Nina took a breath.
She knew Lucia was not being mean. She was just being sixteen, which meant she was being honest in the way that only somebody with no filter and lots of feelings could be.
Lucia had spent the last eighteen months watching her mom move through the house like a ghost. She was probably very tired of it, and she had every right to be. Nina was tired of it, but she still could not seem to change it.
She had one parent who wasn’t there and one who was barely hanging on.
“I’ll go after you leave for school,” Nina said. “Make me a list.”
“There’s a list on the fridge. It’s been there since last week.”
Nina looked over at the refrigerator, and there was, in fact, a list written in Lucia’s sharp handwriting, which looked nothing like David’s and nothing like Nina’s, and was entirely and fiercely her own.
Below the list, held by a magnet shaped like a palm tree that David had bought at a gas station because he loved collecting tacky magnets the way some people collected art, was a picture that Claire had taken and sent in the group chat three days ago.
The napkin.
The pact.
Three signatures in different handwriting.
Claire had taken a photo of it for her fridge, and Nina had seen it when it came through on her phone, lying in bed at 11:30, wearing David’s sweater. She had stared at it for a long time, feeling as if she were seeing a stranger wearing her face. Who was this woman with the dead eyes?
She had printed it out the next morning. She did not know why. She just felt like she had to.
“What is that?” Lucia asked, following her gaze.
“It’s a pact. Claire, Harper, and I made it on our birthday.”
“A pact to do what?”
“One scary thing a month for a year.”
Lucia stared at her, then she looked back at the napkin photo. Then she looked back at her mother. There was a look on her face that Nina could not quite place.
Maybe surprise, or hope, or the careful guardedness of a girl who had learned not to get excited about her mother’s plans because her mother’s plans often dissolved before they even started.
“Scary like what?”
“I don’t know yet. I said I’d pick the first one, though.”
“Wait, you volunteered to go first?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
It should have stung, but it did not because Lucia was right. Nina, or at least the Nina of the last eighteen months, did not volunteer for things.
She did not initiate.
She just showed up when she had to, went through the motions, then came home, sat on the couch, and watched TV until she no longer cared how late it was, before justifying going to bed.
That Nina would never have signed that napkin on a porch at 10:30 at night and told her friends she wanted to go first.
But she had.
She had signed it, and she had meant it.
