CHAPTER 13
That night at dinner, Penn, Junie, and Ivy talked excitedly about their days.
Ivy gushed about her playdate at her friend’s house—who, she bragged, lived in the biggest house she’d ever seen.
Junie talked about how Penn was the best babysitter ever, since Penn had turned on a movie she really shouldn’t have. Penn’s ears had gone red.
She couldn’t have done worse than me, though. Letting Theo out of my sight while I enjoyed a terrible game of pickleball with my ex-boyfriend. I hadn’t planned on bringing it up, but of course, six-year-olds couldn’t keep secrets to save their life.
“I went on a super-secret mission today,” Theo said nonchalantly over his chicken parm, which he was delicately extracting the parm off. “I snuck out to retrieve a package!”
“What package?” Ivy asked. “Did something come in the mail?”
“What do you mean, snuck out?” That was Penn, frowning at our little brother like he was telling a lie.
Mom seemed blissfully unbothered, though, delicately cutting up her dinner and eating without pause.
“The package was Jamie, and I snuck away from Daisy to go get him!” Theo’s small shoulders wilted. “But I thought Jamie would be happier to see me.”
“You shouldn’t have snuck away from Daisy,” Penn scolded him. “You probably scared her.”
Theo peeked at me, knowing he had.
“Yeah,” Junie added, but she was looking at Theo with wide, nervous eyes. “And you could’ve been kidnapped, and some man could’ve kept you in his basement!”
Now it was Penn peeking at me, but I wasn’t the one who scolded her. Mom, without looking up, said, “See, Penelope, this is why we don’t let your ten-year-old sister watch horror movies.”
I watched as a scowl slipped over Penn’s face, and she turned her attention back down to her plate. “Sorry.” It was as half-hearted as it could’ve been.
Mom now turned to me. “Theo got out of your sight?”
“Just for, like, five minutes. Not even.”
“Do you know what can happen in five minutes, Daisy?”
Junie whispered, “Someone could take him and put him in their basement.”
“Or those careless people could run him over with their car. Or he could fall in one of the pools.” Mom was looking up now, and straight at me. “What were you doing that you were so distracted?”
There was no describing the sort of paralyzing terror that’d consumed me earlier today. I barely remembered leaving the pickleball court and searching for Theo. I could, however, remember Jamie’s hand soothing down my back, and his lips at my temple. It’s okay. He’s okay. You’re okay.
“This isn’t just on Daisy.” Penn pointed her fork at Theo. “You know better.”
Theo just continued to pull the parm off his bites of chicken.
Dinner continued on awkwardly after that, with the strain still lingering in the air. Theo ended up only eating half of his chicken, but everyone else cleared their plates. Mom collected most of the dirty dishes and filled the sink with water, beginning to wash.
I came up behind her with the empty tray we’d used for the breadsticks. “I can do these, Mom.”
But she was unmovable. “You cooked. I’ve got it, Daisy.”
“How about you wash, and I dry?”
Mom gave in, making room at the counter for me to stand beside her. We worked in quiet for a long moment, the clattering of dishes in the sink the only sound. Once she’d scrub a plate clean, she’d pass it to me, and I silently wiped the hand towel over it.
I couldn’t figure out how to start talking to her.
She used to be easy to talk to, before Dad died and I’d heard her crying in her room.
Something then had changed fundamentally that I couldn’t look at her the same.
I couldn’t look at her smile without wondering if it was hiding something beneath.
That was another reason I felt so bad that Theo slipped out of sight earlier today—now that was something she’d have to worry about, whether or not it could happen again.
If her dependable daughter would screw up again.
“I shouldn’t have been firm with you in front of the kids,” Mom ended up saying first, as if reading the topic in my thoughts.
Something about the way she said it had me feeling weird. In front of the kids, like I wasn’t one of them. “It’s okay. It was dumb of me to lose track of Theo. It—it was a big mistake. It won’t happen again.”
“How has everything been with the kids in the afternoons, otherwise? Have they been listening?”
“Uh, yeah, for the most part. Theo’s sleep schedule has been a bit off, but I think we’re back to normal.
