There was a time in my life, only months ago, when I felt like I was always saying goodbye to Shia. We were friends, and he was John’s friend, too, but it wasn’t like John felt a little empty when Shia would leave. Then again, John himself had been in West Point for the last three years. My friendship with Shia barely existed compared to my relationship with John, and I saw them each about the same amount of times. Often, I didn’t think anything of the small amounts of time I spent with John; I only thought about how he loved me and was much more mature than Shia. Shia and I had barely been speaking lately. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t know why.
“We’ve barely talked the last few months,” I finally said. I couldn’t let him make me crawl inside my head the way he loved to. He wasn’t the kind of guy you just talked to casually, spitting out beige words just like everyone else. He didn’t ask about the weather, he asked about your favorite type of storm. His conversations were rainbow colored, every shade. When Shia King talked to you, he climbed into your mind and took pieces out with him. He didn’t ask everyday things like How are you?
“Would you have had anything to say to me, Meg?”
Last summer, right in front of Jackson Square, he asked me, “What’s the last thing that made you cry?”
“I don’t know. But I would have liked the choice.”
We kept walking and I could see my hotel from where we were. The temperature was rising as the afternoon took over from the morning. He was being silent as he stirred my words, probably searching for an essay of an answer to make my head spin with thoughts I wasn’t ready to have.
That night in front of that park, famous for artists selling their paintings, something started to grow in the gap between us. I didn’t know much about art. I wasn’t like Jo or Shia King. However, I could name every shade of Tarte lipstick and the best type of haircut for your face shape. We all had our talents.
“How’s your dad?”
“Hasn’t called in a while,” I told him.
That sticky August night was supposed to have been a normal night of me playing Taxi, driving Beth to her friend’s house to “study” (back when she wanted to leave the house) and then dropping Jo off at work. Her last job was at a little coffee-and-crepe place right across from Jackson Square. I planned to walk around a little and maybe go to the mall, but I saw Shia standing outside the entrance and I had recognized him from Reeder’s barracks room.
I spent Jo’s entire shift telling him about a Facebook post from River. It was a meme about crazy ex-girlfriends because I was the crazy one. Riiight. He had not only spread pictures of my body that I trusted him with to half of the school, but he wouldn’t stop posting stupid quotes about exes.
By the time I had spilled half of my guts to Shia, Jo texted me to pick her up from her shift. I couldn’t believe how fast the last four hours had gone, and I couldn’t believe I had gone that much into detail about the bullshit that happened in Texas. I didn’t want that part of my life to follow me here to a new state, new life, but there I was pouring it out on the concrete.
Prior to that night, Shia and I had hung out maybe six times. Sometimes with John, sometimes with Reeder, but never at Shia’s house. Always in the barracks rooms. I didn’t even know he was a part of the Fort Cyprus royal family until Reeder let it slip one night in the field behind the Shoppette, but Shia talked his way out of further conversation about it before we even realized that’s what he was doing.
After I spilled my guts to him like cheap red wine on a white sheet, Shia and I became friends, I guess you could call it. Then we got in a fight that night I was wearing a tiara on my head. He called me princess and kissed my mouth with cherry lips and a silver tongue. Neither of us wanted that night to haunt us, and then John asked me to take our relationship to the next level. Even during that, I kept hanging out with Shia, and he would try to convince me to leave town with him. He always laughed enough at the end where I didn’t know if he was serious or not.
His silence now got the best of me and I turned quickly to him, annoyance spreading through me, and said, “John’s in the hotel room waiting for me.”
Shia’s eyes stayed on the busy sidewalk ahead of us, and the light turned for us to walk.
“Liar!” a voice yelled from the middle of the street.
When I looked, a homeless man was standing there, his hands in the air and liquid draining from his full beard. Shia gently tapped my arm for me to keep walking.
My frustration bubbled over. “If you’re going to ignore me, then get the hell away from me.”
