CHAPTER 3
When Dalton Giovanni broke my heart, I’d been wearing waffle pajama pants.
It was ridiculous, the things you remembered when your world fell apart.
I could barely remember anything else—like what shirt I’d been wearing or what day of the week it’d been or what the kids had been doing—but I could clearly remember the waffle pajamas, and when I’d looked down at myself, I’d thought, I can never eat waffles again.
And, of course, that was all Ivy wanted for dinner.
“I think this waffle maker is dead, kid,” I told her, wiggling the plug in the outlet. The red light still didn’t flick on. “I think you’re going to have to deal with pancakes.”
Ivy sat swinging her legs on the kitchen counter, watching me risk electrocution. “I don’t want pancakes,” she said in the eerily amicable tone eight-year-olds had before they raised hell. “I want waffles.”
“We all want things.” I fought to keep my voice even, yanking the plug from the outlet and trying a different one on the other side of the kitchen. Still nothing. “Sometimes the universe says no.”
Like how I’d wanted to never see my ex-boyfriend again. The universe said more than no. It literally said screw you.
If I was going to go all Jamie Brighton, and be fancy and use metaphors, I’d say Dalton was like a dormant volcano that’d decided to erupt back into my life.
Ever since this afternoon, I couldn’t shake off the feeling like ash and soot that Dalton had practically rubbed all over my skin. I thought I recognized that fiery hair.
I could almost hear Jamie in my head. That was a simile. Not a metaphor.
Ugh.
“It’s broken,” I declared, wrenching the cord from the outlet one final time before dumping it in the trash can. “Let’s just do pancakes.”
Ivy stared at me as if I’d just thrown her hopes and dreams in the trash instead of the waffle maker, golden eyes shimmering with unshed tears that’d come from nowhere. “I haven’t had waffles in forever,” she said, and her voice even wobbled. “Can’t we—”
“Daaaaaaaisyyyy!” Theo came bursting into the kitchen with his red toy truck in hand. It rattled when he shook it. “I can’t get my guy out.”
“Your guy?”
“My action figure. I put him through the window so he could drive, but he’s stuck.” Theo shook the car again. “Hear him?”
I squinted through the truck’s window that was no bigger than the size of a quarter. “How did you even get him in there?”
“I hit him in with one of my blocks.”
“Well, give me a second—”
Junie, who’d been on the couch near the front room’s window, suddenly gasped. “Mom’s home!”
And just like that, the house became a flurry of excitement, while the tension left my shoulders in a rush. Finally.
Ivy hopped off the counter and rushed toward the front door, hot on the heels of Theo, who left his truck with me, both forgotten. I slumped, as if I’d been wound tight up until that moment. Mom was home. She’d take their attention. I could finally retreat to my room and take a breath.
Almost as soon as I thought it, guilt rushed through me in full force. Here Mom was, getting off a ten-hour shift, and I was tired? I was ready to retreat to my bedroom? I’d had a day off school, had gotten ice cream with a friend, and Mom was probably running on fumes.
But I could hear her cheery voice from the entryway. “My babies!”
Mom did an amazing job putting on a mask, one I’d never noticed until Dad had died.
She’d remained bright and chipper, even in the midst of losing her husband and becoming a single parent to five kids.
But one night, I’d gone to her bedroom door downstairs after all the kids were asleep and had heard her sobbing.
The awful sound still echoed in my ears when things got too quiet.
At first, I’d thought she’d been talking to someone on the phone—and then I’d realized she’d been talking to Dad. “I can’t do this anymore,” she’d cried. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Not without you. I can’t handle it without you.”
The next morning, she’d been smiling with a full breakfast waiting for us on the table.
Mom and I were a lot alike in that regard. We both knew how to push the darkness down.
The kids’ chattering grew louder as Mom shuffled into the kitchen. Her red hair looked almost brown under the dull kitchen light, pinned up in the bun she always had it in.
Her eyes found mine, giving me a distracted smile.
“Mom, Mom,” Ivy said as she trailed in behind her, holding Mom’s purse. “I asked Daisy to make me waffles, but she threw the waffle maker away and said no.”
“Oh, why would you throw it away, Daisy?” Mom asked lightly, picking the thing out of the trash. “The cord just needs to be propped at the right angle.”
I scratched my arm. Of course Ivy would make me look bad to Mom. “Sounds like a house fire waiting to happen.”
