I bet she was never called a fat, brace-face heifer.
“Can you move?” Holden snaps. And then adds a, “Please.”
Drake pulls me back and right into his chest, and I stand there, with my boyfriend’s arms wrapped around me, feeling like an outsider in my own home.
I lower my lashes, let a single tear escape, and when I look up, there’s nothing but dull blue eyes behind an ocean of anguish.
“Show me your room, babe,” Drake says, loud enough for everyone to hear.
I keep my eyes on Leo and give him the same treatment he once offered me.
I give him silence.
Chapter Forty-Four
Mia
Drake and I don’t go up to my room. I make us dinner, we watch another movie, and then he tells me he’s tired. I tell him that it would be disrespectful to my grandpa if we slept in the same bed under his roof without his knowing. And Drake, being Drake, accepts this for what it is: another giant lie to go with all the others.
I lie in Papa’s bed, my eyes wide, staring up at the ceiling. Behind the bed is a window, and through the window are their voices. Their laughter. All four them. Music plays, the bass just loud enough to rattle my brain and drive me insane.
Slowly.
Surely.
I fist a handful of blankets when I hear Leo’s voice so loud and unrestrained. I toss. I turn. Over and over until my body and the sheets resemble a sushi roll. I get out of bed, fix the covers, and then dive back in.
Thump, thump.
Thump, thump.
A girl squeals and Holden hollers, and I look at the clock on the nightstand. It’s close to midnight. If we had neighbors, they’d be pissed this was happening on a Sunday night. If I were petty, I’d call the cops. If I didn’t feel pathetic dressed in nothing but an oversized shirt and underwear, I’d go out there and tell them to shut the heck up.
I’m not confident enough to do any of those things, so instead, I lie there, and I try to take my mind away to another time.
When we were little, like seven or eight, Holden and I found an injured baby squirrel on the side of the road. We were on our bikes, and it was getting dark out, so I told him to just let it be. But he couldn’t. He picked it up and cradled it like a football all the way back to his house. He showed his parents, and at first, they were annoyed. Squirrels were everywhere, and most of the farmers considered them a nuisance, and then there was their son, bringing one into their home. It only took one look at Holden’s face, the sadness in his eyes, for his parents to cave. They put it in a cardboard box lined with towels and told us they’d take care of it in the morning. I slept in his room that night, on the spare bed opposite his. He was already snoring when I heard his parents talking. Tammy, his mom, said that she was proud to be raising a boy with so much compassion, and his father agreed. I didn’t know what compassion meant. When I woke up the next morning, I asked Tammy for the definition.
Compassion: sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.
“Holden likes to take things that are broken, or injured, or even sad, and he likes to fix them,” Tammy told me.
I remember looking at up at her, my head tilted. “Is that why he likes me?”
It’s an hour later when the music kicks up in volume, along with murmured voices. A light shines through the window, indicating the barn door’s open. I sit up a little, my ears straining to hear. A moment later, a car door opens and closes, and then another. The engine starts, and then tires spin on loose gravel. The light from the barn dims, and I listen closer, pray harder. There were two cars in the driveway, and only one has left.
I wait.
And I wait.
And I wait.
And then I have enough of waiting, and I get up, light on my feet, and move to the living room where I peek through the curtains. Holden’s car is gone. A stranger’s car is still here.
The reality of what’s happening slams into my chest, and my stomach turns at the thought. I’ve never tasted bitterness as sour as the bile in my throat, and I can’t breathe through the