Shia laughed and I groaned. “I’m not ignoring you. I’m thinking before I speak. You should try it.”
I rolled my eyes in the most dramatic way.
“I want to see John anyway. I’ll come with you?” Shia offered, waited for me to nod, and followed me to the hotel.
28
beth
“Aunt Hannah called,” I told my mom as soon as she walked through the door.
The wooden door shut and barely made a sound. It wasn’t like our thick mahogany door in Texas that Jo used to throw sharp-pointed ninja stars into. That thing slammed shut every time the wind blew and shook the house with it. The door in this house looked like it was made from birch and could blow away with the wind anytime.
Mom set her purse down on the floor and walked over to the fridge. I saw the lines of tension sprout across her forehead, but she kept a straight face. “What did she say?”
My aunt had called three times before I finally answered, and she sounded like she was covering the receiver. I would have told my mom this if her under-eyes weren’t the color of my jeans.
“That she needs you to call her back. She sounded stressed-out.” I paused long enough for my mom to dip her head into the fridge to avoid me. “Is everything okay?”
Mom stood up and closed the fridge, a carton of eggs in her hands. “Yeah, yeah. Everything is fine. Did you get all your class work done? Are you still behind a week?”
Classic Meredith Spring, changing the subject even better than Amy. I knew my mom twice as well as my sisters did, so that meant I knew her every move. She didn’t have many, but lately she had been cashing them all in. She was trying to distract me by asking for my homework and getting me to talk about myself.
“I caught up after Christmas break, remember?” I specifically recalled talking to her about it in the living room.
“Oh yeah.”
My mom opened the cupboard and grabbed a mixing bowl. She hadn’t been in the mood to cook lately, but I wasn’t going to bring that up. I didn’t mind cooking most of the meals around here, but I was happy taking the morning off. It was almost noon. Jo was upstairs writing in her room, and Meg was with John downtown. Amy was at the house of some girl down the street, so we were alone for the most part. I owed it to my dad to take any time I could to check in on my mom. He hadn’t called in days, and her eyes were bloodshot this morning.
My mom’s blond hair was pulled back in a claw clip. Her hair was thinning in the front, where she curled the pieces into one big curl around her hairline. Meg always begged her to let her give her a new style, but so far our mom had refused.
“How much longer do you have? I should know this.” She pulled a smile out of the pocket of her favorite T-shirt. She slept in the T-shirt, printed with my dad’s old company name over the image of a tank. It was so worn that the black fabric had turned gray and the tank had started to peel off. The decal now looked like a house or something, not a tank.
“Until May, technically, but I might be able to finish early.”
My mom popped open the carton of eggs and inspected them. “Your dad has always wondered about next year. And the school sent an email . . .” Her voice fell a little.
My dad wanted me to go to “regular” school, I knew he did, but he would never just flat out say it. “What kind of email?”
She took a few eggs in her hands and walked over to the bowl on the counter. “Just an enrollment email
for you, Amy, and Jo. Are you ready to go back to school?”
She stopped talking, and I figured that she was trying to collect her thoughts before she handed them out. She chose the weirdest stuff to treat me like a kitten about.
“Does Dad think I should go back to school?”
“That’s not what I said. I said he’s asked over the past few months if you were ready to go back.”
“Why, though? Is something wrong with what I’m doing now? I’m ahead of schedule now, and I only fell behind one time and that was over holiday. Jo bombed that math test last week.”
“It’s not about the grades.”
Mom began to crack the eggs against the side of the bowl. The eggs broke hard enough that I’m sure a few tiny shells went inside the bowl, but didn’t want to point them out. I usually did it at the end, pulling out little shards of eggshell. My mom wasn’t great at not getting shells inside, but at least she wasn’t like Jo, who refused to look at the eggs. She ate scrambled meat that wasn’t real meat and tortilla shells almost every day for breakfast. Or the occasional bagel stuffed to the brim with cream cheese.
I waited for my mom to explain why I was failing as a teenager.