“Tomorrow?” I asked, eating my own handful. “How is that two words?”
“To and morrow.”
“What does ‘morrow’ mean?”
“Morning. My dad used to always say it whenever he was going off to work overnight. ‘Have a great night, boys! I’m off to morrow!’”
I smiled a little.
Ash didn’t talk much about his dad.
He hardly talked about his family at all, actually.
“Are you and your parents close?” I asked, grabbing one of Ellie’s homemade cookies.
“We used to be. Now they both work all the time. Or my dad is working on some house project. Sometimes he asks me to help him, but that’s it. We don’t really talk. Not like we used to.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. We used to do hang outs all the time in our family room and have game nights, but we don’t anymore.”
“I miss what life used to be.”
“Yeah...”
Ash wasn’t smiling anymore, and that made me sad. Boys like him were meant to smile more than most. When they frowned, it was heartbreaking.
“Sometimes I think my parents blame me, you know,” Ash said as he stared out at the bowl of chip dip.
“Blame you for what?”
“Everything.”
“Oh...” I shifted around, feeling a tingle of discomfort in my lower back.
No, please stop...
Sometimes, my body decided it didn’t want to function like a regular body, and mysterious aches would appear after a week of successful physical therapy. I knew by the end of the day I’d be near tears with heating pads on if I didn’t sit down soon. But I also didn’t want to sit because I didn’t want Ash to think I wasn’t strong enough to stand for a few minutes in the freaking kitchen.
“If it makes you feel better, I think my dad blames me for everything, too.”
“For the accident?”
I nodded.
“Can I ask what happened? Or is that...?”
“A car accident. I was fighting in the back seat with my little sister, and I distracted my parents. My dad was driving and swerved to avoid a deer, because he looked back to make us stop fighting. We ended up hitting a tree, and I went flying out of the car.”
“Oh...” Ash’s “oh” reminded me of my own—the kind of “oh” when you didn’t know what to say. But unlike me, he followed it up with a question. “Do you blame him? Your dad?”
“Yes and no,” I confessed. “Somedays, when I want to feelmad, I blame him. Other days, when I want to hate myself, I blame me. And most of the time, I want to hate myself.”
He smiled, but it felt sad. I knew those kinds of smiles too well.
“You ever want to stop being alive?” he asked, pulling no punches.
That was a heavy question.
