I should tell. I know I should. But he’s mine. I don’t want him getting the chance to walk away. I want him to pay and I want to be the one who decides how.

On Sunday morning, my dad makes pancakes for breakfast like we always used to. I come downstairs to the smell of bacon frying and I know that in two days you’ll still be able to smell the lingering aroma of bacon grease in the house. I won’t still be here in two days to smell it, but it will be here even if I’m not.

Asher comes down wearing swim trunks and no shirt and is promptly sent back upstairs by my mother to get one. He groans at the request but goes anyway. He’s on his way to the beach with the famous Addison Hartley who is picking him up in less than an hour. I’m actually excited to meet the girl who has my brother trying to act like he’s not acting like a lovesick fool. I’m happy for him, because going to the beach with someone you’re stupidly in love with is such an awesomely normal thing to do. He invites me to go with them, but I shake my head no for all the good it does me.

“Come with us. It’ll be fun,” he tries to convince me. I’m quite sure it would be fun, if it was only Asher and his girlfriend going. Even though I’m freakishly pale, I still might have considered it if not for all of the other kids who I knew would be there. I may be gone, but around Brighton, I am never forgotten. I shake my head again.

“Go with him. All of your old friends will be there,” my mother says hopefully. It’s hard to see hope in your mother’s face when you know you’re going to kill it. I don’t know what she’s more misguided about, thinking this is a selling point or thinking that I actually have old friends. The only old friends I had are probably spending their Sunday with a musical instrument, not running around half na**d on the beach.

“There’s nothing stopping you from going, Mil‌—‌” my dad says, catching himself before finishing. Right Dad, nothing but the fact that I have to wear a shirt the whole time to hide the scars and field a thousand questions I wouldn’t want to answer even if I did talk. Getting impaled with a railroad spike would be less painful.

If I had to decide who, out of all of us, this whole shit situation was the hardest on, I’d say it was my father. My father is a quiet badass. Gentle, protective, and if need be, murderous to protect his children. Like all fathers should be. The problem is he didn’t protect me. Because he couldn’t. No one could. But I don’t think he sees it that way.

“You have to rejoin the world sometime,” he starts. I feel the no excuses lecture. Asher and I have never been allowed to make excuses about anything, even now. I have a feeling he’s talking about more than going to the beach. “You didn’t get a choice in what happened to you. Neither did we. But you have a choice in what happens now. We don’t. You’re the one in control and all we can do is sit on the sidelines and watch, even if you keep making the wrong calls over and over again.” We’re obviously veering into sports metaphor territory. “We’re not going to force you to do anything you aren’t ready to do. You’ve had enough forced on you. But you have to make a decision about how long you’re going to let this define your life.”

Now I think my parents realize that they’ve parented themselves into a corner with their insistence that Asher and I make our own choices growing up and that we stand behind them and live with the consequences. Because they can’t take it back. Now, they’re stuck letting me make all of my own decisions, wrong or not, and watching me live with them because that’s what they taught me to do.

It was fine when being the Brighton Piano Girl defined my life. When I was making the right choices. When all of my choices were influenced by what my parents wanted me to choose. I let their current steer me, let it smooth and shape me like a stone pushed along the sand until I was perfect. And as soon as I was, I was ripped out of the water and thrown and smashed into a thousand pieces that I can’t put back together. I don’t know where they go. And there are so many missing that the ones that are left don’t fit together anymore.

I think I’ll stay in pieces. I can shift them, rearrange, depending on the day, depending on what I need to be. I can change on a whim and be so many different girls and none of them has to be me.

We sit down at the table and eat pancakes made from a box mix. Even Asher doesn’t say anything else. After breakfast I go to my room and look for more names to add to the walls. I see Addison arrive from my window, but I don’t go downstairs. I never do get to meet her, but Asher’s right, she does look smokin’ hot.

I get in my car just after five on Sunday afternoon. Everyone walks me out. My mom reminds me to text her when I get back to Margot’s so she knows I arrived safely. My dad hugs me and closes the door of my now very clean car which he made Asher help him wash yesterday. I lock the doors as soon as I’m in, turn off the radio and leave.

Going home is like culture shock. Different house, different face, different clothes, different name. Same comforter. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind wrapping Asher up in a box and taking him back to Margot’s with me. But then he’d see the way I am there. That I’ve probably gotten worse instead of better and I’d have to face the very disappointment and lost hopes I ran away from in the first place. Plus, once he did the requisite double-take and recognized me, he’d probably beat the crap out of any guy who looked at me in all my Snow White meets Frederick’s of Hollywood glory.

