“Jav—”
“Is he going to be more worried about whether I’m embarrassing him or whether I’m alive?”
“That isnotwhat your father thought,” she hisses, taking a step closer to me. I’m taller, but she’s scarier.
“Sure.”
“It’s true that he wasn’t perfect, but he was?—”
“If you saydoing his best, Mom, I swear to god I’m going to jump out of that window,” I say, lowering my voice and stabbing a finger at the window by the bed.
“Go ahead. We’re on the ground floor,” my mother says, rolling her eyes. “And you callmedramatic?”
“Where do you think I get it from?”
“You haven’t thought this through,” she repeats, deciding to ignore my window threats. “You’re always like this—you seesomething shiny and interesting, and youhaveto jump in with both feet. What happens when she dyes her hair purple and you lose interest?”
Incredibly, I don’t sayI was also super into her with pink hair, actually.
“You think I only like her because she has blue hair?”
“Don’t be like this. You know what I mean. You’ll get bored, or she’ll do something to hurt you, and everything could blow up in your face. Inourfaces.”
I know my mom doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t trust my judgment, she doesn’t trust my willpower, and she’s probably still got the good silverware locked away somewhere. I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t gone looking for it.
She’s not even wrong, because God knows I’ve given her reasons not to trust me. I’d probably tell her she shouldn’t, if she asked. I barely know how to trust myself.
When I first got out of rehab, this last time, Bastien came over and we went through this room with a fine-toothed comb. We looked in every hiding space that I could remember. We looked in all the ones I could think that I might use, and we looked in some I’d never thought of. We took furniture apart and pried up floorboards and stuck our arms into vents. For our efforts, we found two pills and an empty baggie, and Bastien flushed them.
A couple of weeks before I helped my sister move and met Silas, I had a really bad day. I don’t even remember what was so bad—some shit with the VA, some awful customers at the candy store. I came home, took a whole desk apart, went through even nook and cranny in this room, just in case we’d missed something. We hadn’t.
I haven’t bothered looking since then. Even when I’ve wanted to. I know there’s nothing to find. I’ve spent years now prying up the floorboards of my life, foreseeing disaster and doing whatI can to forestall it. This whole time I’ve known that sooner or later, I’ll revert to my true self and I’ll need every goddamn failsafe I can get once I do.
Only this is more than flushing some pills, isn’t it? It’s a messy apartment in a tiny mountain town. It’s Zorro stepping on my face every morning to wake me up. It’s the key to Silas’s house and the instruction to use it if I ever,everneed to. It’s a gold star on Wyatt’s kitchen calendar. It’s Castillo on speed dial. It’s taken a long time and alotof help, but I’ve been cobbling together a life that I don’t want to take apart.
“You know it’s been three years, right?” I finally ask.
Her face changes: now she’s all pity and concern, like I’m a kid who’s just skinned his knee. “You can’t take that for granted,” she says, quick but gentle. “Just because it’s been a while doesn’t mean you can let your guard down.”
“Iknowthat,” I say and thinkJesus Christ, I fucking know that, but don’t say it out loud. “I also know that I’ve made it through worse.”
I can tell she doesn’t really believe me, and I can’t even blame her.
“You could date someone else?” she suggests, changing the subject. “I’m sure there’s someone nice in Sprucevale. Doesn’t Wyatt have a sister?”
I want to scream, but instead I scrub my hands over my face because I’m a model of self-control.
“I’m not in love with Wyatt’s sister, I’m in love with Madeline,” I say as calmly as I can.
“Of course you are,” she says, at her most patronizing and resigned.
“The fu—what doesthatmean?”
“It means I wish you’d think of someone else before you went and—got intimate with—Gerald’s daughter! I’m tired of my family being torn apart, Javier!”
I don’t have a good response for that because she’s not even wrong. Shit happens. Maybe this will all fall apart and it’ll be a huge disaster for everyone, and all I can say in the face of that is that I want this for as long as I can have it. I know fighting for something doesn’t mean you’ll win, but that doesn’t mean you don’t fight.
“Okay,” I say, because I’ve got nothing else. “I’m gonna go talk to my girlfriend and then go home.”
