“Therapy, huh?”
“I should have started it long ago,” I say. “But Dr. Edelstein keeps saying that it’s not too late.”
“It’s never too late, McCall.”
I agree and hope that that’s not only about him or therapy.
He gives me a gentle hug, and then he’s gone. I turn back and stare at the house. It won’t be so long before I’m back, but I know it won’t be the same. By Thanksgiving, I’ll be a visitor.
“Kid.” Dad sticks his head out the window. “Are you ready?”
I appreciate that he doesn’t add a finally to that question.
“Yes,” I say without even having to think about it. “I am.”
I get in the car and say it without dwelling on it for too long first. “I know we’re in a hurry, but can we stop by Mom’s on our way?”
Luckily, he doesn’t make the face that he’s overly proud, and so I don’t feel overly embarrassed. “Of course, James.”
Even though she isn’t expecting me, Mom answers the door right away.
“Aren’t you on your way upstate?” she asks.
I gesture at Dad’s car. “Almost. I wanted to say good-bye in person.”
Mom does make the overly proud face, but I guess that’s fair.
“I also wanted to . . . well, do you remember you asked me to challenge myself to something this year?”
Mom appears to take a huge breath. “Honey . . . I was going through a lot.”
It hits me how . . . herself she looks. For some reason, I think I wanted Mom’s new life to be a mess of selfishness and destruction, but Mom’s just Mom.
“No, it’s OK, you—”
“James, if anything I said made you feel—”
“You were right,” I say. “I wanted to take photos to show you everything I did, but . . . taking photos of volunteer work seems . . .” I try to find a word that doesn’t sound yanked from Kat’s vocabulary, but it’s the only one that sounds fitting. “. . . braggy.”
Mom laughs. “Oh, god, doesn’t it? Like my cousin Sandra.”
I laugh, and we say it together: “Hashtag amvolunteering!”
“But,” I continue, “I just want you to know that I did things. And I’m going to keep trying to help when I’m up at college, even if everyone warns me my schedule will make it impossible.”
“I have faith in you, James.” Mom hugs me so tightly I don’t breathe for a moment. “I’m really sorry for making your year harder than it should have been.”
I stay right in her arms, like when I was little. “I am too.”
She makes me promise to text once I’ve arrived, and we hug again before I get back into Dad’s car. He’s nonchalant even though he must have seen the hugging, and for the millionth time, I’m grateful for him.
I take out my phone and hold it for a few moments as Dad navigates out of Mom’s neighborhood to the 170. With Logan’s words echoing in my ears, I type.
As soon as I tap send, I power my phone down. This drive shouldn’t be about waiting for her. This is for me and my next steps, and I guess a little for Dad and me, too.
Then he tries to turn the radio on to NPR, and I have to override him with my running playlist. I associate the songs with movement, of putting one foot in front of the other and not looking behind me.
I smile. That’s what I’m doing today.
CHAPTER TWO
September of Senior Year
KAT
I can’t believe how he tells me.
“We’re at school,” I say.
“Yeah?” Matty says, then shrugs. Matty is shrugging mere moments after dropping a horrible life-changing bomb. Matty is making the face he always makes, somewhere between bemusement and cockiness, and for maybe the first time ever, it does nothing to me.
It does nothing good, at least.
“How many times?” I ask, even though I don’t know what I want him to say. Since the answer won’t be zero, does it matter? If he slept with Elise Penderson once, twice, forty-two times, what’s the freaking difference?
“Kat . . .” He reaches out to push my curls back from my face, a move he’s mastered by this point. When I’ve listed all the things I love about being Matty’s girlfriend, his care with my Medusa hair always gets a mention. Some guys know to bring you chocolate or take you to special places you’d never find on your own or kiss you with an almost incomprehensible intensity. But Matty takes care.
He did, at least.
“Why?” I ask. It’s now that whatever magical resolve that was holding me together disappears completely, and my voice breaks on that one word. And now Matty is seeing me cry.
It’s not like he hasn’t seen me cry before. Matty showed up only moments after my mom died almost two years ago. We weren’t even serious then, but there he was with James, my perfect pair of support beams. After that, though, I didn’t want to be the girl who cried. To Matty, I wanted to be the cool girl he deserved. To Matty, I was the cool girl he deserved. Or I thought he deserved, at least.
“You know I believe in honesty,” he says, like he’s proud. “I messed up, and I’m telling you.”
“Good for you, Matty,” I say. “Super great. I’m so happy while you were doing it with someone so”—Elise Penderson, blonde, fun, probably never has to send dresses back to ModCloth because she can’t fill out the top—“not me that it was only under such strictly honest terms.”
“Babe,” he says, and I’ve always teased him for that, babe, like we’re some cozy married couple in our forties. That’s how it always sounded to me. “I love you.”
“You don’t,” I say, full tears now. For me, full tears involve snot. I go straight from girl to beast. “If you did, you wouldn’t have . . .”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says.
“Then what was it like?” I slam his locker door shut. Whoever wasn’t already looking at us is looking now. “Why?”
“I . . . I dunno.” He scratches his head and shrugs again. “You were out of town. I was bored.”
“You were bored?” The locker door didn’t completely latch, so I yank the door open and slam it again before slapping its cold metal side. “Good-bye, Matty.”
“Kat,” he says, the way only he can say my name, the way his lips curl around the syllable. The first time I heard my three letters in his voice, it practically brought me to my knees in an all-but-literal swoon. “This doesn’t have to be a thing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
I walk off like I’m the brave one.
James runs up alongside me. She’s built for track-and-field and so my faux confident strut is no match for her. “Sofia told me you tore the door off of Matty’s locker.”
I laugh so hard I snort, and snot from my tears flies in all directions from my nose. James, true BFF that she is, doesn’t flinch.
“Honestly it was easier for me to believe that you”—she makes air quotes—“‘hulked out’ than that you and Matty . . .”