shake my head and pick up my fork, just so I can pretend to be interested in eating. I notice Sara picks up her fork as soon as I do. “I’m not sure yet,” I say.
I poke at pieces of pancake, but don’t actually put a piece in my mouth. Sara does the same.
I put down my fork. So does Sara.
More conversation passes around the table, but I ignore most of it when I can. I can’t stop focusing on the fact that Sara is following my every move while trying to be discreet about it.
I’m going to have to be cognizant of this all summer. I think the girl might need to be informed that she should eat when she feels like eating and not base her food intake around how much I eat.
I make sure to eat a few bites, even though I’m nauseous and nervous and every bite is a struggle.
Luckily, it’s a quick meal. Twenty minutes at most. Samson said nothing the entire time he ate. No one acted like this was abnormal. Hopefully he’s always this quiet. It’ll be easier to pay less attention to him.
“Beyah needs some stuff from Walmart,” Sara says. “Can we go tonight?”
I don’t want to go tonight. I want to sleep.
My father pulls several one-hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and hands them to me.
I changed my mind. I want to go to Walmart.
“You should wait until tomorrow and take her somewhere better in Houston,” Alana suggests.
“Walmart is fine,” I say. “I don’t need much.”
“Get one of those prepaid phones while you’re there,” my father says, handing me even more money.
My eyes are wide. I’ve never held this much money in my life. There’s probably six hundred dollars in my hands right now.
“You driving?” Sara says to Marcos.
“Sure.”
I suddenly don’t want to go again if that means Marcos and Samson are coming.
“I’m not going,” Samson says as he picks up his