” I wasn’t going to tell her that it was my fault that he hadn’t been sleeping through the night.
Letting him crash after his ice cream on Friday had done more damage than I’d expected, and this whole weekend, he hadn’t fallen asleep until after one in the morning.
“Ivy has another playdate on Friday. She wants it to be a sleepover, but I don’t know. ”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know the parents that well.”
Mom’s hands stilled in the dish water.
“I mean, we’ll see,” I went on, confused by her reaction. “Junie wants to meet up with her friends, too. You’d think they’d been out of school weeks by the way they’re acting, and not just a weekend.”
“You sound like a mother.”
The exact same words Jamie had used, and, like Jamie, Mom didn’t laugh when she said it. She didn’t sound even slightly amused. “I do not,” I objected immediately, taking the next dish from her. “I just… sound like me.”
After a beat, she began scrubbing the next dish, but slowly. “What about your friends?” she asked. “Have you seen them?”
I nodded. “I played pickleball with Nellie today.” Mom must’ve missed that part.
I waited patiently for her to finish scrubbing the plate, because she paused again.
I wondered if this was how things had been with Dad, these quiet conversations that I’d never paid attention to, like the kids in the other room didn’t pay attention now.
Maybe she missed him and was wishing she was having this talk with him instead of me. That thought made me swallow hard.
“Have you heard back from NYU yet?”
The plate I was drying nearly slipped from my fingers. “I was… I was waitlisted. Remember?”
“But you should hear back if they ultimately reject you, shouldn’t you?”
I blinked. “Y-Yeah. I mean, I think so.”
“Have you been checking your email? In case they accepted you?”
A panicked feeling slowly began to build behind my ribs. I had not been checking my email. “They hardly ever accept people off the waitlist.” But what if they had emailed me already, rejecting me? What if they accepted me, and I only had a few days to respond, and I hadn’t?
What if I missed my chance?
It’s a little silly to hear you talk about NYU like you’ll go.
Penn came into the kitchen silently, coming up beside my mental freak-out. “Daisy, I can dry the dishes.”
“You want to?” I asked, trying not to seem too eager to rush to my computer. The panic of it made me dizzy. I shakily held a dry dish out to her. “Thanks, Penn.”
She took it wordlessly, stepping in beside Mom. The sinking feeling grew with every step up the stairs, and when I got into my room, I flipped the light on, shut the door, and stood with my back against it for a moment.
I could remember the first poster I’d put up on my walls—a picture of the Empire State Building with a black and white sunset behind it.
I’d carefully ripped it out of a TEEN-LYFE magazine and thumbtacked it to the wall, which Dad hadn’t been happy about.
After the fourth thumbtacked poster, he’d bought me wall-safe tape.
The Empire State Building loomed over my bed, a reminder of where the dream started before I fell asleep.
A dream I’d gotten myself to stop hoping for, now potentially actually gone forever.
Wrenching my gaze away, I went to my desk, where my laptop was pushed in the far corner. With shaking fingers, I logged into my email. My heart thumped furiously in my chest as the webpage loaded, and I searched all the subjects.
Nothing from NYU. I quickly loaded my application portal and found the same. No update.
I let out a breath, feeling both disappointed and relieved. With NYU, they only gave waitlisted students a couple of days to accept before moving on to other applicants. If I’d missed that window…
But it was stupid to think about, anyway. Even if they did take students off the waitlist this year, there were probably thousands to comb through. I most likely would not be one of them.
I slid my sketchbook out of my bag I’d left propped on the floor. Instead of flipping to the last page I worked on, I flipped to a random one. And then immediately let out a breathy laugh.
I could still remember the day Jamie had slid my sketchbook away from me, using the pen he always kept with his notebook to sketch something in the pages.
Jamie had tried to draw me. My hair was simple squiggles, and my eyes were twice the size they should’ve been.
I looked like an alien with spaghetti for hair.
He looks at you like he wants to write about you.
I snorted a little at the thought. Maybe, but he draws me like he can’t stand me.
I hadn’t gotten the chance to really talk with Jamie today after everything that’d happened.