“You have it plugged in for ten minutes, and you watch it.” She set it on the counter, plugged it in, and crinkled the cord until the red light on the waffle maker flicked on. “It’ll trip the breaker before it catches a fire.”
“See, Daisy?” Ivy grinned her gapped smile at me. “Waffles!”
Junie, though, scrunched her nose. “I don’t want waffles.”
“Well, I don’t want pancakes.”
Junie frowned. “Who said anything about pancakes?”
Mom’s hand coasted along the back of my shoulders as she passed by me. “I’ll make the waffles,” she told me, going to wash her hands in the sink. She still turned and smiled. “Thank you for watching the kids.”
Even though she’d given me permission, I still hesitated, my guilty thoughts making it hard to pick my feet up. “Was work okay?” I asked, though my question was nearly drowned out by Junie and Ivy’s bickering.
Mom nodded. “Was school okay?”
She had forgotten about Skip Day today. But of course she had—she had a million other things to keep track of. I just nodded. “It was good.”
I didn’t need to tell Mom about hanging out with Jamie and running into Dalton. Talking about the ex-boyfriend was a weighted conversation, and she was probably emotionally drained as it was. She needed that energy for the little ones.
With that thought in mind, I retreated to the staircase. Penn was on the couch as I started up the steps, her headphones over her ears and her phone in hand, but her eyes were on me. Her expression was unreadable, and when I lifted a hand to wave, she immediately dropped her gaze.
My bedroom was my safe haven. It wasn’t the biggest room in the Carmichael house—Junie and Ivy shared that one—but I’d made it perfect.
The walls were adorned with pictures and posters and printouts of New York City streets, but overtop of them all, I’d doodled characters onto them.
Outside of realism, one of my favorite styles to draw in was chibi, because the big features and small bodies were far more fun for me to relax with.
My four walls were a vision board of sorts, with pictures of New York City street signs and my doodles decorating them.
New York University. Tisch’s undergrad program. That was my plan throughout high school as I’d perfected my portfolio, and in my mind, it’d been set in stone.
My mantra when life wrung me dry.
Think of NYU.
And on April first, I’d finally learned my fate. WAITLISTED.
I wasn’t good enough to automatically accept, and now that my waitlist status had stretched on over two months, I knew it was only a matter of time now before they updated the portal to give me a label they’d always meant to. REJECTED.
Now, every time I walked into my bedroom and saw my walls, it was a sort of painful reminder that vision boards didn’t always work. And when they didn’t, they just became a shrine of dreams you weren’t good enough to achieve.
I couldn’t bring myself to rip the papers down, though. Even though they made me feel sick, the thought of bare walls made me even sicker.
I shut and locked my door behind me, but it didn’t do much to muffle out the noise that leaked through the floorboards. A low-grade headache that’d been following me all day reared its head now, pulsing behind the eye that Junie had used for target practice this morning.
I thought I recognized that fiery hair.
Dalton’s familiarity was what ate at me more than the words themselves. As if we’d parted on good terms. As if we’d never dated at all. As if he hadn’t broken my heart.
Standing still in the middle of my room, truly alone for the first time all day, the darkness slowly crept in around me. It stretched its arms out as if reaching for a hug.
I all but fell to the little desk in the far corner of my room, grabbed my headphones, and reached for my sketchbook. And, pulling in a big breath, I poured the black feeling out onto the page.
I’d been drawing my whole life, but I’d only started taking it seriously after Dad died.
It’d been January, and I’d been in the eighth grade, and he’d been coming home from work when a truck slid into his lane on the highway.
Gone in a blink. Just like that, everything had imploded.
Mom went from being a stay-at-home mom to scrambling for a job to keep us afloat, and I’d taken over her role as much as I could with one-year-old Theo and the other littles.
Neighbors had helped some with meals and babysitting, but the helping hands didn’t hold on long.
I’d felt so many things, but had no idea how to express them any other way than drawing them. But I’d been a horrible artist as a thirteen-year-old, so I drew in every single second of spare time, forcing myself to become better so that I could finally get my true feelings across.
Now, as I chased the darkness away, I sketched out a picture of my original character.
I’d created him a little into freshman year, when the therapist Mom signed me up with suggested I create a “comfort character” to draw.
I’d named him Kit, and Mrs. Tubs had been right in one regard—he was comforting to draw.