“If it’s about how Hammond called Valbabykinsafter breakfast, let’s leave it. I think one of my teeth fell out when I heard it.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Oh,” I manage. No chance of verbal sparring after this. My throat feels closed and tense, my eyes scratchy with unshed tears.
“Didn’t say anything before, which was a dick move. So I’m sorry. That it happened, and that I didn’tsay anything.”
“It’s fine.”
Another stretch of silence, a car door slamming. I tamp down a ridiculous sense of disappointment. Of course we’re not going totalkabout it. He’s just doing the right thing; Aiden’s the kind of guy who does the right thing. But he isn’t the kind of guy who wants to know more than he has to, at least when it comes to me. At Betty’s, he’d said he was trying to be better friends with Ahmed and Charlie, and I wonder what that’d be like, Aiden as a friend. I don’t suppose he’d ever be like me, too chatty by half, too loud sometimes, overeager to get a laugh. Relentless.
“It is awful how he called her that,” Aiden finally says. “Hammond, I mean. I’m pretty sure they’re insulting each other with those names.”
I feel a smile hook at the corners of my lips, a smile that felt impossible when I first walked into this room, not even a half hour ago. “Theytotallyare.” I keep the snark in my voice, not overselling it. I’ll bet this is what Aiden’s like, as a friend, or at least for a second I let myself believe it. Quiet, but he tries. Doesn’t leave you hanging, not when itreally matters.
“Well. I’d better get going. Got ashift tonight.”
“Okay.” Then I add, without thinking, “Be careful.”
A hot flush spreads up my neck, underneath my ears. I’ve said that as though he’s my fiancé for real, as though I have something to do with his life outside the weekends in Stanton Valley. I’m so embarrassed that I move the phone away from myear to hang up.
But not before I catch him say, maybe more gently than usual,“Sure. Thanks.”
I look down at where my pack rests by my feet, see the hard shape of Aiden’s binder pressing against its back side. In my hand, my phone pings with a text, an expected one this time, in our long-running group message.Back yet?Kit’s written, and I type out a quick reply:All in one piece.
She’ll want more—she and Greer both will. Right now, though, I don’t so much feel like giving it up. I feel like having Aiden’s voice as the last in my ear. I type out another quick text to my friends, my friends who so clearly disapprove of what I’ve chosen to do with my weekends.I’ll call you guys later. Need to shower andstart laundry.
But instead I bend down, unzip my pack and slide out the binder, take it over to the dining room table, and open it again. It’s hard, looking at this and thinking about how to make it work—this story of addiction, lives lost and ruined or never really the same, even if they come out the other side—after seeing Val’s smiling, healthy girls, all that potential for them in Paul and Lorraine’s campground.
It’s hard seeing Dad’s slip lying there on the table beside the vase.
It’s hard—but it’swhat I deserve.
Chapter 8
Aiden
Thursday night, and I’ve been on duty since 6:00 a.m., another seven hours to go of the double I’m cramming in before we head back up to camp tomorrow. We’re back from a call at Sunset Terrace, a nursing home that’s barely five minutes away, where we spend lots of time, easy calls, usually, since the nursing staff there has almost always taken care of the basics, and we’re just doing transport. It’s fall break at the university, a long weekend that started yesterday, so students are thin on the ground, and I’m hoping it’sa quiet night.
“Charlie, you can’t be saying that this team deserves to be ranked fourth right now,” says Ahmed, overloud. He’s stuffed himself into the old, faded recliner—a community donation, like all the furniture in the squad quarters—and is eating microwave popcorn, the bag looking a little charredon the bottom.
“It’s about strength of schedule,” says Charlie, flopping down beside me on the couch, setting her heavy black uniform boots on the coffee table. “You always overlook strength of schedule.”
“You always overlook how they barely squeak out wins,” he says, into it now. They love arguing about college football, I’ve learned, even when neither of them really cares about the teams that are playing. “They’re always—”
“You guys,” I say, turning up the volume a couple of notches. “Let’s just watchthe damn game.”
“Grouchy,” says Charlie.
“I’m not grouchy.” But the way I’ve said it sure as fucksounds grouchy.
“That camp thing going bad, man?” Ahmed says, and I can tell by the way Charlie grabs the remote from me and returns the television to a lower volume that they’ve been waiting to bring it up.We’ll get him when he’s tired,I imagine them saying.We’ll distract him first withour bickering.
“It’s going all right.”
It should be Val’s presentation that’s getting to me. All week I’d been turning it over in my mind, replaying it from start to finish, or at least replaying it from the part I’d started paying attention. Val’s presentation had what Zoe said mine needed—there was astorythere—that’s how she’d made her argument. Plus she’d used her kids as props, which even I can admit was effective. I’m not creative enough to think of something like that for my own presentation, and bringing in recovered addicts seems like a risky game. There was no darkness in what she’d said. She’d made it entirely hopeful, entirely upbeat.
But that’s not really what’s getting to me. Zoe is getting to me, that hitch in her voice when I’d called her on Sunday. That vacancy in her eyes when I’d asked her if what she’d told me about her father was true. I’d fucked that up—I knew it as soon as I’d said it. We’d gotten into a good rhythm, last weekend. Started making it look real.
