Who We Could Be - Chelsea M. Cameron Page 0,20

her place and stay over again. I didn’t even care if I missed another day of work or got fired. I wouldn’t even need to spin a sob story about why I’d missed so many days.

If that’s okay Monty said, as if my parents wouldn’t take her in in a heartbeat.

Get here when you can I responded.

“Ford’s coming over. She said she didn’t want to be alone, but she probably doesn’t want to talk about it, so can you both be cool?” I said and my parents shared a look.

“We’ll behave,” Dad said.

“Does she want anything? I’m happy to make dinner or heat up some leftovers.” There was no shortage of leftovers in the O’Connell house. My parents had gotten used to feeding three teen boys and hadn’t lost the habit of making way too much in anticipation that someone would come by and devour whatever it was.

“I’ll ask when she gets here.”

I didn’t know why I was fretting about Monty getting to the house, but she didn’t show up until nearly an hour later, and when she walked through the door her hair was still wet from the shower and, honestly, she looked like shit. Her skin was too pale, except for the red blotchy patches under her eyes and on her cheeks. The puffiness around her eyes hadn’t gone down at all. Monty always dressed carefully, but the outfit she had on was something I’d never even seen before: sweatpants that had enormous holes and a faded t-shirt from a camp we’d attended when we were ten that I didn’t even know she had anymore. On her feet were two different socks. She hadn’t even brought shoes.

“Oh, Ford,” I said, holding my arms open. She stumbled into them and I pulled her inside.

MONTY STAYED WITH ME for nearly a week. I woke her up and made her eat breakfast and shower and go to work. She did a lot of staring at walls and not a lot of talking, but we got over the initial hump of grief. Then it got out (I didn’t know how) about her and TJ, and then I spent my time following her around and hovering whenever she was near anyone else in case they asked her about it or gave her pitying looks. Those came, as did the whispers. Honestly, I didn’t listen to a lot of the gossip because that shit didn’t matter, but I heard it nonetheless.

Monty was stoic through it all, but I heard her crying the guest room at night sometimes. I tried to comfort her, but she told me that she had to deal with it alone, so I just gave her a hug and went back to bed to worry about her.

The boxes she’d taken to TJ’s showed up on her steps, and he didn’t try to contact her further. She did end up writing a message to the other girl, but she didn’t hear anything back. That was probably for the best.

In the second week after everything, she started looking better and I even caught what I thought might be a smile or two. Always focused, she threw herself into work, volunteering for way too many things and meetings and committees to fill up her time, but I didn’t blame her.

Her parents finding out was the roughest part. There was a lot of screaming and crying on the part of her mother and a lot of disappointed words from her dad. As if she’d been the one who’d done wrong. I’d never really gotten along with them, and they’d been pretty absent for most of her life. I would never, ever have said this to her, but they were the kind of people who got pressured into having kids because it was supposedly the right thing to do, but probably shouldn’t have.

I was so glad when she got to get away from them when she went to college and got her own place. They pretty much sucked.

Every night she stayed with us, I would wake up and creep to the guest room and check on her. I couldn’t help myself. I had to make sure that she was okay. I think she was beginning to get annoyed with me when I kept texting her during work to check in. Not to mention all the times I brought her coffee and food to make sure she ate.

One week before her wedding was supposed to happen, there was a knock at my bedroom door in the middle