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“Why’d you bring me back?”
“I—” My mouth falls open. I don’t even know how to answer. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I dunno.” Wendy draws a circle in the blankets with her finger, ignoring Nana’s entreaties for more cheese. “Maybe you don’t wanna be a babysitter anymore.”
I’m not a fucking babysitter.
If something happens to her, it’ll be doing us all a favor. You ever think of that?
Pan. That asshole. My stomach clenches.
“Fuck that,” I say, before realizing who I’m speaking to. “I mean, sorry. Uh. Screw that. Look, Wendy, if my life is complicated, if any of our lives are complicated, they were that way before you got here. If anything…” I hesitate just a moment. “If anything, you give us all something to care about and…get our shit together over. Sorry,” I say again.
Wendy fixes me with a look. “I know about swear words, Tink.”
My body decides it actually needs chips in addition to burrito, so my hand finds its way to the bag. “Yeah, I know. You’re smart.” But then I pause, chips still pinched between my fingers, and I realize something. Something I haven’t done, haven’t said, even though it’s the most obvious thing that needs taking care of, even beyond getting food in our bodies.
“Wendy?” I say, surprised at how girlish my voice comes out.
She looks up at me. “What?”
“I’m sorry.” I press my lips together. “About lying to you. I just thought—” I cut off my explanation short. Who gives a shit what my justification is? Not the point. “I’m sorry,” I finish, and add, for good measure, a teachable moment kind of thing, “because lying is wrong.”
She’s silent at first.
“Yeah,” she says at last. Then she frowns. “I call bullshit.”
“Wendy!” I cry, almost surprised into laughing before I catch myself. “What the—heck?”
Wendy gives an impressively teenage roll of the eyes. “Sorry, Tink, but be for real. You lied to them too.” She nods at the door to my room. “And I don’t think that was wrong.”
“Well, it…” I stare at the bed, realizing too late that the chip has gone to crumbs in my hand.
It depends on who you ask, I think.
Pan’s voice reverberates in my mind. You lied to us, Tink? You lied to me?
Yeah, like I had any choice? I mentally yell back. What would you have done if I’d told you the truth? Laughed? Tried your usual fuck-and-run? Or just…just discarded me?
Because he wouldn’t have wanted me around as a girl, I realize. He wouldn’t have needed me. Not the same way.
And maybe I knew that all along.
Maybe that’s why I talked myself into the lie in the first place.
Wendy’s still waiting, I realize. Intent on me.
“I guess it’s circumstantial,” I finish.
“Circumstantial,” Wendy repeats.
“Like, it depends. On the situation. The circumstances. Sometimes the ends justify the means, you know?”
Wendy shakes her head. I sigh.
“Like, I guess it was better for me to lie to them and be safe than it was to…try and make it any other way, you know?” That’s pretty much true. And has nothing to do with me being…hung up on Pan. Or whatever I am.
Was.
