“Have you ever been in love?”
“I don’t know,” I answered her honestly.
“The accident?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was only two years, give or take, of my life, but it seemed like an important time.”
“You don’t know if you were in love with Ben’s brother, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I put it together when you and Ben were talking. I’m sorry,amica. I had no idea how bad it was.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I didn’t realize either.”
Bambina jumped on the sofa, sniffing around Cilla’s candy. “This is not for you,” she said, pulling it away. “You have your own treats.”
Bambina set her body between ours. She could always sense when I was sad, which was a lot lately, but I thought she could sense Cilla’s sadness too.
I sighed, my mood turning a little darker, but I was going to try to hide it. For such a young girl, Cilla had some heavy issues to deal with, and I wished I could fix them for her. But this life was no daydream. It was a constant stone-cold reminder of reality.
“Okay, what do you want to watch?” I turned toward the TV, selecting some streaming service where thousands of movies were just one press of a button away.
When Cilla didn’t answer, I turned, finding her watching me.
“Aniello,” she said.
“What about him?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing” was the best word she could have used to describe anything between Aniello and me. Even though I had a strong attraction to him, that was all it would ever be. Nothing more. Like Cilla, my world had rules, too, and they were unbreakable.
I turned back toward the TV, searching through the options that were on the home screen.
“You know what I think?”
“What?” I said, pausing on an actress in a wedding dress tying her sneakers. “A romantic comedy?”
“No.” She took the remote from me and found a horror movie. “I wasn’t talking about the flick.”
I sat forward and reached for my ice cream. “What are you talking about then?”
“Ithink you were, orare, in love.”
The spoon stilled before it touched my lips. “What?”
She picked up her ice cream and took a bite. “I just realized it. The way you have been vs. the way you were a little while ago. I compared. I don’t think you have a Schadenfreude complex. I think your memory is gone from that time, but your heart remembers something. I know that feeling. The low when your heart is breaking into a million pieces and the high when it finally feels like it’s being pieced back together.”
“I’m not following.”
She pushed the spoon closer to my mouth. The ice cream was starting to drip. “You’ve been so miserable. Why do you think I do so many shows? I’ve been trying to deal with my heartacheandyours. Then tonight, it happened. You were actually happy. Like…scary happy. Fucking robot.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s how it feels to be in love,amica. He’s the cure, you know? You’re sick without him, but one taste of whatever he has to offer and it’s: LIFE IS FUCKING GREAT enough to do the lame-ass ROBOT.” She mimicked me, moving her hands in a robotic way. “It’s like tasting death and then being consumed by the cure, by life.”
We became quiet for a while. Her words hit me with so much force they brought back memories of the crash. Of that feeling of flying and then falling. Of waking up to…nothing that felt like mine.
“If I were you,” she said, “I’d take Ben up on that offer for dinner.” Then she rolled her eyes at the scary scene playing out on the TV. “This chick is definitely going to die.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice quiet. I was having a hard time processing all that she’d said. I couldn’t remember the last time I had acted the way I had. Singing and dancing around. If I ever really did. It was all work, work, work, and then an accident that seemed to consume every day after.
