“I’m good,” I say, only feeling a little guilty about it. I lift the laptop off my lap and set it back down. “Halfway through an episode.”
“You sure? Even Margot agreed.” Getting Margot to do anything is a feat, and it’s clearly meant to sweeten the pot.
“I’m okay.”
Mom tucks her hair behind her ears, and it instantly falls back into her eyes. “It’s two hours, and then you can come back up to your cave.” She’s trying to be lighthearted, but it borders too close to condescension.
“Maybe tomorrow.” The assurance falls flat. We both know it’s a lie, but where it would normally be enough to get her out of my room, tonight it lights a rare fire in her.
Mom steps farther into the room, leaning into the old chest of drawers near the door. Like the house itself, most of the furniture has been around since the beginning of time, and all of it creaks or groans or grunts.
“Joanna…” she begins, again stepping closer. The anxiety that lives under my skin slips through my pores, skittering up and down my arms as she comes to sit on the edge of the bed. I don’t move, don’t close the laptop, don’t do anything to indicate that she’s welcome.
It’s harsh. I’ve just stopped caring. It’s easier this way. Easier to keep me and everything I’ve lost where it can’t infect everyone else. The move is supposed to be a fresh start, and shoving my grief into my family’s faces negates it.
My family is no stranger to loss. After my dad left us to tour with his band almost a decade ago, it took us years to regain ourfooting. I might have slipped back down, but it doesn’t mean they need to.
“Please don’t,” I say, trying to kill the lecture I can sense brimming. I sound like a bratty teenager, but it’s one of only a few successful evasive maneuvers I have.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.” My mom tries her hand at a supportive smile, but it’s too plastic to be comforting.
“Yeah, I do,” I say. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. And I’m really not in the mood to hear it.”
She’s given a dozen variations of the speech. That it’s not healthy for me to hole up in my room all the time, that I have to come out at some point. That I can’t hide forever.
Her lips part, and it’s clear she’s trying to decide whether to argue or humor me.
It’s almost a disappointment when she gives in. She usually gives in.
I think part of me, the me from before the accident, before Harper died, wishes Mom would fight harder. Wishes she didn’t look at me and see a lost cause. Wishes I didn’t see myself the same.
“I worry about you. It’s been six months. At some point—”
“I said no,” I say, as cold as I can, and my mom doesn’t hide her flinch.
She looks at me for a long moment. The bruises and cuts on my face faded months ago, and even the lacerations up and down my arms have turned to shiny pink scars, but I swear my mom still sees the version of me hauled to the hospital in the ambulance the day my car went off the road.
Two ambulances: one with sirens, the other without.
Whatever internal war she’s waging ends the way it usually does, with a sigh of frustration. My mom stands, makes her way tothe door, and pauses in the doorway. She meets my eyes over her shoulders, and says, “People can’t be islands, Joanna.”
I don’t argue with her. They can. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve been pulling away from land since that icy road.
And I’ve survived.
So I say, “I know,” and hope it’s enough to get her out.
“Joanna?”
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t seen any spoons lying around, have you? There are only five in the drawer, but we should have at least a dozen. I swear, every week we’re missing another.”
“Spoons?” I frown. “No. You sure Jasper’s not collecting them or something?”
“He swears he isn’t.”
“Do we buy it?”
