chapter one
eight months after
I’m staring at myself in the bathroom mirror when Mom bursts in, garbage bag in tow, and starts rummaging around.
“Oh,” I say. “Cool. I guess knocking’s out of fashion?”
Mom ignores me and, despite her fierce devotion to thriftiness—despite the fact that she yells at us if we buy anything fully priced, or really if we buy anything at all—starts throwing bathroom products in the trash at random. I watch in silence, too stunned to bid a silent farewell to my Aveeno lotion, which I just bought. My younger sisters Saige and Willow stand behind her, mesmerized by this grand ransack of our bathroom.
“Mom,” I finally explode. “Hello? Hi. What are you doing?”
“Shrink said to.” Mom’s grinding her teeth.
“I haven’t met the shrink yet, but I’d bet all my savings that she didn’t tell you to pillage the bathroom.”
“Rory,” Mom says. “I’m done. If you can swallow it, it’s going away. Period.”
“Are you serious? Do you really think I would drink”—I gesture furiously at what she’s holding
—“Saige’s fucking anti-dandruff shampoo?”
“Hey now,” Saige objects from behind Mom. “We all use that.”
Mom gives me the death glare to end all death glares. “Rory, I don’t know anymore. You tell me what you’re capable of doing. And give Willow a dollar for the swear jar.”
I fish a single out of my jean shorts, drop it into Willow’s hand. She grins at me before diligently leaving the bathroom. My youngest sister is eight, but sometimes, she’s the most mature member of our family.
Saige, who’s sixteen, takes the opportunity to interrogate me. “When my friends ask how college is going for you, what am I supposed to tell them? What will they think?”
“The truth.” I shove my fists into my pockets and lean against the bathroom counter. I don’t know why Saige cares about what her vapid lacrosse friends think. They’re all the same. There’s truly not a single unique thought among them. “You can tell them your weird older sister’s stuck in this bullshit town, because Ridgewood College apparently decided to pull her scholarship for no fucking reason.”
Mom straightens up with her garbage bag and wipes sweat from her cheek. “No reason? No bloody reason?” After living in the States for two decades, she’s nearly lost her British accent, but it always shows up when she’s pissed.
“No real reason,” I say as Willow returns. Instead of using literally any of the empty space around us, my little sister sidles up right next to me, leaning against the counter like I am. Except that she’s much shorter, obviously, so she’s on tiptoe. She looks up at me with her big eyes and gives me a hopeful, anxious smile.
Mom pushes past me into the hallway. “You know, I’m not even going to discuss this with you. Not today.”
“You’re punishing me because I’m sad,” I call after her.
“Oh, cut the shit,” Mom responds.
Willow glances up at me again, seeming torn, before running after Mom for another dollar.
***
The whole Xanax thing was an accident. I never thought taking three would knock me out like that. I mean, was I taking more than I usually took? Yes. Did I want to fall into a relatively deep sleep? Yes.
FOR A BIT.
But I wasn’t trying to send myself to the hospital. Or . . . worse. Mom, Saige, Willow, and my grandparents, Nonni and Nonno—would be heartbroken. Not to mention extremely pissed at me. And as Mom likes to remind me, my family has already been through enough “Rory-related horseshit” this year even before the Xanax Incident. It’s been eight months since the Worst Night, January 5th, when I actually almost died. I mean, in the car accident. Mom’s like, “I didn’t go through forty-eight bloody hours of labor to bring you into this world so you could snuff it early, Rory. Quit it already with the drama.”
***
“I’m going to pause you right here,” says April, i.e., the shrink who instructed Mom to raid the bathroom.
For the first time since coming into the office, I look up at her. April is unfairly gorgeous and put together: a middle-aged Black woman with long braids and chic glasses, who dresses in colorful, printed clothes. Kind of elite-Zen-bohemian vibes. A lot of moms in Clarksdale who want you to think they’re boho try to dress like this, but April actually has it nailed.
She takes a breath and says, “Your mom’s reaction to the pills incident seems a little—”
“Wild? Like she’s on drugs?”
“I was going to say angry, but . . . is she on drugs?” Her tone remains remarkably casual, like she’s asking about the weather.
“No, she’s just bitter about her life.”
“Okay. I’m hearing some potentially harbored resentment, but first, I want to address—”
“They think I did this on purpose to hurt myself, but that’s not what happened,” I say, suddenly out of breath.
“Can you tell me what did happen?”
I can feel my heart pounding in my throat. Calm down.
“I already told you. I took a few more pills than I should have because I wanted to sleep.”
“Why did you want to sleep?”
“That’s generally what people do at night,” I respond, irritated.
April moves on, looking down at her notes. “And it was your mom’s Xanax. How long has she been on it?”
