I called bullshit on that. I called bullshit on it all. I hadn’t known what Royal and I were, but not once had I ever pressured him. Yeah, I asked him to go away together, but he didn’t have to. He had a choice.
I guess he made it in the end.
I hadn’t cried since that day, not once. I hadn’t wanted to give him the satisfaction. Tears showed I actually cared. Tears showed he mattered to me.
Sniffling, I moved on from his photos with my sister, trying to read what they were saying about Paige herself. My eyes blurred with tears, I finally came across some photos without Royal and the rest. My sister was young, really young. Maybe freshman year? Paige was in the hallway with a few girls and a woman I’d seen before. Birdie had said she was the headmaster’s wife.
The woman wore a necklace, a silver emblem. Her arm around Paige and the rest of the girls—the caption read, Mrs. Hastings (former guidance counselor at Windsor Preparatory) and other students from Windsor Pre
paratory remember a valued student.
The article had quotes from those other students, all of them saying nice things.
She will be greatly missed, said a quote from Mrs. Hastings. She got the last quote, the article over.
Ten
December
“Holy hell, girl. Finally. How are you? How’s LA and what’s this number?”
I circulated the area of the payphone I currently broke down and made a call at. I told Birdie I’d call her sometime, just hadn’t told her when.
I watched a tumbleweed literally tumble down the street and pressed the phone to my ear. “Good. Things are good, and this is a payphone. My phone charger is still broken.”
A half-truth, of course, my phone charger was broken, but I lied about how things were in my life currently. Oh yeah, and the little white lie I told her before about where I was. Keeping up the lie about all that felt best in this situation, though. In all honesty, I trusted Birdie, but telling her anything did put pressure on her. It was just easier to keep things to myself for the time being.
“Oh, awesome,” she said. It sounded like she was at a game or something, a lot of activity in the background or maybe practice. She and the other basketball players were currently off season but they had intramurals. “It’s good to hear from you. The others have been asking about you. Well, literally everyone is asking about you.”
I bet they were, the new girl coming to the school to rescue her sister only for said sister to turn up dead. The rumor and gossip mill had been ridiculous when I’d been there, and now that I actually gave people a valid reason to talk about me? I shook my head. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. You coming back soon? We all miss you over here.”
I knew they did, my smile faint. She and the others had become pretty good friends to me in my short time there. We had our drama moments a little bit, but eventually, we’d gotten over it. Things had been good until they weren’t. I turned with the phone cord. “Probably not for a while. Things are nice here, you know? Easy?”
I felt all that was self-explanatory, and Birdie agreed with me, her soft “Mmmhmm” into the phone.
“I get it. I do,” she said, then stopped. “Well, I don’t… You know what I mean.”
I pushed my hand through hair that hadn’t seen a shower in over twenty hours. I showered at the local YMCA or the homeless shelter, but since I hadn’t made it in last night… I gripped my arm. “I do know what you mean.”
A pregnant silence filled the line, as awkward as this conversation. I mean, what did we say to each other? I was lying to her, and she didn’t know how to deal. There wasn’t a manual on how to console a friend when they were literally on the cusp of a breakdown.
Which I was…
“Things with all that, what people were saying before you left is starting to blow over. I’m sure, by the time you come back, it won’t be a thing.”
I turned with the cord again. All that, a decision I made in another life, was the least of my worries. That happened when you were trying to figure out how to keep food coming when you didn’t have a lot.
“So I’m just saying if that’s the reason why you’re not coming back… If that’s why, it’ll all blow over. People aren’t even really talking about it anymore.”
She could be lying herself in an attempt to get me back, but even so, I wasn’t buying. That wasn’t the reason I wasn’t coming back.
It just helped my case.
“It’s not,” I said. “And I’m sure it will.”
“It will.” She sounded hopeful, her voice hard to hear with all that going on in the background. “And oh, I almost forgot to mention. Your dad asked about you. Well, talked to my dad who talked to me. My dad cleans up at the building your dad works at, I guess, so they work together kinda.”