Heart Bones

I nod, tight-lipped.

Sara spins around and I can see the surprise in her eyes that I’ve changed back into my old sundress. She hides her shock well, though. Marcos is standing next to her, pouring himself a glass of tea. When he makes eye contact with me, he does a double take. It’s obvious he didn’t expect to see the girl from the ferry at dinner tonight.

Samson must not have told him about seeing me sob on the balcony earlier.

Speaking of Samson, he’s the only one who doesn’t look at me. He’s digging through the refrigerator as Sara lifts a hand and waves it toward me. “Marcos, this is my stepsister, Beyah. Beyah, this is my boyfriend, Marcos.” She throws a thumb over her shoulder. “That’s Samson, third wheel and next door neighbor.”

Samson turns around and eyes me for a moment. He lifts his chin in a nod as he pops open a can of soda. All I can think about as he presses the can to his lips to take a sip is how I just saw his mouth on some other girl’s neck.

“Welcome to Texas, Beyah,” Marcos says, pretending he didn’t meet me on the ferry earlier.

I appreciate that the two of them aren’t making a thing of it.

“Thanks,” I mutter. I walk into the kitchen, not sure what to do. I don’t feel comfortable enough to ask for a drink, or to make my own plate of food. I just stand still and watch everyone else move about comfortably.

As hungry as I am right now, I’m dreading this dinner. For whatever reason, people feel the need to alleviate awkwardness with questions no one really cares to know the answers to. I have a feeling that’s how this entire dinner is going to go. They’re probably all going to be batting questions at me the entire meal, and I really just want to make a plate of food, take it to my room, eat it in silence and then go to sleep.

For two straight months.

“I hope you like breakfast, Beyah,” Alana says, walking a plate of biscuits to the table. “We sometimes like to switch things up and have it for dinner.”

My father sets down a pan of scrambled eggs. There’s bacon and pancakes already on the table. Everyone starts taking their seats, so I do the same. Sara grabs the seat between Marcos and her mother, which means I’m left with the seat next to my father. Samson is the last to sit, and he pauses when he realizes he’s seated next to me. He sits reluctantly. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems he’s trying to subtly shift his attention away from me.

Everyone begins passing food around. I skip the eggs, naturally, but the smell is overpowering all the other foods. My father starts in on the questions as soon as I take my first bite of a pancake.

“What have you been up to since graduation?”

I swallow, then say, “Work, sleep, repeat.”

“What do you do?” Sara asks. She asks that in a rich way. Not, “Where do you work,” but “What do you do,” like it’s some kind of skill.

“I’m a cashier at McDonald’s.”

I can tell she’s taken aback. “Oh,” she says. “Fun.”

“I think it’s great that you chose to work while still in high school,” Alana says.

“It wasn’t a choice. I had to eat.”

Alana clears her throat and I realize my honest response made her uncomfortable. If that bothers her, I wonder how she’s going to take the news that my mother died of an overdose?

My father tries to skip over the moment and says, “I guess you changed your mind about summer courses. You starting in the fall now?”

That question confuses me. “I’m not enrolled in summer courses.”

“Oh. Your mom said you needed summer tuition when I sent her money to cover the fall.”

My mother asked him for tuition?

I earned a full ride to Penn State. I don’t even have to pay tuition.

How much did he give my mother that I never even knew about? There was obviously a cell phone shipped to me at some point that I never received. And now I find out she asked him for tuition to an education she never even cared enough to ask me about.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to come up with an excuse as to why I’m here in Texas and not in the summer classes he paid for. “I signed up too late. The classes were full.”

I suddenly have no appetite at all. I can barely finish the second bite of pancake I took.

My mother never asked me about college at all. Yet she asked my father for tuition money that probably ended up in a slot machine at a casino, or running through the vein in her arm. And he paid it without question. If he would have just asked me, I would have told him I could have gone to community college for free. But I didn’t want to stay in that town. I needed as far away from my mother as I could get.