“Since my sister Willow was born.”
April nods. “Had you ever taken her Xanax before?”
“Yeah. Sometimes she’d let me have one, if I couldn’t sleep.”
“But you’ve always asked your mom first.”
“Well, yeah,” I say, twirling my finger through my bangs. They’re getting way too long, but it’s been a hot minute since I cared about my appearance.
“Why didn’t you ask her this time?”
I’m going cross-eyed, looking at my increasingly purple finger, yanking my hair tighter and tighter around. I don’t answer April’s question.
“I just want to know how I can best help you, Rory,” she continues, after it must become obvious that I’m staying silent. “And to do that, I need to know how you got here.”
“I biked,” I say, hating myself.
“You know what I mean.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We have thirty-eight more minutes.”
April and I then have a staring contest that lasts about five eternities. I learn a few new things, such as: April’s skin is flawless. Therapists don’t blink. I am suffering.
Finally I say, “Aren’t you supposed to, like, ask me questions?”
April smiles, uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “Ideally, we could have a conversation. But we can go with more questions, if you’d like.”
I take a deep breath and prepare. I’m not as ignorant as I’m acting in this appointment: I know exactly why I’m sitting in April’s office overlooking the woods near Evergreen Lane. Saige found me unconscious in my room three weeks ago, and now I’m seeing a therapist. Mom’s on a mission to fix me. She wants to make me return to who I was Before—the quiet, chill daughter with no social life, who babysat for free and preferred to listen to Britpop with her while watering the plants on Friday nights.
I know therapy is a waste of time at this point, but I have sob stories prepared anyway: Body insecurities. General anxiety. Dad dying, even though it happened when I was three and I can’t remember him much.
I think, Ask me anything. I’ll talk about anything, as long as it’s not—
“Tell me about Liv,” April says.
A chill spreads from my
chest down my legs to my feet. I try not to look down at my hands, which are starting to go numb.
“That isn’t a question,” I say.
“You’re shaking,” she says, a thin crease forming between her eyebrows.
“How do you know her name?” I try not to sound accusatory. Try to be calm, remember my breath. I am cold, I tell myself steadily. April can’t touch me.
Despite myself, I ask, “Did you . . . did you Google me?”
“I didn’t have to Google you, Rory. I heard about the accident back in January. Your faces and names have been all over Clarksdale, as you know. It’s hard to live here and not know about it.”
You’re fine. You’re fine.
Push it away.
“I’m here because I accidentally swallowed too many pills,” I say. “Nothing about that has to do with Liv.”
Even as I say it, the falseness of my statement hits me so hard that I almost smile.
Everything about everything has to do with Liv.
April’s smile is the very small and sad type that I’ve become used to in the eight months since the Worst Night. “I know it’s difficult,” she says. “But I want you to at least try.”
“I’m fine. It’s not difficult.”
April doesn’t respond right away. Instead, she stares at me, which makes me have a long, honest think about what I must look like. My dirty blond hair is piled uselessly at the top of my head, half-grown-out bangs shoved behind my ears. The sleeves of my worn-out sweater are rolled up, revealing the rash caused by my hospital bracelet from the Xanax Incident. My jeans are torn, and underneath, we can both see the eight-month-old gash across my knee, one of my souvenirs from the Worst Night. I haven’t worn makeup in eight months. Again: Who cares at this point? But although there are no mirrors in April’s office, I can almost see through her eyes the dark circles under my own.
I am a complete dysfunctional mess.
“It’s not difficult,” I repeat, amazing even myself with the lie.
“Okay.”
More silence.
“This isn’t about me doing my job, Rory,” she says finally. “This is about you being able to have a good night’s sleep.”
I have to give her some credit for the drama, but I press my lips tighter together. We sit and sit and sit, and time stops and the sun sets and the world ends, and when I look at the clock, only three minutes have passed.
Thirty-five to go.
I don’t want to think about Liv, so I grab on to the next thing that comes to mind. “I wonder who Ridgewood gave the scholarship to. You know. After they took it away from me.”
“Rory,” April says.
I feel my cheeks heating with anger. Also with shame, but I try to push that down. You’re fine.
If you asked me last New Year’s what I thought my life would be like by now, by early fall, I would have answered that I’d be a freshman at Ridgewood College in upstate New York, wearing bulky sweaters and going to English seminars, writing papers on feminist authors. There was no alternate universe in which this wouldn’t happen.
Except that there was, and it was this current one, the shittiest universe in the world. In which, four days after New Year’s, the Worst Night happened.
In which I spent the next three weeks in the hospital, and eight more in physical therapy.
