Heart Bones - Colleen Hoover Page 0,6

in plastic sacks before putting them in my backpack so they don’t get wet in case I get stuck in the rain.

Before I head out the front door to wait on Dakota, I take the painting of Mother Teresa off the wall. I try to shove it in my backpack, but it won’t fit. I grab another plastic sack and put the painting in it, then carry it with me out of the house.

TWO

One dead mother, one layover in Orlando and several hours of weather delays later, I’m here.

In Texas.

As soon as I step off the plane and into the jet bridge, I can feel the late afternoon heat melting and sizzling my skin like I’m made of butter.

I walk lifeless, hopeless, following signs for baggage claim to meet the father I’m half made of, yet somehow wholly unaccustomed to.

I have no negative experiences of him in my memories. In fact, the times I did spend with my father in the summer are some of my only good childhood memories.

My negative feelings toward him come from all the experiences I didn’t have with him. The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me what little effort he’s made to be a part of my life. I sometimes wonder how different I would be had I spent more time with him than Janean.

Would I have still turned out to be the same untrusting, skeptical human I’ve become had I experienced more good times than bad?

Maybe so. Or maybe not. Sometimes I believe personalities are shaped more by damage than kindness.

Kindness doesn’t sink as deep into your skin as the damage does. The damage stains your soul so bad, you can’t scrub it off. It stays there forever, and I feel like people can see all my damage just by looking at me.

Things might have been different for me if damage and kindness had held equal weight in my past, but sadly, they don’t. I could count the kindness shown to me on both hands. I couldn’t count the damage done to me even if I used the hands of every person in this airport.

It’s taken me a while to become immune to the damage. To build up that wall that protects me and my heart from people like my mother. From guys like Dakota.

I am made of steel now. Come at me, world. You can’t damage the impermeable.

When I turn the corner and see my father through the glass that separates the secured side of the airport from the unsecured, I pause. I look at his legs.

Both of them.

I graduated from high school just two weeks ago, and while I certainly didn’t expect him to show up to my graduation, I kind of held out a small sliver of hope that he would. But a week before I graduated, he left me a message at work and told me he broke his leg and couldn’t make the flight out to Kentucky.

Neither of his legs look broken from here.

I’m immediately grateful that I am impermeable because this lie is probably something that would have otherwise damaged me.

He’s next to baggage claim with no crutches in sight. He’s pacing back and forth without a limp or even a hitch in his step. I’m no doctor, but I would think a broken leg takes more than a few weeks to heal. And even if it did heal in that short amount of time, surely there would be residual physical limitations.

I already regret coming here and he hasn’t even laid eyes on me yet.

Everything has happened so fast in the last twenty-four hours, I haven’t had a chance for it all to catch up to me. My mother is dead, I’ll never step foot in Kentucky again, and I have to spend the next several weeks with a man I’ve spent less than two hundred days with since I was born.

But I’ll cope.

It’s what I do.

I walk through the exit and into the baggage claim area just as my father looks up. He stops pacing, but his hands are shoved inside the pockets of his jeans and they stay there for a moment. There’s a nervousness to him and I kind of like that. I want him to be intimidated by his lack of involvement in my life.

I want the upper hand this summer. I can’t imagine living with a man who thinks he’ll be able to make up for lost time by over-parenting me. I’d actually prefer it if we just coexisted in