shake my head.
What an ugly, ugly mess.
“Tell me,” she says, punctuated with a sob, “if I’d shown up that night and told you who I was, would you have given me a chance in hell?”
I don’t have to answer that, because she’s right.
Iliana reaches up to touch my cheek. Our eyes meet, and all I want is to melt into her.
But it’s all so much to reconcile. Even if I see the way Cheshire and Iliana puzzle together, my mind flip-flops in protest and I can’t get my thoughts all the way around it.
“I—I don’t know—”
“Iliana!” Iliana’s mother’s voice is a throatier version of her own. I’d know it anywhere. “Baby, come on! They’re calling for you.”
Iliana’s eyes grow wide like saucepans, the color of honey.
“It’s you, baby,” her mother calls out to us—no, to Iliana. This isn’t meant for me. “You won! What’s wrong, sweetheart? Ah, come inside—”
I burst into tears. Again.
Here we are, at the end of this, and it’s all come down to Iliana after all.
“You need to go,” I say.
I’ll give myself this: It feels like I’ve lost something tonight, seeing the Capstone going to her. I’ll be happy for her tomorrow, I hope, but tonight the grief is real in more ways than one.
“But—we need—” Iliana glances back at her mom. Applause thunders from inside the tent, and people are peeking out into the courtyard, grinning.
“I need time,” I whisper. “Go. You’ve worked so hard for this.”
Iliana rocks forward to kiss me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispers. “For everything.”
With that, she leaves the umbrella in my hand and darts back toward the tent.
Applause hits a crescendo, and I turn to the sidewalk to walk two blocks back to the condo with Iliana’s umbrella over my head.
For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had
happened lately,
that Alice had begun to think that very few things
indeed were really impossible.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
CHAPTER 30
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 2w ago
I thought my first night back at Sylvia’s since the scholarship award would have entailed a hero’s welcome. My entire world flipped on its ear in Nashville, but being back here in Birmingham, strung up in one of Sylvia’s frilly aprons, feels like some modicum of my normal life.
Plus, I was right: Telling Rhodes the truth put the universe back in balance.
Except it isn’t in balance at all, because this level of security is something I’ve never actually experienced before. For the first time, maybe ever, I feel like I can think past what will happen to me in a week. A month. A year. Five years.
I’ve burned bridges and broken hearts, but now everything is paying off—I know where I’m going to college, and I know how I’m going to pay for it. The Capstone Award women have shifted from horrifying, Argonaut-esque harpies into women who champion for me in every area—Bootsie Prudhomme asked her friends to help pay for my freshman year art supplies. In spite of June Baker’s fallout with the organization, her daughter-in-law asked their junior league chapter to help me buy a new computer.
The thing is, I don’t really know if I can call it “paying off” at all—maybe a year ago, I would have been okay with the way all of my relationships became collateral damage in my fight for all this.
But so much has changed since then, and there is this chilly, impenetrable silence that has been draped over my life like some kind of burial shroud—there is no one around me to share in my joy. My parents are thrilled for me, sure, but I have no friends who care about me enough to really be happy for me.
I’m lonely. I ache for what I don’t have anymore.
It’s been two weeks since the Capstone Award finals, and I haven’t spoken to Rhodes since. Lord knows I’ve tried—I texted her a week after finals. I tried to call her in a moment of weakness a few days after that, even though I knew that if she wanted contact with me, she would have texted me back in the first place. Then I emailed her.
I eventually accepted that I had come on too strong.
It’s what I do when there’s something in front of me that I want—and it’s the trait that got me into this whole mess to begin with. This time, though, I didn’t push forward.
I gave her what she needed—space—and I turned my heart toward the very specific pain of getting used to the idea of what life will look like now