hair behind my ear. “But I’m afraid for you. This isn’t normal teenage stuff. You’re not eating like you should. You’re keeping secrets. You just seem so angry all the time. I’m worried if I don’t do something now, it’s only going to get worse.”
“What do you mean do something now?” I whisper.
“There’s a program.” Her shoulders shake as she lays it out for me. “It’s a residential in-treatment therapy. Maybe they can help you work through some of these issues since I seem to be failing—”
“You aren’t sending me away!” I yell at her.
Her eyes widen as she snaps her gaze back to mine in shock. I’ve never yelled at her before. Not like this. She used to be my best friend. My confidante. And now, it feels as though we’re strangers. Because this secret is poisoning everything. My own mother wants me to go away. It hurts. It hurts so much I don’t know what else to do. So, I open the car door and bolt down the street.
She doesn’t follow.
17
Landon
I spend every night of the next week sleeping on the lounger in Kail’s pool house. She leaves the door unlocked for me, and the gesture doesn’t go unnoticed. Neither does the extra blanket she left there. But I wait until after she’s asleep to come in and leave before she wakes up.
Sometimes, she stirs, and I can feel her eyes on me. Neither of us says a word. She doesn’t ask me why I’m there, and I don’t ask her why she’s been moping around all week. Things are starting to feel too familiar. Too comfortable. I can’t let myself get wrapped up in her problems when I have my own to deal with.
Suzy has come knocking on my house a few times since she left, but I ignore her and hope she’ll eventually get the message. It’s a dangerous game to play with her because I never know what she might do next. That’s why I’m here in the pool house. It’s become more comfortable to me than my own home. A truth I don’t want to analyze too closely.
Every night, Kail’s mom invites me to dinner, and I go because it feels good to have someone give a fuck for a change. Kail and her mom have always had a pretty solid relationship, but the new cold war at the dinner table hasn’t gone unnoticed. It’s awkward and tense as Alana and Theo make conversation and ask me about football while Kailani stews in her silence. Tonight, though, in the middle of dessert, the tides turn.
Kail’s mom serves up a cheesecake, and I’m on my second slice when they start whisper arguing in the kitchen. Except they don’t realize both Theo and I can hear them.
“You promised me you were going to try,” Alana says.
“How am I supposed to think about food when the school could decide to expel me at any moment? I could lose everything.”
Kailani sniffles, and the piece of cheesecake I’m chewing gets lodged in my throat. When I glance at Theo, there’s a grim expression on his face.
“Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out, Kail. I promise you.”
Footsteps echo through the house, followed by the slam of a door. Alana is the only one to return, and she looks defeated as she sits down and stares at the plate of cheesecake in front of her. I polish off my dessert quietly, trying to figure out how to approach this situation. But as it turns out, Alana figures it out for both of us.
“Landon, do you know what’s going on between her and Audrey?”
“Audrey?” I repeat.
“Honey—” Theo reaches out to touch her hand, but she shakes her head.
“No, I can’t handle the secrecy anymore. I need to know what would make her do something so horrible.”
“What did Audrey do?” I ask, understanding without a doubt that it is Audrey she’s referring to.
“She went to the school and told them Kail attacked her,” Alana says. “They’ve already suspended her from the dance team while they investigate, but now they’re threatening expulsion too. I just can’t figure out why Audrey would do something like that.”
The beautiful dinner she made sours in my gut. From a young age, I came to understand that people will say and do things that can damage you forever without a second thought. As long as it benefits them, they don’t care about the fallout. It’s happened to me more times than I can count. Betrayal is a constant expectation in