she reached the floor, she beat against it with her open palm until she started to cry for real—dark, ragged, body-racking sobs like I didn’t even know existed.
I hesitated for one second—unsure if I should go to her, if seeing me would make her feel better or worse. But then I couldn’t stand it. I skittered barefoot down the steps and across the Persian rug, and I threw myself down beside her.
She looked up, surprised.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said.
And she just knew in that instant, the way mothers always know, that I’d heard it all. She pulled me tightly to her chest and wrapped her arms around me. “It isn’t you, sweetheart,” she said, her voice still thick. “It isn’t you.”
But, of course … she was lying.
It was me.
She knew it, and now so did I.
I never thought about that night now. I hadn’t forgotten it, exactly, but I kept it somewhere at the distant edges of my memory. What was the point of replaying it? Nothing could change. Nothing could work out differently. My father would leave, and I wouldn’t see him again until my mother’s funeral, two years later—and even then he would look at me with bitterness.
He didn’t take me in after that. I’d go to live with my mother’s sister, and my father and I would spend the rest of our lives ignoring each other’s existence.
All because of this one thing that was wrong with me that would never be fixable.
Anyway, how could someone like Alice—cheerful, logical, tea-drinking Alice—ever understand something like that?
I couldn’t even understand it, myself.
She wanted to know why my falling in love with Duncan was bad—and for a second, I thought about trying to explain it to her.
But words failed me.
In Alice’s world, love was mathematical. Every problem had a solution.
But in my world, solutions had always been a hell of a lot less easy to come by.
sixteen
When Babette showed up in the kitchen, still in her robe, she took one look at the two of us and said, “What did I miss?”
“Sam kissed Duncan,” Alice said.
“Finally!” Babette said. “Maybe it’ll fix him.”
“One kiss can’t fix a person.”
“Maybe it’ll inspire him to try to fix himself.”
I meant to lay it all out for them very carefully, but instead, here’s what came out: “He was so doped up after the surgery it was like a truth serum, and he wound up confessing that he’d had a thing for me back in California, and then I had to take his clothes off for him and he fell on top of me, and then he stared into my eyes until we were kissing, and then he told me he was lonely and he asked me to stay with him, and now I’m afraid I have no choice but to fall back in love with him.”
Babette took that in.
“Wow,” Alice said.
I nodded. But I was tired of thinking about what it all meant for me. Now that Babette was here, I added: “And there’s one more thing. He was shot. In a school shooting.”
Babette and Alice both set down their coffee mugs, leaned in, and said, “What?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have told them. Maybe it was private information that he’d only disclosed under the influence of drugs. But I trusted them.
And I really, really needed advice.
I nodded to confirm. “He almost died. The scars are … massive. Shocking. I mean. Disfiguring.”
Babette sighed. “That explains a lot.”
“And so now I’m very conflicted,” I said.
“I can see why,” Alice said.
“Because I’d already given up on him. And we’ve hatched a plan to get him fired. And there’s no doubt that for the sake of the school, he needs to go. But…”
“You want him to stay,” Babette said, with a little smile.
“But, now, after seeing the scars … I can see why he’s acting like he is.”
“He’s afraid.” Babette nodded.
“Yes, and I don’t think he’s dealt with any of it—whatever that would even mean. I mean, how would a person even do that? How would you even start?”
“You feel like there’s hope for him?” Alice asked.
I nodded. “I’ve been trying all this time to figure out what changed. And now that I know, I feel like maybe instead of trying to fire him, we should try to help him.”
Babette and Alice thought about it.
I looked back and forth between them. “What do you think?”
And that’s when Babette gave me a big smile—the first real smile I’d seen from her in months. Then she said, “I think it’s the best idea