Even though Nellie had tried to pressure me into getting lunch with them earlier, after the heart attack that was losing Theo, I’d just wanted to go home.
Dalton lingered with us longer than he should’ve, trying to pry his way back into the conversation, but my eyes had only found Jamie’s.
And in Jamie’s gaze, I could finally tap back into Bestie Telepathy. We’ll talk later.
I flipped to a new page and found a sketch of Kit from earlier in the year.
I’d drawn him smiling, a rare sight for him, because he hardly had anything to smile about.
In this sketch, he was smiling brightly down the barrel of a gun in an amputated hand.
From the side profile, I could see a dimple in his cheek.
One that looked just like Jamie’s.
That was why Jamie’s dimple was so familiar that day in Jefferson—I’d drawn it before without realizing it.
Swallowing a sigh, I kneaded my hand to my forehead.
I wondered, again, how Jamie would feel if he found out I’d been drawing him.
It wasn’t like I’d crafted Kit as some sort of dream boyfriend.
He’d been my comfort character. A familiar face to draw when all the other faces hurt too much to look at.
A character I could kill off again and again, but he’d always bounce back unscathed.
Even though it was weird, it made sense that it was Jamie. I thought of his hand on my back, his soothing voice in my ear. You’re okay.
I shouldn’t have told Jamie I’d been drawing Dalton. I should’ve been honest.
I never should’ve let college get between us, either. I was failing at every turn.
Setting my pencil down, I pulled my phone from my pocket.
Whatcha doing?
At the exact same time I pressed send, my phone lit up with an incoming call. My heart skipped a beat as I read the name, and for a moment, I stared at the screen as it vibrated in my hand. In a quiet voice, I lifted my phone to my ear and murmured, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Jamie replied, almost as soft. An undercurrent of amusement filled his voice. “Did you just text me?”
“Yeah. I guess we were both missing each other at the same time, huh?”
He gave a small laugh at that, and a smile tugged up my own lips. “It’s that Bestie Telepathy you and Nellie always talk about.”
I traced a fingernail down the bumps of my sketchbook’s spiral, an almost musical noise coming from it. “I guess so.” The page in front of me was Kit-slash-Jamie, still smiling at the gun. “What were you calling about?”
Jamie hesitated, and I wondered if he was going to tell me you go first to get out of whatever he planned.
A faint sigh filtered through, almost like it was directly in my ear.
“I hate fighting with you, Daisy.” I could picture him clearly in my mind.
Eyes wide. Soft. Sad. “It makes me sick to my stomach.”
I leaned closer to the sketchbook, elbow planting on the desk. “Me too. I—”
“Daisy!” Theo bolted into my bedroom, far too much energy for needing to be asleep soon. “It’s time to get ready for bed, Mom says. Come help me pick out some pjs.”
I held my phone away from my mouth. “Can’t you pick out your own?”
“Nooo, you have to help me.” He wound his little hands around my arm, in the crease of my elbow, and tugged. “Come on, before Ivy gets to the bathroom first.”
“Can I—” Theo pulled my arm again, hard enough that he nearly yanked my phone from my ear.
“Can I call you back after I get the kids in bed? It shouldn’t take too long.
I mean—if you’ll still have your phone. I know your mom usually does a curfew.
” I didn’t know if that was different now that it was summer.
“My mom doesn’t do phone curfews anymore now that Nellie and I are eighteen.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” I scratched my neck—the exact spot Jamie had kissed. “Well. I’ll call you, then. If you’ll still be up. Or we can just talk tomorrow.”
“Daisy?”
I closed my eyes. He’d heard the anxiety in my voice, too. “Yeah?”
Silence crackled over the line for a beat. And then, hesitantly—“Can I… come over?”
“Y-Yeah. Sure.” My voice was a murmur of its own, the pressure on my chest disappearing. “Don’t come to the front door, though. Can you come through the backyard?”
Jamie agreed and let me hang up first. I found myself rushing to my feet. “Okay, pajamas,” I said, grabbing Theo’s hand and pulling him. “Let’s pick some out.”
“Slow—down,” my little brother grunted, trying to wrench his hand away, but I didn’t let go.