chin on his hands, propped up on his elbows. “Don’t take it like that, Rho.”
“She is such a shitty therapist.” I slap my laptop shut. “Seriously, she’s so bad.”
“She’s really not,” he says.
“So what? You’re an expert on therapists now just because you go to therapy?”
“I’m leaving.” Griffin pulls his knees to his chest one at a time, then pushes to stand with his laptop in his arms. “Don’t forget that you asked me to be here.”
“What? No! Don’t leave!” I feel like crying again.
Mom always says, “if everyone in the world is an asshole, then maybe you’re the problem,” and there’s a small part of my brain that is nodding to this little bit of mom logic playing itself out in my life right now. But even if a tiny part of my brain confirms I’m the one with the problem, the rest of me just … hurts.
It hurts that Dusk is telling me to suck it up and deal with it.
It hurts that Griffin seems fed up with me.
It hurts that Mom is getting what she wants without listening to me.
“You’re being really shitty right now!” Griffin shoves his laptop into his backpack and dusts the dirt off the back of his khakis. He looks like he’s five again, all eyes and flushed cheeks. “And if there’s anything I learned in therapy, it’s that I can’t control you being an asshole, but I can control whether I stick around to listen to it.”
“Griffin!” I feel like I’m five again, crying at my own party.
He pauses on his way to the ladder, tall and slender in his tech-track golf shirt and khakis, with his backpack slung over one arm.
“Have you talked to any dance kids since we’ve been back?” I ask.
I’ve been meaning to ask for weeks now.
It’s a loaded question and a change of subject—one I hope pulls him back close to me.
I need him right now, so, so badly.
He sighs, and the blue of his eyes reflect the wide, November sky stretching over our heads. “Nobody knows what to say to me.”
“I get that.” No one’s known what to say to me, either.
It’s a small school. All of us studio and performing arts–track kids are lumped together despite our grade level. Having Griffin begin his junior year in the tech track—which once upon a time existed as an independent school and was absorbed into the Conservatory to escape financial ruin in the nineties—felt every much like the exile my parents intended it to be.
“For the first three periods of our first day back, some jerk had everybody convinced I was dead—”
“I remember you telling me about that,” I say. The tug in his voice hurts my heart. “The dance girls were literally crying into each other’s leotards until they ran into you in the cafeteria.”
He rakes his fingers through his hair, then tucks his hands behind his head. “Then they thought I was a genius for moving out of dance and into tech, which lasted long enough for someone in the sci tech–track to dispute that based on the fact that I’m completely over my head in Physics I.”
He frowns at me.
I frown at him.
It’s so clear to me right now, how everything we’re doing—and not doing—is at the bidding of a woman who is operating more like a dictator than a parent. Neither of us are where we want to be right now, and it’s 500 percent her fault.
“Help me…?” My voice is this thin, aching thing. “I don’t know what to do.”
One hand rakes across his face, lingering to scratch at his eyes. “We’re all trying to help, Rho.”
“I’m sorry I was mean to you,” I say. “Please?”
He draws a long sigh and slips his backpack over his other arm. “Buy me dinner and we’ll figure it out.”
* * *
Denial works like this:
1) Eating with Griffin at Sylvia’s Diner will be fine. It’s during the week.
2) Iliana and Sarah have school like we do—of course they won’t be working tonight. But—
3) Sarah’s car is in the parking lot—maybe it broke down over the weekend. Except—
4) It’s wet on the asphalt under her car, and the hood is still hot when I park in the spot to its left.
“Maybe it’s just Sarah.” Griffin shoves me toward the front doors of the diner. After our spat earlier, humoring him with his dinner locale choice was the least I could do.
“Yeah, maybe it is just Sarah.” I snatch the door open first. The bells crash against the glass,