“Any particular reason? Or just because?” she asks.
I have to run my hand through my hair, eyes moving to the floor. “When I found out my dad had cancer, I pretended it didn’t bother me. But the feeling in my gut was like I was the one with cancer, and it was eating me from the inside out. I ended up in the chair every time it crossed my mind to come home and give the asshole even a minute of grief. Somehow… somehow, I was the one who felt guilty. After every fucking thing he put me through, I was the one feeling guilty about not reaching out to him. And then, when he died, it was like now that he wasn’t around to put me down and tell me how much of a piece of shit I am, the voices became louder. There was no sense of relief that he was no longer there. If anything, my mind became more of a prison. It’s like it felt the need to fill in those gaps. Every time my phone rang and it wasn’t his name across the screen, there was this pain in my stomach. I couldn’t breathe. Even in fucking death, he made me feel as if I wasn’t a good enough son for him to love or stop the madness for.”
“And now?” she asks.
I feel my teeth grind slightly. “Being back here isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and maybe that’s because we’re here and not at the old house, or because—fuck, maybe it’s because it’s only been a day.”
“Do you still hear the voices?” she asks.
My eyes lift to hers. “Every day,” I admit. “You?”
A brow flickers up, and she shifts her gaze to her hands. “They never left.”
“Sometimes it helps the world not feel so lonely,” I say, only halfway joking.
Andi snorts, and it’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen or heard. “You talk back to your voices?”
“Don’t you?”
“I mean, sometimes,” she answers. She stares down at her hands, tension lifting in her eyes. “I think the scariest part about talking back to them is the fear that they’ll say what they used to tell my mother.”
The thought makes me shift. “Andi, your mother was a psychotic narcissist who self-medicated with the wrong choice of drugs and a string of boyfriends who made it worse. She should have been in an institution where she could get help for the voices in her head. You’re nothing like her.”
Her brows lift in agreement. “She probably would have conned her way out of the institution,” she mutters.
She isn’t wrong.
“Even still…” Her voice drifts as she lets out a sigh, amusement threading in her eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that I hear them,” she admits. “For that reason.”
“I’m the perfect person to tell,” I say. “My voices don’t gossip to anyone else’s.”
A laugh sounds from her. I hadn’t even thought it was that funny, and maybe it’s the delusion of the late-night, how tired we both are, or how sad the entire notion is.
“How do you do that?” she manages after a minute.
“Do what?”
“Hide it,” she replies. “Make people laugh like you do. Laughing through all of your pain. How are you…you, when you have so much in your past that could have made you a monster?”
“How do you know I’m not just good at hiding the monster?”
Her head tilts as she smiles at me. “Either way, you’re still hiding it.”
I fumble with my hands. “Making people laugh helps me feel a little less shitty, maybe less worthless than I was made to believe,” I admit. “I never wanted anyone to truly know what was happening behind closed doors. Reed. You. Your family… that was enough people. I think maybe that’s why I’ve continued wearing the mask. If people saw me and figured out my past, what might they think of who I really am?”
“They’d love you just like we do,” she says.
Warmth fills my chest at the way she’s staring at me, and before I can even think of what to do or say next, the first note of a familiar song plays.
Andi’s eyes widen to mine, putting a full stop to our previous conversation.
I almost laugh.
So fucking cute.
“Instant chills,” she says as she holds up her arm to show me. “That one note is like a calling card to an entire generation.”
A quiet chuckle leaves me. “We covered it at a show a couple of years back. Fucking hell, you should have heard everyone sing it back.”
