His eyes are watery. He knows I mean it. It just isn’t enough to undo what I just did.
“Just … leave me alone for a little bit, okay?”
I’ve known Teddy since he was two days old. That’s sixteen years and forty lost baby teeth and two Les Mis Broadway revivals and at least four hundred boxes of Reese’s Puffs. That’s countless sleepovers and late-night YouTube wormholes and pranks on our parents and secrets under his phone’s flashlight. That’s a whole lifetime of being directly in each other’s faces, and never once has either of us told the other one to “leave them alone.”
But I let him push ahead of me. I follow a few feet behind, keeping my distance, and proceed to put on the best performance of my life: smiling through the rest of the party even as my heart sinks so far down into my chest that it feels like it could mop the floor.
The next hour passes in a blur of cake and thanking people for coming and cleaning up so the club can open to the rest of the city for the night. Teddy makes himself scarce, my dad is completely AWOL, and even Heather won’t seem to make eye contact with me for more than a second. I feel like an island in the middle of the room, reaching out with nobody left to touch.
I wait until we’re climbing the stairs back up to the apartment to ask, steeling myself.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Home,” says Heather. “So thankfully he didn’t hear any of this conversation about you deciding to look for your mom without saying anything to him about it.”
I stop on the stairs, my heart slamming in my chest but the rest of me going very still. There are a hundred thousand things I could say to her right now, but the first thing that comes out is “Are you going to tell him?”
Heather stops on the landing above me. When she turns to look at me, she isn’t angry. Isn’t disappointed. More than anything, she just looks sad.
“Tell me you weren’t really going to pull some woman into this precollege thing and rub it in his face.”
My whole life I’ve always felt like we were a team: me, Dad, and Heather. I’ve never given much thought to what they were before I existed, but I’m seeing a flash of it now: of a woman who isn’t just my fiercely protective aunt but was my dad’s fiercely protective older sister first.
“I don’t…” Her mouth goes tight, ready to catch me in a lie. “I thought I would,” I admit. “At first. But I wasn’t going to.”
Heather watches me like she’s trying to decide whether or not to believe me. The worst part is I don’t even know how much of myself I believe. A few weeks ago I couldn’t have imagined a night like this. If I could let it escalate this fast, how much further could I have gone?
Finally Heather sighs, leaning against the railing, running a hand through her hair. “It’s one thing to be curious about your mom, Millie. That I can understand. But you could have just asked. Had a reasonable conversation about it.”
“Asked who?” I don’t mean to raise my voice, but just like that it’s reverberating through every floor in the building. I gesture at the empty space between us. “You don’t even know who she is, and my whole life Dad’s acted like it was some kind of untapped land mine.”
Heather’s mouth makes a tight line, nodding curtly to acknowledge this. But it doesn’t soften her. “Your dad was going to talk to you about it. I know he mentioned that to you, because I told him to.”
She’s watching me steadily. I know only because I can feel it, because my eyes are trained on the floor.
“I didn’t know,” I say quietly.
“Millie, look at me.”
I do. Slowly. Defensively. But Heather seems to be expecting that.
“I don’t know why you started looking for your mom,” she says. “I don’t know who this Steph woman is, or how you found her, or what you and Teddy have been up to … but I just thought that if you really needed anything, you knew you could always come to me.”
I’m about to protest, but she scratches at her face in that exact same way I do when I don’t want people to notice me crying, and it stops me in my tracks.
“I know I’m not your actual mom, but. Well.”
She gives this tiny shrug, but it isn’t enough to shake off the very real hurt I see in her eyes. It isn’t enough to make the words settle after they land right on my chest, so heavy that it hurts to breathe.
“Heather … it doesn’t—I didn’t mean for it to have anything to do with you,” I say pleadingly. There’s the part of me that feels rotten, and then a part of me, maybe, that is rotten—the part of me thinking that this just isn’t fair. That I should be able to ask for something this simple, something most kids I know never even have to ask, without it hurting everyone I love.
“Yeah, well. You’re my whole world, Millie. There’s not a thing you do that doesn’t have something to do with me.”
It occurs to me then in a very real way how much I’ve messed up. That there won’t just be consequences, but that they’ll be worse than the ones I’m used to—they’ll be quieter and last longer. They’ll cast a shadow that I can’t just walk away from.
I say the only thing I can, the only thing I know that I mean, even if I don’t know what parts I mean it for: “I’m sorry.”
She nods, then right on cue I feel the telltale rumble of the bass kicking up downstairs for mic check. “I’ve got to go back down for the night,” she says. “We’ll talk about this later.”
She passes me on the stairwell without bopping me on the nose or scratching my shoulder or even looking at me at all. I walk up to the apartment, the lights dim, my dad’s bedroom door already closed, and wait for myself to fall apart.
But for once, there is no Millie Mood to give in to. There’s just me—careless, stupid, thoughtless me, and no relief from it. I walk into my room, kick off Heather’s boots, and lie down staring at the wall, waiting to cry, and discover there’s something worse than falling apart—knowing that you’ve broken something, having no idea how to put the pieces back together.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
That night I barely sleep. I open up my glitter journal and I write and I write and I write, until everything is written out of me, until there’s something close enough to clarity that I can close my eyes without seeing it all on a reel: Teddy’s shock, my dad’s wide eyes, my aunt’s deep and unexpected hurt. I write long after I hear Heather come home, long after I hear my dad’s door open and murmured voices in the kitchen, long after New York has gone so still around me that for once, all I can hear is my own breathing.
The next morning doesn’t feel like the blank slate I’m hoping for, but at least I know what I want to do. I want to keep going to Farrah’s dance classes. I want to keep meeting up with Beth. And even though I know it might just make things worse, I want to continue the internship. I’ve pulled the thread too far now not to follow it all the way to the end. I want to know Steph, really know her, now that she’s not just my potential mom but my actual, legitimate mom.
For some reason, though, I’m nervous as the elevator pulls me up to Check Plus Talent. It’s not like stage fright or dread or any other kind of feeling I’ve felt before. I pull out my notebook and hug it to my chest, like all the words I wrote in it can steady me.