“Wait. So,youwent through my stuff?”
She winced and nodded.
I backed up until my legs hit my bed and then sank onto the mattress. “Wh-why?”
Looking down at the wood floor of my bedroom, she tentatively crossed the threshold and sat beside me. “I’ve been told I’m too curious for my own good.”
“That seems like an understatement,” I remarked.
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I thought it would be fun to surprise you with the song when we were done with it. I swear, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“So, everything I just yelled at Liam was for no reason?”
Her head teetered. “I mean, he probably deserved a few of those words, but he had no idea where the lyrics had come from. Well…now, he does. I told him I stole them from you.”
Embarrassment hit me so hard that I could feel a weight in my chest.
“You can yell at me.” Lexie took my hands and pleaded. “Call me whatever you want. I can handle it. Please.”
I shook my head, ashamed of myself for what I’d said to Liam and for trusting Lexie.
“You’re not mad at me?”
“I’m pissed actually.”
Lexie was the only other girl in the house, and in the few days I had been there, I’d felt like she had my back. Now, I was alone again.
“Then, why aren’t you screaming?” she insisted.
I found myself asking the same thing. It was so much easier for me to be mad at Liam. Maybe it was because I’d hated him for so long. Maybe he brought out that side of me. The worst side.
“Liam hurt me a long time ago, and I haven’t quite forgiven him for that. The things I said to him downstairs weren’t all because of this. It runs a lot deeper. With you…I don’t know. I guess I had no reason not to trust you. Until now.”
The way she looked at me was like a dog looking up at you after stepping on its foot—all sad and scared, not knowing what they had done wrong. As her eyes began to pool with tears, I had to remind myself that she had known what she was doing when she went through my things. She had known it was an invasion of privacy, and she had done it anyway.
“It won’t ever happen again. I promise, Avery.”
Second chances were the most important part of learning if you could really trust someone. Everyone made mistakes, but you had to mean it when you apologized and asked for that trust back. Keeping the promise of not doing it again was the true test. As much as I wanted to deny Lexie that chance, especially after she’d taken something that personal and sacred from me, I squeezed her hand and forgave her anyway.
“Haven’t you ever heard the phrase,Curiosity killed the cat?” I asked.
Relief melted off her shoulders. She let out a tiny, “Meow,” and jutted out her bottom lip.
I laughed and shook my head.
“Those journals…are they yours? I saw the lettersD.F.on the side.”
My heart did about three flips in my chest, and all of the color left my face. “They’re, um … they’re my dad’s journals.”
“Really? I didn’t know your guys’ dad wrote songs.”
“He wrote a lot of things. Songs, poems, random thoughts…” Why was I telling her all of this? They were supposed to be kept a secret.
Her brows knitted. “I didn’t go through all of them, but the ones that I did read were beautiful and…tortured.”
She had no idea.
I’d read through his journals so many times to try and understand him better that I’d memorized most of them. It never occurred to me to put them to music. Of course, now that I’d heard Liam sing his words, I had a hard time not thinking of the poem as lyrics.
