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My throat wells and I nod.
“Okay.” She shrugs off her coat and hangs it by the door, slipping out of her shoes and curling up by me on the sofa.
Paloma turns the volume up then, just a tad, before her hand covers my sock-clad foot.
“Did you shower?”
I shake my head, looking at her where the blanket is pulled nearly up to my eyes.
“What about this?” she says, reaching forward to pause the movie. “You go shower. I’ll make some soup—or I think I have a few things in the fridge I can make some snacks? You wash your hair and everything, anything you usually do to feel better, and I get it all set up and we can just stay down here tonight. You can talk to me about it or not, but I’ll just . . .”
Her mouth seems to tremble, like she expended all her energy at the beginning of her monologue and she’s running out of steam. “I can just be here.”
Why does it seem like she’s more nervous than I am?
The thought is enough to push me up to a sitting position as I nod rapidly.
“Yes, please. I think . . . I think that would be really nice.”
Can she tell I’m about to cry?
I don’t let it happen, darting over and slugging up the stairs to my room to shower. Washing my hair. Shaving. Scrubbing. Exfoliating and moisturizing. I follow all my extensive steps for my hair, skin—everything, before putting on leggings and a soft, long sleeve shirt, stepping back down slowly.
My roommate is still standing by the sofa, though now there’s a plate of goldfish crackers and fruit and sour gummy bears—a random assortment like she raided our fridge and pantry for our collective comfort foods.
“Sorry,” I say again. “Today is just really hard.” There’s a lump in my throat, a rock I can’t swallow, and it only swells in size as I refuse to cry.
Paloma steps closer, her arms outstretched like she wants to hold me but is hesitant. I wish she wasn’t. I wish I was better at explaining that I want to be hugged, more than anything. That so many people have avoided touching me or holding me my entire life that now it’s a near desperate craving for it.
“Can I brush your hair? Maybe braid it for you?”
“I . . .”
Instead of answering, I nod through a blur of tears.
She takes her own brush carefully through my hair, before plaiting the wet strands into two pigtail braids, loose enough not to pull on my scalp.
“I’m sorry,” I keep saying. “I’m sorry I’m not getting better. Today is just . . . I don’t know.”
I hate this. I’m not sad. There’s nothing I can trace to the reason I feel this way. It’s like this dark cloud forms slowly, over a few days until I’m fully sinking under the weight of something I don’t have the tools to rid myself of.
For a while I thought making friends would fix it. Then, maybe something different. Doing something outside my house—being somewhere else. And it did, but it was temporary, like the high off the one joint I’d smoked in high school beneath Toren’s half-amused, half-protective gaze.
But it always fades. Something is just wrong, with my brain or the way my thoughts work. Happiness is always temporary—and it isn’t sadness that replaces it. A weird, creeping feeling that feels wrong, and it’s in my body, as inescapable as my own skin.
“I want Toren.”
The words come out of me too easily, and Paloma doesn’t even flinch. She pulls me back into her arms, against her chest with a tight hug that pushes my breath out.
Paloma nods. “Okay. Let me call him.”
Chapter 34
Toren
“Where the fuck were you aiming that stretch pass, Kane?” LaBlanc shouts.
Coach Harris shakes his head and crosses his arms from the bench. There’s a relief in knowing he’s here to oversee today, that slight insults are the lowest our assistant coach will stoop to in the face of his boss.
