Her mouth pulls tight. “More than that.”
My heart stutters.
“They’d send stuff to his house. Packages, letters…” Lilia says, not looking at me. “I mean—he was a little nine-year-old. He shouldn’t be seeing things like that.”
I feel the blood drain from my face.
She goes on, and I kind of wish she wouldn’t. “Some of them would come to the school. Asking for him. Saying they were there to see him.”
Why would they have any reason to see him?A nine-year-old?What valid reason is there to do something like that?
A sick feeling coils in my gut. My skin’s too hot now, flushed with something sharp and furious. I suddenly feel like I need to sit down, or punch something, or scream. Maybe all three.
“He was just a kid,” Lilia murmurs, almost under her breath, and she pales—cringes. Like the thought alone makes her sick. “And they were old men and women.”
I don’t even realize I’m gripping the side of the bed until my knuckles start to ache.
He was a child, and theyruinedhim. With their words and their hands and their obsession.
Because nothing is ever what it looks like.
Fame doesn’t protect you. Beauty doesn’t heal you. Money doesn’t keep the nightmares away. It just makes them easier to hide.
That’s just how it is, isn’t it? Everyone wants the storybook version, and no one wants the truth.
The ugly kind of perfect. The kind that bleeds behind closed doors. The kind that smiles on cue but cries in parking lots. The kind that is all performance, all the time.
No one wants to know that perfection is just the prettiest lie we tell ourselves about other people.
That it’s not a real place. And it never will be.
I glance over at Lilia. She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, picking at a loose thread in the duvet. Her hands won’t stay still.
“Lilia?” I ask, carefully.
Her head turns. “Yeah?”
“What did Berlin mean,” I say slowly, “when she said you went to rehab?”
She draws her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on them, arms wrapping loosely around her shins.
“For a while,” she says, “I had quite an awful drinking problem.”
I just look at her.
I don’t mean to stare, but I do.
And I know I should wipe the pity from my face, but it stays. Painted stupidly all over my face.
“I’m all better now,” she says quickly, forcing a smile. “Just took a few long months at rehab.”
The words are light, and don’t match the way her voice dips. Or the way her shoulders draw in, turning tense.
She looks… ashamed. Embarrassed.
I shift slightly on the bed, trying to think of the right thing to say. There probably isn’t one.
“That must’ve been hard,” I manage timidly.
