Phoenix was my past. Not my present nor my future. So why the hell was he at the bowling alley earlier? As if he… Knew. Exactly. Where. To. Find. Me.
“Harl—”
“Come in.” I sighed.
She slipped into the room and pressed her back against the door, offering me a weak smile. “I promised myself not to push you, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go to sleep without knowing you’re okay.”
“I’m not going to do anything stupid, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Celeste flinched at my cold tone. “Harleigh, that’s not…” She released a heavy sigh. “Look, I get it. You’re not used to letting people in. And I know Mom and Dad haven’t exactly made it easy for you, but I don’t care about them. I care about you. You’re my sister and I’m here. Whether you want to talk, sit in silence, or binge-watch cheesy horror movies and eat our body weight in candy. I’m here.”
“You’re a good person, Celeste. One of the best people I know.”
“Is that your way of saying you love me too?” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
I patted the bed and shuffled over to give her enough room. Celeste took a run and jump, flopping onto her back and stuffing a pillow behind her head.
“So which one are we doing? A, b, or c?”
“His name is Phoenix Wilder.”
“I know who he is, Harleigh.”
“You do? But you said—”
She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “I wanted you to come to me. I heard what Marc said to you. Everyone knows his beef with Darling Hill High’s star quarterback Phoenix Wilder. I’ve heard some of the stories. I didn’t realize you two were… close.”
“I’m not really sure there’s a word to describe what Phoenix was to me.” I ran my hand over one of the shaggy pillows, letting my finger sink into the soft fibers, the texture soothing the wild, erratic beat of my heart.
“You loved him.” She didn’t ask it as a question but stated it as something definitive.
Inevitable.
That’s what I’d always assumed about me and Nix. That we were inevitable. That one day, he would look at me and realize he loved me the way I’d always loved him.
“I did. So much that I didn’t ever imagine a time when I didn’t love him.”
“What happened?”
“He abandoned me. When I needed him most, he… abandoned me.”
God, it hurt as much now as it did then. The day my life changed forever.
“I found her you know? My mom. Trina Maguire,” I whispered her name as if it was forbidden. In a way, I supposed it was. Something I barely let myself think about. Because remembering that night, letting myself go there… it resurfaced too many feelings, too many memories. Feelings and memories that had almost destroyed me.
“I found her cold and dead in her room and the first person I screamed for was Nix. I think I was still screaming when the police arrived and wrestled me into the back of their cruiser while they wheeled my mom’s lifeless body to the ambulance.”
“Jesus, Harleigh… I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t—”
Of course she didn’t know. Michael had made it clear the details of that night were to stay under wraps, even from his own family. I suspected Sabrina knew, but if she did, she’d never tried to talk to me about it.
“It’s okay.”
It wasn’t something I’d ever talked about. Not with my father or Celeste. Definitely not with Max or Sabrina. My therapist had tried to broach the subject more than once, to encourage me to explore my feelings around my mom’s ravaging alcohol dependency and her subsequent overdose. But every time I’d tried, it was like a switch inside me flipped and I shut down.
“It doesn’t sound okay,” Celeste whispered. “No wonder you were…” She trailed off.
“Messed up?” I glanced over at her, smiling.
“It’s not funny,” she said.
“No, it isn’t. But sometimes smiling or laughing is the only way to deal with emotions so intense they paralyze you. Like if I don’t smile or laugh or tell myself it’s okay, everything will collapse and I’ll—” I inhaled deeply, the shuddering breath rolling through me like thunder in the distance.
“What happened with Phoenix?”
“It was last Halloween. We’d been to some stupid party… He took me home and when I found my mom, I texted him right away. But he never replied. When Michael showed up at the police station, I begged Nix to come and get me. But I never heard from him again.”
“That doesn’t sound right. Why wouldn’t he reply? I mean, you were friends, right?”
“Best friends,” I confirmed despite the pain it caused.
“What about his friends? Didn’t you call them?”
“I did, at first. But when no one replied, I stopped… and well, you know what happened after that.”
I’d been a mess.
As the days went by and I didn’t hear from Nix or the guys, I withdrew until I wouldn’t leave my room. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t interacting with anyone in the house. My grief was a living, breathing thing inside of me, except I wasn’t only grieving the death of my mom, I was grieving the death of my friendship with Nix.
Celeste was right. It didn’t make sense. None of it did. But I’d been too numb and anguished to step back and be rational about things at the time. And the more time passed, the more my heart withered and died in my chest. Because Nix didn’t come for me. The only person I’d ever trusted, left me. Whatever his reasons were, he’d abandoned me when I’d needed him most, and it was unforgivable.
It’s why seeing him earlier had been such a shock.
Nine months.
Almost forty weeks had passed since I’d last seen him.
It might as well have been a lifetime.
I wasn’t the same person anymore. And I very much doubted he was.
So why had he come?
Five little words that had haunted me since we left Strike One and I’d desperately searched the parking lot for any signs of his car.
“There must be more to it,” Celeste said. “He wouldn’t abandon you, only to turn up all these months later and—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. You’re in love with him—”
“Was. I was in love with him.”
Now I wasn’t sure I had the capacity to love. My heart was too damaged. Even though they had brought it back to life, it was still broken. And I wasn’t sure it would ever fully heal.
Some cracks were simply too deep to repair.
My mom and Nix were the only two people I’d had in the world, and I’d lost them on the same night. You didn’t walk away from that kind of trauma unscathed. No, it stayed with you. Intrinsically altered you.
“Yeah, but those feelings don’t just go away, Harleigh,” Celeste said, peeking over at me. “You know love and hate are two sides of the same coin. You can hate what he did to you but still love—”
“I don’t.”
“Okay, but—”
“It’s late and I’m getting tired,” I said, refusing to look at her. If she was going to push the Nix thing, I couldn’t be around her.