I ARRIVE BACK at the house before Joel, walk right into the dining room, and pull a bottle of tequila from the liquor cabinet.
“Dee?” my dad asks when he enters the room behind me. “Joel just pulled out of the driveway. Did something . . .” He trails off when I finish pouring myself a glass and turn around. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What, it’s okay for me to date rock stars with tattoos and piercings but I can’t have a freaking drink?”
My dad’s brows turn in as he studies me. “What happened?”
“Oh, you know,” I say, swirling the liquid in my glass. “Classic case of girl meets boy, boy saves girl, girl hangs out with boy, boy tells girl he loves her, girl tells boy to get lost.”
When my dad just stares at me like I’m a creature that possessed his daughter, I say, “Why’d you tell him about Mom?” His face pales, and I challenge, “It wasn’t enough for you to ask him to stay for Easter and invite him to Christmas, you had to go and tell him about Mom too?”
“She just came up,” my dad stammers.
“Of course she came up!” I slam my untouched drink on the table, and it splashes onto my hand. “It’s been seven years and you still can’t stop fucking talking about her!”
“Deandra,” my dad says, but I’m too far gone to heed the warning in his voice.
I wipe the back of my hand on my jacket and say, “No, Dad, tell me. It wasn’t enough to have her pictures all over the walls, you had to rub her in my face by telling Joel about her too?”
“That isn’t fair—”
“You know what’s not fair?!” I shout, startling him. “You not letting me forget her! It’s not fair I had to teach myself how to put on makeup or how to shave my legs. It’s not fair that Rowan’s mom had to tell me how to use a goddamn tampon!” Tears burn my eyes, but I ignore them and shout at the top of my lungs, “She doesn’t deserve to have her pictures on our walls, Dad!”
He reaches out to touch me, hesitant like he’s afraid I’m going to burst into pieces. “Dee . . . calm down and just tell me what happened.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. The tears are coming. They’re acid in my eyes, sulfur in my nose. I walk past him and grab my keys off the breakfast bar.
“Where are you going?” he asks as he follows after me.
“AWAY!” I shout, and I slam the front door behind me.
In my car on the way to Rowan’s, I can barely see the road through the tears that have sprung free from somewhere deep inside me. They’re clouding my vision, and the sob that tears from my throat racks my whole body. In her driveway, I’m crying too badly to move, so when my car door opens, I don’t bother lifting my head from the steering wheel to see who it is. Slender arms wrap around me, and I shift to let them hold me.
“Shh,” Rowan whispers, hugging me tight. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
“I can’t fucking do this, Ro,” I cry, hating myself for being this person. This person who can’t take care of herself. I can’t believe I snapped on my dad, or that I was so cold to Joel, or that I cried about my mom after seven years of managing not to.
“What happened?” Rowan asks me, rubbing my back.
So much has happened, I don’t even know where to start. I just shake my head against her shoulder, and she holds me until I calm down enough to breathe.
“Let’s go inside,” she tells me, but since I’m not sure I’m done crying and I don’t want to wake her parents, I shake my head again. “Then let me take you to the hideout,” she says, and I let her help me out of the car.
We enter her garage and climb up into its attic, a tiny space we set up in seventh grade. It’s filled with oversized pillows, beanbag chairs, and old lamps we collected from yard sales. I turn on my favorite one and it flickers purple and green light all over the eggshell walls before I sit down in my zebra-print beanbag and drop my head to my hands.
Rowan sits on her blue beanbag across from me, rubbing my shoulders and my knees until I take a deep breath and say, “He told me he loves me.”
“Joel?” she asks, and I huff out a single humorless laugh. Even Rowan can’t believe he’d say it. He was supposed to be different.
“Yeah. Joel.”
“Then what?”
His broken face flashes into my mind, his words echoing in the fissures of my heart. Was this your fucking plan? To fucking crush me?
I sit up, wiping my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I told him to go home.”
Rowan frowns at me, and I stare down at the floor.
“Why?” she asks.
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Dee,” she says, rubbing my shoulder, “you’re hurting right now.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“What about him?”
Another wave of tears stings my eyes, and I hurriedly wipe them away. “He’ll be fine too. This is for the best, Ro. We’re no good for each other. You said so yourself.”
“I said that months ago, Dee . . .”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. I know she has a point, but it’s one I don’t want to think about.
“I yelled at my dad,” I say to avoid her question. More silent tears. I lift the bottom of my shirt to wipe them away. “He told Joel about my mom, and Joel used it to try to psychoanalyze me when we were fighting and . . . I don’t even know, Ro. I just . . . I was just so . . .” A sob bubbles out of my chest, and I bury my face in my arms.
Rowan drops to her knees beside me to drape her arm over my back, trying to rub my pain away.
“I threw it all in my dad’s face. I took it all out on him. He didn’t deserve that.” The sobs start coming hard and heavy, my entire body aching with the force of them, and I say, “He’s been through enough. He’s always been such a good dad.”
