Something inside me is desperate to keep her in this bathroom so I can hear more. Maybe it was the letter she sent. Or maybe a small part of me thinks we have more common ground than I thought. “No one gets it,” I finally say. “It’s like your parents being married is one of those things that’s supposed to last forever. No one gets what it’s like when that just ends out of nowhere.”
“It’s like finding out the tooth fairy isn’t real.” Kiera turns around, and her face looks like I’ve sucked every bit of air out of her. “It’s all I can think about. Sometimes I just ask for stuff I don’t need or throw fits over silly things so that they can argue over that stuff instead. That at least feels normal.”
I shake my head, remembering how I lied to my dad about his mail. I don’t even know what I was trying to do. Just get some kind of reaction out of the two of them, I guess. Because right now in their weird perfect little divorce world with their perfect little houses on the same street, I feel like a broken compass just spinning in circles, trying to find my way. Like, I’m just looking for a sign—any kind of sign—that will tell me how I’m supposed to feel.
I take a step closer to her. “I’m sorry for crashing your party and for giving you that dumb gift.”
She shrugs. “The deodorant actually did smell good.”
“And for puking on you.”
“That was, like, the grossest thing ever,” she says, but then as though she’s just realized we’re not being jerks to each other right now, she adds, “but maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to hit the trampolines after all that pizza and cake.”
“It was still a pretty cool party.”
She pauses for a moment. “We better get back to class.”
I hate to leave the bathroom, where it felt like we were in neutral territory for a little while, a place where neither of us had to worry about what had happened in the past, but I’d also hate to get in trouble for taking too long in the restroom. The two of us take our hall passes and walk back to Mrs. Young’s room in silence.
It feels like something between us has shifted. But Istill can’t forget what the last three years have been like and what it felt like to be ditched by the person I trusted most.
Guilt settles in my stomach as I think about the letter I wrote Kiera. Not even my worst enemy deserves a letter like that.
After school, Mrs. Young must see the worry on my face, because when everyone is getting their stuff together to walk out to the pickup lines, she says, “Sweet Pea, hang back for a minute if you don’t mind.”
Oscar looks over at me, and I just shrug. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Once the room has cleared, Mrs. Young sits down at the desk beside me, tucking her black dress with multicolored beetles underneath her. Today she wears a light-pink lipstick, with her hair twisted into a sloppy bun and secured with two paintbrushes.
“How’s it going?” she asks, like it’s not at all weird that she asked me to stay after school.
“Am I in trouble?” I ask. “Is this about my research project?”
She shakes her head. “You’re not in trouble, but you do need to let me know who your project is on and soon. That’s not why I asked you to stay, though. I just wanted to check in with you. I know we talked a few months ago, but you seemed a little off today.”
Mrs. Young was one of the first people to know that Mom and Dad were getting a divorce. They told her because they wanted her to know what was going on in case I wasn’t myself.
“I’m okay.”
“Everything okay at home?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“You know,” she says, “you’ve got a lot of big changes going on right now. It’s okay if you need to readjust a little bit. No one expects you to just act like everything is fine.”
“Thanks,” I say, trying to release the knot of tension gathered in my forehead.
“But that’s not all that’s bothering you today, is it?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Anything I can help with?”
I take a breath. “I think I’ve made a big mistake, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You know, the best part about mistakes is there’s nowhere to go but up. You can either learn from them or if you’re really lucky, you might even be able to fix them.”
“Too bad life isn’t written in pencil,” I say.