In which I spent the summer numbly drifting, half-heartedly doing my physical therapy, just thinking, September. September. September.
In September, I will still go to college at Ridgewood. In September, I will escape Clarksdale.
This shitty universe, in which Mom told me last week that, because of my deteriorated grades from spring semester, my Presidential Merit Scholarship at Ridgewood had been taken away. So, no, I would not be attending college in September. I would be living at home for another year, still “recovering.” Surrounded by everything, and everyone, that made me want to burrow under the covers and sleep.
“I hope you’re not feeling guilty, Rory,” April says. “The accident, your scholarship—none of that was your fault. Yes?”
I only stare at her.
“And it’s not like Ridgewood’s out to get you. Colleges can only give so much aid to each of their students. It sounds like removing your scholarship was just a procedural thing. Your mom told me that if you took community college classes this year and got back up to a steady GPA, Ridgewood would reconsider your scholarship for next year. And from what she told me about your grades in high school before the accident, that shouldn’t be a problem.” She smiles again. “Straight-A student?”
“No,” I say, before I can stop myself. “I got a B+ in pre-calc. Liv was the one with straight As, not me.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound like getting your grades up will be difficult for you. And then, like your mom said, you’ll be reconsidered for the Ridgewood scholarship next year.”
I don’t know what to do, so I nod slightly, but I’m still shaking. “My mom—she seemed so casual, telling me about the scholarship. It’s like she’s glad I can’t go to school this year. And then she makes me go to this bullshit.” I gesture vaguely to April’s lines of diplomas on the wall. “Like she can just fix me.”
April gracefully ignores that I’ve just called her line of work bullshit, sighs, and looks down. “Listen, I know it’s not what you want to hear right now. But your mom loves you, and she didn’t really have a choice but to send you here.” She looks at me hard. “I think you know that.”
I grind my teeth.
“Rory, your mom almost lost you twice this year. First, the accident in January. Then, a couple weeks ago, with the Xanax.” Her eyes pierce me. “She’s scared.”
I think, although I don’t want to, about this morning. The way Mom seized up when I walked into the kitchen, how she cut her finger slicing bananas for Willow’s cereal, swore, brought her bleeding finger to her lips.
“Off already?” she asked roughly, looking down. “Without breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry.”
We looked at each other then, because this would normally be the beginning of a fight:
you just don’t use that tone with Mom. But she pursed her lips and looked away, wrapping her finger tightly in a towel. Willow slurped her milk behind us, watching us. Willow is like a tiny version of me: wide-eyed and bony, quiet, observant. Always taking mental notes. In the past few weeks since the Xanax Incident, it’s gotten even more extreme: she’s with me every moment, observing everything I do. I’ve woken up to her staring at me more than once.
“Wear a helmet,” Mom said. “And stay away from the street.”
I couldn’t remember the last time Mom said the words stay away from the street. Or the last time she even cared to look me in the eye and ask if I was being safe.
“Can you chill?” I seethed, although what I really wanted to say was, Where were you for eighteen years? “I’m not five.”
Again: you can’t sass Mom like that. I’ve been grounded for less. But this time, she just looked at me. And her blue eyes were gray. And the circles beneath them were black.
April is watching me relive it, this small, pointless memory. She crosses her arms, peering at me critically.
“I know you don’t like this, Rory. But your mom signed you up to see me, once a week, for the foreseeable future,” she says. “I’m not saying your mental health is a problem we can just fix, but if your mood improves at home, she might get off your back.” She waits until I meet her eyes. She raises her eyebrows pointedly. “We can sit here in silence, or we can talk about Liv. Your choice.”
I try to sit, remain cold. And when I finally can’t stand it, I look at April and communicate through my eyes: Just because I’m going to start talking doesn’t mean you won.
chapter two
one year before
Liv Martinez was late to fifth period, and to my life.
I could have really used her before that frigid Monday in January when she walked into choir wearing a bathrobe and a scowl, but unfortunately, that was the first time I’d ever seen her.
There are lots of unfortunatelys in my story with Liv. This one’s just the first.
***
Hours earlier, I stood outside waiting for the first bell to ring at Telsey College Prep, where my status as the New Kid but Also a Junior Whose Mom Is a Science Teacher Here had rendered me basically friendless. As I brooded in the cold, a girl in my homeroom ran full-speed into me on the way to greet a friend.
“Sorry, Lori!” she said.
Crushing it, Rory, I told myself.
