Piper
I’m in the kitchen the next morning, scavenging for breakfast, when Tati walks through the front door.
I hadn’t realized she wasn’t in the apartment.
She was home when Gabi and I came in last night, on the couch watching The Notebook with Mom’s knitted blanket and a box of tissues her only company.
Gabi sat down to talk to her while I went into the bathroom to wash my face.
I ended up on the floor, crying into a bath towel until my throat ached, leaving splotches of mascara on the white terry cloth.
Tati will be pissed.
Her outfit is uncharacteristically sloppy: a Wahoos T-shirt she must’ve inherited from Mr. Marketing and leggings that are usually reserved for lounging at home. Loose wisps of hair hang in her face. She looks exhausted.
“Are you okay?” I ask, forgetting all about the recent silence between us.
“Not really.” She pulls her I NEED MY SPACE! mug from the cabinet and fills it with cold coffee left over from yesterday. “Davis was admitted to the hospital last night.”
“Oh. God. I didn’t know. Henry and I—”
I’m not sure how to explain what happened at Hudson’s. My heart hurts every time I think about what I saw on Henry’s phone, and how he let me walk out without even trying to salvage what we’ve spent the summer building.
Tati waves me off. “He found his dad unconscious. You need to get in touch with him.”
“I don’t think he’d want—”
“Piper, don’t be petty.” She sets her coffee down and crosses her arms. “If you care about him at all, be there for him. He’s struggling. Trust me, I’m not the person he wants sitting beside him in a hospital waiting room.”
There it is again, her assumption that I’m the problem.
When Gabi found me crying in the bathroom last night, she sank down beside me and grasped my hand. She whispered reassuring words. She rubbed my back and wiped my tears and put toothpaste on my toothbrush. She stood by while I scrubbed my teeth and washed my face for real, then tucked me into bed.
“I’ll stay until you fall asleep,” she promised.
Where was Tati?
“He could call me,” I tell her.
I wait for her to ask why he didn’t.
I’m begging her to invest in me. To love me.
She says, “Why are you always so selfish?”
She picks up her coffee and walks out of the kitchen.