Thank god I wore shorts.
We slow eventually and step off the trail a little so as to not be in anyone’s way, and Gemma hands me a water bottle from her backpack. She put on a baseball hat once we left the car that’s currently framing her eyes so perfectly that I’m having a hard time looking anywhere else.
“You’re staring again,” she says, smirking sideways at me.
“Hard to stare anywhere else,” I blurt.
“Flirt,” she mumbles. “Did you ever do any of these trails growing up?” she asks me.
“Nah. Dad only cared about surfing. You?”
“Oh yeah. My dad was really into helping me with track. He said the best way to get stronger and build my stamina was to run trails. So, that’s what I did in the summers. He’d wake me up before fucking dawn to drive us here or really any trail just so I could get a start on it before the heat became too much.”
“Your jogs in the mornings make more sense now,” I say.
“Old habits,” she shrugs.
“What about your mom?” I ask. “Was she into this kind of thing? I barely remember ever seeing her at graduation and everything.”
“Ah…” She hesitates, and I halfway regret bringing it up. “That’s because, at graduation, she was in rehab,” she finally says.
My stomach drops. “Oh.”
Gemma peers sideways at me and gives me a nervous smile. “Does that bother you?”
“That your mom was in rehab? No. No, I just… I think I just wish I had been the kind of friend to you that would have known that,” I say.
“I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone to know anything different about me. Any little thing that might put a target on my back other than simply being the girl with glasses.”
“How is she now?” I ask as we start walking again.
“She’s… one day at a time, I think. Her vice was pills. She was in an accident when I was ten and back then, doctors were handing out pain medication like candy. She broke her leg and had a fractured pelvis from the accident. She just kept needing more and more to keep the pain away, and the withdrawal…”
She pauses to sigh as if replaying a tough memory behind her eyes, then smiles softly at me. “Now, I’m the one making our conversation sad.”
“How many times did she go to rehab?” I ask.
“Twice,” she replies.
“And now? How is she now?”
“She’s… she’s okay. After her first stay, she did really well for a while. Almost made it from freshman to senior year, or so I thought. We do a big family dinner with my mother’s side on Christmas Eve, always at my aunt’s because her place is the biggest. And my senior year, we figured out Mom had been using for the last few months. She’d been taking just enough to take the edge off and still function.”
“Shit,” I mumble.
Because I know how that is.
It’s exactly how I want to feel right now, exactly how I functioned for months.
“That night after dinner, I found her in the bathroom snorting whatever pill she’d brought with her,” Gemma goes on. “I remember yelling at her, crying. The whole family got involved to the point that she actually left and went home. And then, the next morning, I went into her room to apologize, and I found her passed out in the bed. There was vomit everywhere.”
This fucking hurts.
I can’t even count how many times I woke up covered in the dinner from the night before.
“My dad took her to rehab again, and by the time she got out, I had graduated, Dad had sold the house and sent her the divorce papers, and I was off to college. She went to live with my aunt after that,” she finishes.
“Damn,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d gone through any of that.”