I had begged Mom to let me keep going to my old school when she took the job at Telsey, but she bit back with the classic Telsey-is-the-thirteenth-best-high-school-in-the-country-and-you’d-better-be-grateful-for-this-opportunity bullshit. To this day, I cannot explain how little I fit in there: the place was overflowing with preppiness, trust fund babies, and an absurdly high level of school spirit. In fact, everyone in our whole town of Clarksdale seemed to be rich, tan, and beautiful, and come from a “golf family” with “Ivy League ties,” and have “parents who’ve paid off their mortgage” and “moms who don’t get wine-drunk and stress-cry periodically while blaming their dead husband’s career choices.” I mean, I didn’t care too much about what other people thought, but it’s hard for even the most self-assured kids to go to this school and not feel insecure when they’re wearing beat-up sneakers from eighth grade.
I kept my eyes trained on my high-tops, shoving as much of my face into my jacket as humanly possible, concentrating on the song pulsing through my headphones: Bowie’s “Modern Love.” These vintage headphones had been with me from the beginning—and by that I mean sixth grade, when I bought them off our old neighbors at a garage sale with my babysitting money. Mom raged, asking what was wrong with the $9.99 knockoff earphones she’d bought me from Walgreens, but I’ve always insisted on having as much of my head covered as possible. I like to be enveloped by the music. It’s much easier to disappear.
I had a few minutes of uninterrupted me-time, standing near the front door and listening to Bowie, before a long arm swooped around my neck and tightened.
Speaking of “basically friendless”: I did have one friend. Sort of.
“You’re so emo,” Stoff said, loosening his grip on my neck a little so that I could breathe.
I rubbed my neck. “You’re such a bully.”
“Oh, you’re fine,” he said, resting his chin on top of my head. “Keep me warm, Rory. I’m fucking dying.”
“You’re not scared of my germs?” I responded, my voice muffled. It worked. Stoff twitched and extracted himself from me, shivering. The very first thing I ever learned about Stoff: major germophobe.
Stoff waited for the first bell with me, sharing some winter break tea he’d gathered from the various parties he’d attended. In the first week of school, when I knew absolutely no one, I’d partnered with Stoff for a French project. We spent one delirious night throwing together an awful poster, and the rest was history. It was hilarious that Stoff was the one friend I’d made since starting at Telsey, because he was also (separately from me) very popular. Everyone seemed to want an extroverted, designer-wearing, Riverdale-watching gay best friend, and that’s precisely what Stoff was. He was tall and glamorous; he wore mostly Ralph Lauren or J. Crew with the small exception of Gap on his “ugly days.” He even worked at J. Crew during the summers. He knew everything about everyone all the time, and no one ever got mad at him for it.
“WAIT!” he shouted straight into my ear, in the middle of a story. “You haven’t told me what you decided for fifth period yet!”
I rolled my eyes. For the fall, I got to have fifth period as an “adjustment period” (read: study hall), but my advisor forced me to pick an elective for second semester instead. I cleared my throat and mumbled a response, hoping he wouldn’t be able to distinguish my words.
“You joined fucking choir?” he screamed.
“You convinced me,” I joked, but much quieter than him, and kind of not joking. Stoff is very, very much a theater kid, and I had decided to just stick with him. But I didn’t want to make it too obvious.
“Rory Quinn-Morelli sings?” he said.
“Oh my god. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“That means you auditioned.
I’m all over this. Okay—did you sing a Simon & Garfunkel song or something?”
“I ran, like, one scale with Mr. Wong.”
“I’m picturing you walking in with your gray sweatshirt, like”—he hunched his shoulders and lowered his eyes—“‘Hey, I’m Rory. I haven’t smiled since I was ten. I like old bands and staying at home.’”
“Please get over yourself. At least I’m not wearing turquoise pastel pants.”
“Don’t hate me because I’m thriving right now. These are vintage Ralph Lauren.”
I lightly hit him, and he elbowed me back. Because of our major discrepancy in size, this actually hurt.
“Dick,” I said, rubbing my arm as the first bell rang.
“Please. You need to bulk up.”
I rolled my eyes and followed the crowd into Prep Hell.
***
Mom told me an easier A than choir would have been taking home ec, but I flat-out refused. I figured choir would be a blow-off, and I would have Stoff to keep me company. But when I entered the music hallway before fifth period, I started to wonder if learning how to fry an egg with thirty-five future Clarksdale housewives would’ve been better than this. Stoff was immediately engulfed in hugs from a group of overexcited kids who looked like they just finished filming an episode of Glee. Ducking underneath their arms, I leaned on the wall with my headphones, attempting to look chill.
I tried very hard not to listen to Bowie again, but it happened anyway.
After a few minutes, the door swung open and the teacher, Mr. Wong, beckoned us in with a beaming smile. I hoped he wouldn’t notice me, but when I trudged through the door, he grabbed one of my shoulders and squeezed.
“Welcome, Rory! ...
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