“I’m sure he’ll understand,” Rowan says, and I know she’s right, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. If anything, it makes me feel worse.
“I just don’t know what to do.” My words are muffled and stuffy. My eyes are swollen and I’m too congested to breathe.
“Just tell him you’re sorry—”
“No, I mean about everything.” I sit up and wipe my nose with the back of my wrist and my eyes with the tips of my fingers. “He’s never going to talk to me again.”
“Your dad . . . ? Or—”
“Joel,” I answer. “We can’t be friends. Not anymore.”
“Do you love him?” she asks, and I shake my head, tears falling between my knees.
She waits for a long moment, holding my gaze, and then says, “Are you sure?”
I shake my head again, and she sighs and brushes her thumb over the apple of my wet cheek. “When you told Joel to go home, what happened?”
“He went.”
“Did he say anything?”
He told me he wouldn’t get over me. He practically pleaded with me not to push him away. He told me I was crushing him.
I shake my head. “He just left.”
“Maybe you should call him . . .”
“And say what?”
She frowns, because we both know there’s nothing to say.
“I need a fucking drink,” I say, already feeling the sting of new tears and desperately trying to hold them at bay. I need a buffer, something to help me forget. Something to help me sleep until being awake doesn’t hurt so much.
Rowan stares at me for a moment, and then she nods. “I’ll be right back.”
A few minutes later, she returns with a bottle of Jack Daniels I’m guessing she stole from her parents’ liquor cabinet. She unscrews the cap and hands me the bottle, and I take a big swig before holding it back out to her. “Let’s just get drunk.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asks, not taking the bottle.
“Yes,” I insist, never so sure of anything in my entire freaking life. I push the bottle into her hand, and Rowan takes a little swig before handing the bottle back to me. I take a big swig, then another, before sending it back her way, and we keep going like that until my tears stop falling—until most of the whiskey is gone and so is the aching in my heart.
“Dee,” Rowan says later that night, waking me with a light touch to my shoulder that makes my head throb. “Dee, your dad’s here.”
I try to sit up, and the whole room spins. I feel big hands steady me as the world slowly comes into focus, and then there’s my dad’s face.
“What . . .” I mumble, not sure where I am or why I’m being woken up.
“Come on, kiddo,” he says, and then he helps me to my feet. The night seeps back into my consciousness in bits and pieces. Joel, crying, Rowan, Jack Daniels.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I slur, my eyes thick with burning tears as we walk down the stairs into Rowan’s garage. He shushes me, but I turn under his arm and wrap my arms around him. “I didn’t mean it.”
“I know,” he says, holding me upright and rubbing my back. I hear him whisper something to Rowan, and she whispers back, but I’m too busy sobbing in my daddy’s arms to care. “Let’s get to the car, okay, sweetheart?”
I nod but don’t stop hugging him, and eventually he picks me off my feet and carries me the rest of the way.
I fall asleep sometime during the car ride home and don’t wake up again until four o’clock in the morning. The alarm clock on my nightstand glows an angry, fuzzy red, and I realize I’m still in my clothes, but my shoes and jacket are off and I’m snug under my covers. My eyeballs feel too big for their sockets—and my brain, too big for its skull. I press my fingers against my temples until I’m sure my head isn’t going to explode, and then I reach for my lamp and flinch away from the light when it smacks me in the face.
I lie in bed with my eyes squeezed closed for another few minutes before summoning the strength to roll out of bed. Then I lumber down the hall and rummage through the bathroom medicine cabinet until I find the aspirin. With three of them in my hand, I turn on the faucet and dip my mouth under the water; then I swallow the tablets down and brace my hands on the sink, lost in deep blue eyes and a voice I’ll never forget, words I’ll always remember.
I only know that I’m in love with you. Like seriously fucking in love with you.
I pat the back pocket of my jeans, closing my clammy fingers around my phone and pulling it out. I have missed calls from my dad and missed texts from Rowan and Leti.
Nothing from Joel.
Go home, Joel.
My heart twists, and I bite the inside of my lip to keep from crying again.
I did what needed to be done. I extinguished the fire before it consumed us both. Now I need to let it go.
After shutting off the water, I find myself walking away from my room instead of toward it. I slip into the guest room at the other side of the house and stare down at the unmade bed Joel was sleeping in less than twenty-four hours ago.
I feel like I’m keeping a secret.
Some secrets are better off kept.
I take off my jeans and crawl under his covers, wanting to be close to him even though I can’t be and won’t ever be again. My knee brushes against something soft, and I pull a T-shirt out from under the covers. Yesterday morning, he borrowed a clean one from my dad, and last night, he didn’t come inside to get his old one before leaving.
I love you.
You don’t have to say it back, but don’t tell me how I feel.
I lift the shirt to my nose—breathing him in, missing him, wanting to go back in time even if nothing could have changed—and then I tuck the shirt under my cheek and fall asleep alone.