I spent the remainder of the night and day at Sam’s place. We watched TV and ordered food until we had to leave for our obligatory dinner with our parents. It’s the last place I want to be, but where else would I go? I’m convinced these dinners are the one thing that keeps my mother hanging on.
I shake my head and check my phone one last time. “No, it’s okay.”
“I don’t think she is going to text you,” Sam says with a broken look.
“That’s not what I’m worried about.” I grab the flowers from the back seat. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
After thirty minutes of cocktails and tension, I sit with my hands in my lap and stare at the expensive food in front of me while my parents chat together about things I don’t care about.
Lamb chops.
We are eating fucking lambchops for dinner and Sunny is leaving. There’s too many forks and spoons to choose from, and despite the fact I grew up learning those types of manners, I’ve completely forgotten the purpose behind each.
I toy with the smallest spoon, the voices of my parents and sister background to the thoughts in my own mind.
Defeat is crushing. It’s suffocating. For some reason, I can’t pull myself from the rubble of it.
I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, but I don’t look at it to save an argument from my mother. She only gets a numbered, scheduled time with us, so I’ll let it be unbothered if I can.
“Tyler?” She interrupts my thoughts. I look at her concern with furrowed brows. “Are you okay, honey?”
I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.
I don’t even know what to say, but before I can even think of it, my father speaks. And I’m about ready to make him wish he hadn’t. I’m so close to stapling his fucking mouth shut.
“He is just pouting because that little blonde girl, who, by the way, lied about herself, is leaving.”
My eyes flick to my father.I love her, Mitchell. Do you even know what love feels like?
Another vibration in my pocket.
He doesn’t miss a beat, doesn’t even wait for a reaction from me, because he knows he won’t get one. I don’t have the goddamn energy anyways.
A part of me is gone with you now, Sunny.
Then my phone rings again.
SUNNY
I sprint to the pharmacy to grab a test.
Not just one, but five.
A shadow of eeriness radiates down my spine as I frantically rummage through the pharmacy. The ever present feeling of someone watching me persists despite my unrelated panic.
I pee on every single one of the tests, laying them all out upside down in the pharmacy bathroom because I couldn’t wait to go home.
I sit on the bathroom floor, foot tapping as I count the minutes until I can look at the tests.
All at once that broken heart of mine slams against my sternum, the pain of it lacing through my bones just as the panic does while it shreds apart my chest.
I clasp my shaking hands and curl into myself as the time to look approaches. Yet I can’t bring myself to. But then it’s all I want to do. The chances still have to be low, right? It’s only a few months expired.
Finally, I sum up the courage and grab a test that sits before me with shaky hands, waiting to find out my fate.
I keep my eyes closed and take a deep breath.
As I flip the test over, and I’m greeted by two dark pink lines staring back at me.
