“Good,” Gray says again, like it’s just that simple; still, I know he’s just trying to be encouraging. “You coming to pizza?”
I shake my head. Everybody at Bridgewater always goes for slices at Antonio’s on the last day of school before Christmas break; normally it’s one of my favorite afternoons of the year, the line spilling out onto the chilly sidewalk and the smell of cheese and pepperoni warm in the air. Today, though, I can’t face the thought of being around that many people. “There’s something I gotta do,” is all I say.
My mom is working on her laptop at the dining room table when I get home, paperwork spread out in messy piles all around her; my dad is already prepping the Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve tomorrow night.
“Hey, guys?” I say, setting my backpack down in the mudroom, tucking my hair behind my ears. I steel myself against the panicky feeling of having set a series of events into motion, when I’m not even sure it was the right thing to do. “I think we probably need to have a talk.”
Twenty-One
I’m expecting fireworks from my mom in particular—after all, this is the same woman who marched down the street in her pajamas and put the fear of god in Avery Demetrios when she was mean to me at day camp the summer after fourth grade—but instead she just sits stock-still at the table and listens, one hand in my father’s and one hand in mine.
“He did what?” she asks when I get to the part about the kiss, but my dad’s grip tightens around her fingers, and she immediately presses her lips together.
“I’m sorry,” she says, shaking her head like she’s trying to clear it, and I see her eyes getting watery. “Keep going.”
So I do, staring down at the table and telling them about my editorial and the response paper and ending with today and my conversation with Mr. DioGuardi. When I’m finished all three of us are quiet for a long moment.
“Goddamnit, Marin,” my mom says, and when I look up at her I’m surprised to see she’s wiping tears away with her whole palm. “I am so, so sorry he did that to you.”
We sit at the table for a long time, all three of us talking. My dad makes us a snack of cheese and crackers and grapes. They don’t ask any of the questions I’m expecting: Are you sure you weren’t confused? Did you give him the wrong impression? What the hell were you doing in his apartment to begin with? I don’t know why I feel a tiny bit guilty about that, like maybe they’re letting me off too easy.
All of us startle when the back door opens and Gracie ambles through, back from her carpool with her cheeks gone pink from the cold.
“I’m starving,” she announces, then registers all three of us sitting around the table like we’re conducting a séance. “What’s wrong?”
I hesitate for a moment, then take a breath and smile. “Nothing,” I promise, offering her a cracker; sitting here between my parents it feels like maybe it could be the truth. “Everything’s okay.”
I go to Chloe’s the day after Christmas, pulling my mom’s car into the driveway and skirting past the enormous blow-up snow globe on her parents’ front lawn. Every year the two of them get more and more into the holidays, three-foot-tall candy canes lining the flower beds and a motorized, light-up Santa waving from beside the chimney. To Chloe it’s literally the most embarrassing thing on the planet—none of our other friends are allowed to come over between Thanksgiving and New Year’s—but I’ve always thought it was kind of great.
Once her mom lets me in I wave to Chloe’s brothers, who are sprawled on the carpet in front of the Christmas tree playing Battleship, and find Chloe still in her pajamas in her bedroom, watching an eyeliner tutorial on her laptop.
“Hey,” she says, looking surprised when I knock on the mostly closed door.
I frown. “We’re doing the mall, aren’t we?” Chloe and I have done the mall the day after Christmas for the last four years, returning ugly sweaters from our various family members and taking advantage of the clearance sales. We always end with a peppermint mocha at the scruffy hipster coffee shop in Inman Square.
“Oh.” Chloe shakes her head, like this is totally new information and not something we’ve been doing since before we got our periods. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I just figured you’d be with Gray.”
“What?” I didn’t even realize she knew about me and Gray, and it stings to think how little we’ve been hanging out. “Gray’s in New Hampshire with his cousins until New Year’s. But also, why would I be with Gray? This is our day, right?”
“Right.” Chloe shrugs. “I don’t know.”
I frown. “Do you not want to go?” I mean, obviously I know things have been weird with us, and I don’t 100 percent believe all the time she’s been spending with Kyra, but it would just be so much weirder to not do this.
“No, we can,” she says, shutting her laptop with a look on her face like I just invited her for a rousing afternoon of digging a hole in the frozen earth. “I just have to shower.”
“I mean, we don’t have to.” Suddenly it does feel like a bad idea, actually: Chloe’s lousy mood, yeah, but also the crowds, the chance of running into people we know from school. Running into Bex. I sit down on the edge of her unmade bed.
“Can I tell you something?” I ask, picking at a loose thread in the quilt her mom made out of all her old day camp T-shirts. “Without you, like, freaking out?”
Chloe raises her eyebrows. “Is it that you got Bex in trouble with DioGuardi?” she asks immediately.
“I—” My eyes widen. “How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that,” Chloe says, sliding the laptop onto the mattress and climbing out of bed. “Like, the entire school.”
“What? Seriously?” My heart drops. I purposely talked to Mr. DioGuardi on the last day before vacation to buy myself time before the gossip mill started grinding. “How?”
“I have no idea,” she says, though she’s not quite looking at me.
“Well, I mean, who told you?”
“Does it matter?”
“I mean, yeah, Chloe. If people are going around saying—”
“Can you stop messing with that?” she interrupts, nodding at the quilt. “The whole thing is going to fall apart any second.”
“Sorry.” I set it down, wiping my suddenly sweaty palms on the knees of my jeans. “Are you mad at me?” I ask, although the answer is pretty obvious. What I can’t figure out is the why.
Chloe scoops her bathrobe off the back of the closet door, draping it over her arm. “I just don’t understand why you even bothered asking what I thought you should do,” she says, shrugging inside her Bridgewater hoodie. “When, like, you obviously had your own agenda this whole entire time.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I protest. “I don’t have an agenda. What does that even mean?”
Chloe huffs like I’m being dense on purpose. “It means you, like, decided you had this vendetta against him, and now—”
“Against Bex?” I shake my head. “That’s not even—”