By the time I get back to Margot’s, it will be after seven o’clock. I planned it that way on purpose so I wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to go to Drew’s. I’m starting to feel guilty about the fact that neither Josh nor I have made any move to tell him about the amount of time we spend together. It’s not that I really mind Drew knowing; I think he’s finally accepted the fact that there is not enough alcohol in the world to get me to have sex with him, so that’s not the issue. The problem is that he would inevitably start to wonder how Josh and I spend so much time together with no talking involved, and even if his suspicions are unconfirmed, they’re still suspicions I’d rather avoid. Plus, if I’m being honest, the hours I spend in that garage with Josh, apart from school and Margot and everything else, are mine. I just don’t want to share it yet. Apparently Josh hasn’t said anything, either.

CHAPTER 19

Josh

“Nastya can’t make it to dinner. She asked me to drop this off on my way to work.” The blonde woman at the door hands me a really tall, elaborately iced cake. I can see the blue paisley pattern around the edge. The last time I saw that plate, it was on my front porch covered with cookies.

“She asked you?” I say skeptically. Does she talk to other people and she’s lying to me? I don’t know why, but that bothers me. A lot.

“She wrote down this address under the words Drop off, Sunday and 5:45. At the bottom she tacked on the word please. It’s the most communication I’ve gotten from her in years.” She sounds aggravated at having to explain herself to me.

“OK. Thanks.” I take it out of her hands and she looks at me like she’s waiting for something.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Josh Bennett.” Who are you?

“Can I come in?”

I’m kind of dumbfounded by the request but I don’t want to be rude. I look at her again. She’s really thin and tan and blonde and doesn’t remotely resemble any serial killers in my mind. She doesn’t resemble Nastya, either, but I’ve got to assume she’s the aunt Drew talked about, so I push the door back and let her step inside. I really don’t know what she wants from me, unless Nastya’s messing with me in more ways than I imagine and this woman knows things I don’t.

“Margot Travers. Nastya lives with me.” She holds out her hand. I hold up the cake in response.

“Listen, I’m not going to beat around the bush because I have to be at work soon, and frankly, it’s just not my thing.” Okay. “Even if I didn’t have to drop the cake off, I would have been over here this weekend anyway to find out what’s going on.” I can’t decide if I’m more nervous or curious now, but I’m definitely listening. “There’s a tracker on Nastya’s phone.” She pauses for a second. I guess she’s giving me a minute to react. I don’t. “I check it periodically, and a few weeks ago this address came up, so I started checking it more often and do you know what I found?” Of course I do, and you know that I do. You just want to ask for dramatic effect and then you’re going to tell me anyway. “This address came up again and again and again‌—‌at nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock. Sometimes midnight.” Sounds about right. I don’t confirm or deny. I’ll let her keep talking until she asks me something outright.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asks expectantly.

“Is there something you want to know?” I feel like I’m having a seventh-grade stare down with this woman.

“What’s going on?”

“Why aren’t you asking her?”

She looks at me as if to say yeah, right. “She doesn’t talk to me.”

Every time she pauses, her eyes scan the room like she’s looking for my  p**n  collection or the entrance to my hidden meth lab. I’m getting a little insulted at the fact that this woman nearly pushes Nastya out the door with Drew, of all people, but she’s here giving me the third-degree. Maybe because Drew shows up, knocks on the door and asks her to be a guest at a well-chaperoned dinner on a Sunday evening, while I let her covertly hole up in my garage, late at night, with no adult supervision anywhere.

“Then why should I?” I respond, because now I’m just being a child. But then I realize what she’s really asking, what she really wants to know. And it’s not my first suspicion. Because this woman isn’t trying to figure out if her niece is sneaking over here and ha**ng s*x with me. She wants to know if she’s talking to me. I take a breath; because now I want this over, and if I give her some sort of answer, maybe it’ll be enough to get her off my case. Plus, I’m getting the feeling she’s going to start issuing rules or threats and I don’t really handle either of those well. I may not know if I want Nastya hanging around all the time or not, but I don’t like the idea of someone else making that decision for me. I can give her an answer, but I’m doing it for my benefit, not hers. “She’s in my shop class. She’s really behind everyone else so she comes over here at night when she goes running and watches me work.”

She looks at me long enough to make me wonder how she’s going to respond.

“That’s it?” She sounds disappointed. Her eyes narrow again. “Your parents don’t mind that she’s here all the time?”

“Doesn’t bother them at all.” It’s not really a lie. Not really.

“Where’s Nastya?” I’m greeted by Drew’s dad almost as soon as I walk in the door for dinner. The comment brings his mom around the corner a second later. The music’s already playing and I can tell it’s Sarah’s. I’d rather listen to a circular saw but we’re not allowed to insult anyone’s music when it’s their week.

“Nastya’s not coming?” Mrs. Leighton asks, taking the cake out of my hands and sounding genuinely disappointed. “Then where did this come from?”

“Her aunt dropped it off this afternoon and said she wanted you to have it.”

“She is the sweetest thing!” she exclaims, carrying it into the kitchen. I don’t know if there’s another person on Earth who would refer to Nastya as the sweetest thing, and I wonder if she sees something the rest of us don’t.