“Would I have called if I didn’t?” I reply, popping a french fry into my mouth. The campus refectory’s food tastes like cardboard, so I dipped into the funds my parents send each week and had something delivered from town.
In LA, I waited tables and did stage work for Grandeur Playhouse, only using their money for emergencies. But they suggested I take time to focus on school and not work now, so unfortunately I’m twenty-five and living off their dime.
Not that I’m complaining, especially since there are people who’d kill for this life. It just sometimes feels like my independence is a sham, is all.
“That hurts, Noelle,” Foxe whines. “You wouldn’t call your own flesh and blood just to check in on him? Don’t you love me?”
“Okay,” I say slowly, chewing. “Howareyou doing? Written any new songs lately? I see the plants behind you are wilted, so your mom must not have visited recently. Does that mean you’re well?”
Aunt Violet, a florist, believes heavily in the healing and therapeutic power of plants, so naturally she filled her son’s apartment to the brim with every pot she could get her hands on.
Foxe faces the ceiling again, folding his hands over his tanned, tattooed chest. The ink is everywhere—it stretches up each arm and rains over his back in a plethora of patchwork designs, some fresh and some not.
Only one spot is blank, above his pectoral—lasered off at some point.
“My opinion is that you’re too hard on your sister,” he answers, ignoring my questions. Classic deflection. “She was probably just making sure your transition to a new school was going smoothly. This is how she’s always been, so I don’t really see why you’re freaking out.”
“Why would she need to ask myteacherabout me? Why not go directly to the source?”
“Maybe she didn’t want you to think she was overstepping. You tend to assume the worst, you know.”
The fry drops from my mouth onto my bed, and I frown, scooping it onto the paper plate in my lap. “I do not.”
“I’m not criticizing,” he says. “Just observing.”
“It sounds critical.”
He waves a hand, dismissing the notion. “Some people hear whatever they want to hear.”
“Ugh.” I groan. “Why did I call you again?”
“Because I’m willing to pretend if you are.” He grins, but it feels forced somehow, not quite reaching his hazel eyes. “Other than Q being her regular overbearing self, how’re you liking it up there? I assume no one’s tried to murder you yet.”
“‘Yet’ being the operative word really bums me out.”
“Hey, you chose to enroll.”
“My parents thought it would help.”
“Oh, I’m aware. Strength in numbers, or whatever. I heard them talking about it over the holidays. Kept waking me up arguing when I was in the midst of early recovery, the fuckers.”
“Is that why you got your own place?”
Foxe shrugs, rolling his head to look at me. “Partly. And because my mom was suffocating me. Unintentionally, of course, but she was pretty inconsolable when I came back from Fury Hill.” He pauses for a brief moment as if remembering something—replaying his return to Aplana Island in his mind. Then he chuckles to himself. “You’d think I almost died or something.”
“Do you joke about what happened like this with your mom?” Aunt Violet is like sunshine in human form, so I can only imagine how hearing that stuff from her son would make her react.
The dead plants suddenly make sense.
“I am who I am, Noelle.” He sighs, propping his hands behind his head. “Can’t be changed.”
“Remember when you used to think Asher and I were callous about death?”
“Callous aboutothers’ deaths. I think I’ve earned the right to feel however I want about my near one, don’t you?”
I do, but I’m not sure Foxe understands the cost. He doesn’t know what it took for us to get to this point. You practiceambivalence, growing those calluses, just so you can sleep at night.
So the memories of your past don’t keep you awake.
