“Iacceptmoney.” She held out her hand and wiggled her fingers. “Venmo me. Or, you know, promise to come with me to that alien invasion movie next weekend and we’ll call it even.”
I paused, then nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay, as in sci-fi movie, or okay as in frozen cocoa?”
“Both,” I said.
“Hell yes.” She leaned back in her chair, triumphant. “You’re buying the popcorn. And if you cry, I will be telling everyone you sobbed like a Victorian widow.”
“Can’t wait.”
We both lapsed into silence, our books open but untouched. My fingers rested on the edge of the page without turning it. Amira didn’t ask anything else. She didn’t need to. She just existed beside me, which was enough. And in that moment, I realized something I’d been too wounded to admit before.
I wasn’tcompletelyalone.
I just wasn’t with the person I wanted most.
But like my mom promised me years ago, I was surviving. Maybe not thriving, not yet, but I’d get there, eventually.
CHAPTER 14
DARE
There’s nothing crueler than fate giving you what you asked for, just to show you how wrong you were to want it.
The camera clicked again.Another photo. Another lie.
I stood shoulder to shoulder with Truen, our cheeks stiff with smiles, while the photographer chirped directions. “Put your arm around your brother,” she said, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
My arm slid behind his back automatically. Muscle memory. Habit from a time when we used to drape ourselves all over each other without thinking.
But this wasn’t that. This was posed. Plastic. This was a funeral in formalwear, and everyone was too drunk on alcohol and optimism to notice the casket.
Tru’s shoulder pressed against mine, warm and familiar.Toofamiliar. I wanted to scream. Or maybe sob. Or just disappear.
How the hell did we get here?
How did we go from skateboards and secrets and piss-pacts to this? To rented tuxedos and champagne flutes and calling each otherbrotherlike it wasn’t some fucked-up joke whispered by fate. I used to wish I could be part of his family. Used to stare at the photos on the fridge and yearn to belong there.
Now my photo would be added to the collection because Iwaspart of the family. And I wanted to rip my own skin off just to escape it.
Across the ballroom, Charlotte beamed, radiant in her ivory lace gown, one hand nestled in my father’s elbow. They lookedhappy.The kind of happy people get embossed across their wedding invites in swirling gold font.
The photographer clapped once, bright and chirpy. “Okay! Let’s get a few with just the parents!”
Tru and I peeled apart. My arm dropped from his shoulders like it weighed a hundred pounds, and Tru slipped away as if he couldn’t move fast enough.
He laughed at something one of his cousins said, tilted his head back, and smiled that crooked, soft smile that used to belong to me, and I felt the knife twist. I pulled out my phone and, without thinking, snapped a picture of him.
It was dumb. Stupid, even. But I did it anyway. To keep for myself. Proof that he still existed like that. Unruined. Untouched by the version of me I’d become.
“Dare,” Lauren sang, tugging at my sleeve. “Come dance with me. You’re being a total bore.”
I muttered something that sounded likelater,but maybe it was justnodisguised as a drunk slur. The champagne had numbed the edges of everything, which was good, because otherwise I might’ve actually let myself feel something.
I continued to watch Tru on the dance floor. He didn’t look miserable. He didn’t look broken. He looked happy, and that only made it worse.
Because if he was happy, then I was the problem. Maybe I was always the problem. And this whole thing—this big, white-linen, family-fucking-merger—was just the punchline to a joke I didn’t get.
