I hesitate, then delete all of the messages she’s sent in the last twelve hours. There are nineteen of them. I send a thumbs-up emoji, and nothing else, because I don’t know what I could possibly say that wouldn’t make her worry even more. She replies immediately with a message that says simply I love you no matter what.
She loves me no matter what. Even if I’m a murderer. Even if I’m a monster—because, let’s face it, the kind of person who does what I did? That’s a monster. It wasn’t on purpose, but that doesn’t really feel like it matters.
Something is wrong inside me, something I don’t understand and can’t control, and Maryam wants me to know that she loves me anyway.
The group text thread is pretty quiet. I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what to say. I can’t blame them—I don’t know what to say either. I draft and delete nine messages before chickening out and sending a string of heart emojis.
The only texts I haven’t read yet are the ones from Roya.
My mouth is too dry for me to read the texts from Roya. When did my mouth get so dry? It wasn’t like this until I saw her name on the screen.
I hate seeing her name on the screen. I wish I saw it more.
I slip out of my room, hoping no one will ambush me in the hall to ask if prom was just fine. I can hear Dad and Pop and Nico making leaving-noises in the front entryway. I stand at the sink, drinking water and trying to get my heart rate to settle down a little. I open the texts from Roya.
Hey did you get home ok?
Marcelina says you’re staying at her place, lmk if you need anything
Man, this duffel bag I’m thinking of buying is an ~arm and a leg~
I let out a long, slow breath that would be a laugh if I wasn’t so dizzy. Of course Roya’s got jokes. She’s always got jokes.
“Well, go find them,” Dad says from the entryway, and I catch a note of exasperation in his voice. It’s always like this, trying to get Nico out the door—a thousand loose ends, everything last-minute and forgotten. Dad’s pretty type-A, and he tries hard not to expect Nico to be as organized as he is, but it definitely drives him up the wall.
“I think they’re in Alex’s room,” I hear Nico call back behind him, and then his cleats are tearing up the carpet in the front hallway, and—
“Shit,” I mutter, dropping my glass into the sink hard enough that I have to check to see if it’s cracked. It isn’t. “Shit, shit, shit.” I run for the hall. My bedroom door is ajar, and when I walk in, Nico is rummaging around my desk. No no no. The head is in here. The heart is in here. He can’t be in here.
“What are you doing?” I shout. I’m a caricature of a pissed-off big sister. “Get out of my room!”
“I need my headphones,” he says. “I can’t find them. Didn’t you borrow them yesterday when you were doing your hair or whatever?”
“No,” I snap. “You probably washed them again. Take shit out of your pockets next time.”
“Don’t swear at me or I’ll tell Dad and he’ll make you do Conflict Resolution,” Nico says. I scowl because he’s right—Dad would totally sit me down to go over the rules of engagement. No swearing, no yelling, no specious allegations, no hearsay. We are not a yelling household, and other totally normal things to say during an argument.
Nico looks something less than smug but more than satisfied. He runs a hand through his hair, which he does whenever he knows he’s winning. I hope the gel leaves his hand gross and sticky. “I know you borrowed them. I just need to find them before I go, or else I won’t have anything to listen to during warm-ups.” He turns around and his eyes land on the backpack.
He reaches for it.
“No,” I say, but he’s not paying attention.
He’s holding the backpack and ignoring the hell out of me.
“Nico,” I shout, “give me the damn bag!”
“I just need my headphones. God, don’t be such a bitch.”
I snatch the bag out of his hand just as he’s reaching for the zipper. “Don’t call women bitches,” I snap. “I don’t have your headphones.”
“I wouldn’t call you a bitch if you weren’t being a bitch,” he snaps back, and we would probably devolve into a shouting match, but Pop calls from the garage.
“Are you coming to the game, Lex?”
Nico and I stare at each other hard. He smiles. I shake my head. His smile broadens, and he calls over his shoulder.
“Yeah, Pop, she’s coming! She’s just getting her shoes on now.”
I growl at Nico and push him out the door so I can change into clothes I didn’t sleep in. I shove the backpack under my bed as far as it’ll go. When I pull my arm out from under the bed, my fingertips brush across something that feels unfamiliar. I grab it and pull it out.
Nico’s tangled headphones dangle from my hand.
“Ah, shit,” I mutter.
* * *
Nico gloats for the entire drive to his game. I should have just tossed his headphones into his room and let him warm up with no music, but I’m not that cruel of a sister. Pop is on a call with his assistant for the first half hour of the forty-minute drive, but the second he hangs up, his eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
“So!” He does the bright, excited voice that means “I’m sorry for taking a work call on the weekend, it won’t happen again, except actually it definitely will and I’ll make up for it by sending you to a nice college someday.” “Prom, huh? Was it the best night of your life?”
I swallow an incredulous laugh, and his eyebrows go up. “Uh, no,” I say. “I sure hope not. It would be a bummer to peak this early.”
He smiles, rolls his eyes. “Did you have a good time, though?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“Just fine?” he asks, and I realize that I’ve died and gone to a special section of hell where people won’t accept “fine” as an answer.
“It was fun,” I revise. “The music was great. I felt like a princess the whole time.”
Pop doesn’t laugh. His eyebrows come together, which isn’t hard, since they almost meet in the middle anyway. They’re the only hair on his entire head, but they kind of work overtime. When he frowns, they form one long, worried line. “Did something happen?”
“No,” I say, sharper than I intend. “Nothing happened, Pop, it was just—it’s a dance. Everyone thinks it’s more than that, but it’s not. It’s just a dance. And it was fine.”
“I think she had a fight with Roya,” Dad whispers. “Roya went with Tall Matt.” Pop keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. When Dad says “Tall Matt,” Pop’s eyes get wide and his eyebrows rocket around like they’re motorized.
“Why does everyone think that?” I retort. “I didn’t have a fight with anyone, I had a good time, I don’t even care about who Roya went to prom with, it was—”
“ ‘Fine,’ we know,” Nico interrupts. He’s texting someone, probably about how he was right and I had his headphones all along. “If you didn’t have a fight with Roya, you must be on your period or something.”