“I’ve been sketching something like this for myself since I was a kid,” I said. “I can’t believe you own it. I can’t believe it’s real.”
“Then it’s yours,” Meredith said. “Have it. Please.”
“What? No. I can’t keep this. I can’t—”
“You’ve written so many love stories for me, Katie. Beautiful ones. The least I could do is send you off with a worthless-to-me gown so you can live out your own.”
“No way. This must’ve cost a fortune. It’s irreplaceable. I can’t accept this.”
“I insist. I demand it. It’s yours.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
She nodded. My face burned from the wine, from the gown, from the tears, from all of it.
“God, thank you!” I twirled around twice. The room, spinning. A blur. An iridescent and drunken swirl. “I love it! I love it so much!”
Meredith smiled as Pinot circled the platform, tail swishing. She dropped a pair of heels at my feet. Satin—and stunning. “I know those will be a few sizes too big,” she said, “but you should try them. For the height.”
I nodded, then, careful not to snag the fabric or be swallowed whole by the skirt, sat on the edge of the pedestal and slid them on.When I glanced up, Meredith was looking right at me. Her eyes, the slightest bit damp.
“There’s one thing, Katie, that I’d like to say.”
“Oh, okay. Sure. Go ahead.”
“I think you’re very brave,” she said. “I know your life’s been quite difficult. It’s remarkable, how big you love anyway.”
72
Katie
September, Nine Years Ago
Long Island
February turned to March, turned to April, and then Memorial Day turned to the start of sophomore year. My life continued: a new homeroom, a new boyfriend, a new musical in the fall. Mikey hadn’t picked up a baseball since the crash, and I knew—from the whispers in the hallway and the newspaper articles that covered the accident since day one—that he never would. Maybe that was why when he began to push Ingrid away, when he began to shout and scream and use his size to do whatever he wanted, get whatever he wanted, and go wherever he wanted, my parents never intervened.
Maybe that was why—when Mikey started falling asleep at school and Tyler’s absences piled so high the principal started calling my mom instead of his—nobody did a goddamn thing. Denial, I was learning, was a hell of a drug.
And still, the months rolled by. And then, the spring I turned sixteen, Mikey and Tyler overdosed, and everything changed. Mikey went to rehab immediately. He was still seventeen, so it was an adolescent treatment center he could not check himself out of. Tyler, thanks to his October birthday, was already eighteen and, unlike Mikey, didn’t put up much of a fight. He went to detox voluntarily and then did some hybrid school-outpatient thing in Nassau County for the rest of the year.
Not that any of this mattered to me. I couldn’t let it. I had my own life, my own friends, my own future to worry about. And it was a big job, thinking about me. After all, someone had to do it.
And so I hardened. I watched my brother go in and out of rehab and in and out of rehab, and I never cared, and I never hoped, and I never wrote, and I never visited, and nobody ever asked me why. Nobody, really, outside of a California-bound Ingrid, who sent the occasional text, asked me much of anything. My theater friends had tried at the very beginning, but I pushed their questions away. We were kids, after all, and nobody knew what to say.
It was the night before the start of my junior year when there was a knock on my window. My parents weren’t home. They rarely were. My mom had joined a zillion support groups and usually dragged my father along. Not that it made a difference where they were. I had no curfew. No rules. No ride to school. No groceries in the fridge.
It was fine, though. I was a really tough kid.
I walked over to the window and slowly opened the blinds. Tyler was standing there, shoulders hunched.
“Can we talk?” he said.
I frowned, shrugging as he watched on through the glass. The sun was still setting.
“Please, Katie,” he said. “I need a friend.”
I stood there for a minute, examining him. The tremble in his lips, but the steadiness of his hands. The color in his face. The fifteen or twenty pounds of life he’d put back onto his body since the spring.
