22. Everett
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Everett
THEN
My head feels like it’s about ten times its size. I don’t even know how I made it to my bed. But somehow, I’m nestled on a soft surface surrounded by cushions and a thin blanket. Hopefully my mom didn’t see me stumble home. But when I open my eyes, I realize I’m not in my room. I’m not even in my house. I’m still on Jake’s couch, only without the haze of darkness and flickering lights and loud music, and it makes me feel low and regretful.
A tumble of empty cans and glass bottles clatter somewhere, and the sounds feel like a fighter jet flying over me. My head starts to pound as I sit up.
“Jesus,” I mutter, my throat feeling like it’s full of coarse desert sand.
“You all right there, Hayes?”
I twist my neck to look behind me but immediately regret it, my shoulder aching like hell from the distorted position it was in on Jake’s couch. “What the fuck happened?”
“I have no idea,” Jake answers, looking just about as bad as I feel. “I woke up to pee and found you here.”
I scramble for my phone in my pocket to check the time. It’s just after ten o’clock. “Shit!” I mutter. “I need to go.” I stand to leave when something hard and plastic crunches under my shoe. I lift my foot to find a pregnancy test. Teeny’s pregnancy test. I pick it up, further examining the dark line cutting across the little window, and last night comes flooding back to me. Teeny looking at me, her eyes filling with tears and this tangible hatred toward me. She’s never looked at me like that. Like she wishes me dead while hoping I’d somehow survive her bid. And I just sat there, nailed to the sofa while she walked away.
I rush to my car, running a hand through my disheveled hair, and buckle in, racing back home. I park my car in my driveway, seeing my mom’s car parked next to mine, and rush to Teeny’s house.
I ring the doorbell and wait as patiently as I can, fidgeting with my keys and tapping my foot against the doormat. When the door finally opens, I see James on the other side.
“Uh, hi,” I say awkwardly. “Is Teeny home?”
He eyes me warily. “She’s in her room.”
“Can I talk to her?”
He opens the door wider, and I rush past him, not bothering to appear calm. I take two steps at a time up the stairs to Teeny’s room, knowing I’m probably breaking a rule by being up here. It looks like Teeny and James are the only ones home, and it brings my nerves down a notch knowing her parents aren’t around.
When I reach her door, I find that it’s open, left slightly ajar. I knock gently before pressing a hand to it. Teeny’s there, roughly shoving some of her things into her backpack, and she watches me as I walk in. Whatever sad expression she had on her face sours into that hate and anger again.
“What do you want, Everett?” she asks coolly.
“Teeny,” I say, inching toward her only to find that I suddenly feel unwelcome. “I’m so sorry.”
“About what?” she asks, her hands moving angrily around her. “For getting drunk and cozying up with Angelica? For getting mad at me because you thought I was pregnant?” She stops what she’s doing, turning to face me. She throws a blow to my chest, shoving me a step back. “For blaming me because you thought I ruined your life?”
My hands loosely grip her wrists. My fingers trail her skin, skimming over her pulse point, but she pulls away before I can feel the beat of her heart. “All of it. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t care.” She zips up her bag and hooks it over her shoulder.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go to Diana’s,” she tells me, her eyes trained on the door behind me. “We’re working on a project for English that’s due after spring break.”
“Teeny, please,” I plead. “Talk to me.”
She chucks her bag on the floor, finally looking at me. It’s then I see how much last night took a toll on her. Her eyes are puffy, swollen and red from a night’s worth of tears. Her hair is all over the place, strands matted to her forehead, and she’s not wearing my hoodie anymore. She’s changed into something of her own, and of all the details of her appearance, that little bit hurts the most. “You hurt me so bad,” she finally says, her voice wavering. “And you go and embarrass me like that.”
My head hangs between my shoulders, so ashamed of my actions even as I acted in a drunken fog. “Teeny, I’m so sorry.”
“You know what those girls said to me?” she asks, her eyes growing misty. “They told me that you finally got the girl you really wanted and led me right to where Angelica was practically straddling you. They shoved in my face that you cheated on me.”
“I didn’t cheat on you?—”
“That doesn’t matter!” she shouts. “That was so humiliating! I stood there, watching her touch you and throw herself all over you while you did nothing! All while I went and—” Her words are cut off by a sudden sob. “I went and got that pregnancy test by myself. I stood there while the cashier looked at me and judged me. And I took the test all by myself when all I wanted was for you to be there for me!” I reach for her to wipe at the tears now trailing down her face, but she leans away from me. “I needed you last night, but you…” She stops, her body sagging like she’s exhausted. “I need to go. I already promised Diana I’d meet her.”
“Teeny, please. Don’t go.”
“Just leave, Everett. I have nothing else to say to you.”
Teeny brisks past me, and I don’t stop her. When I hear the front door open and close, followed by the sound of her car starting, I leave her room. I awkwardly walk past James in the living room, giving him an uncomfortable nod, before walking over to my house.
When I see my mom in the kitchen, she’s sitting there, staring blankly at a steaming cup of coffee. She looks up when I walk in, and her face shifts to confusion. “Did you just get in?” she asks, her voice hoarse.
I nod.
“Jesus, Everett,” she says, somehow sounding even more exhausted than last night. “What the hell were you doing out all night? Were you with Teeny?”
“No.” My answer is curt as I reach for the fridge for some juice.
It’s quiet in our house, though the silence isn’t in any way comforting. I move about the kitchen, my steps sluggish and weary, as I pull up a stool in front of my mom. Both of us sit there, the exhaustion evident in our posture and our slackened expressions. I don’t know what to say to her. If I should ask her about my dad or what’s going to happen moving forward. And I think she feels the same way about me, wondering why I’m in such a morose state as if my heart is as broken as hers.
“We’re going back home.”
I feel like I’ve been sucker punched. “What?”
My mom’s grave and grim expression matches the level tone of her voice. But when she finally looks at me, all of that’s swiped away. The formidable way she said we’re leaving and the stone-like expression that said she means business. It’s all gone as she looks at me, as if silently asking me if she’s making the right decision. “We have to go back.”
I start to panic. “Why? Mom, why do you want to go back?”
I see her hands start to tremble and just how badly her exhaustion is taking a toll on her. The dark circles around her eyes, her chapped lips and sunken cheeks, her disheveled hair and the same clothes she was wearing yesterday. She’s been brewing over this. All night. She didn’t get a wink of sleep, and she’s come to this decision in the delirium of insomnia.
“I have to fix things. I have to talk to your dad and let him know that this was just a mistake.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? He ch?—”
“No, Everett!” she says harshly, shutting me down in an instant. “It was a mistake. It’s my fault.”
What the hell is she talking about? How is this whole situation her fault? I watch her as she convinces herself to take full responsibility for my dad’s actions. I see it in the way her eyes shift as she says the words, an underlying shakiness that accompanies them. I can tell she’s been repeating them to herself all night. I don’t know how to dispute her at this point. I don’t know if she’ll even hear me, let alone let me get in a word through the fog of her misconstrued blame.
“I should’ve never come back here,” she continues, her words not necessarily directed at me. “I gave him permission to be with someone else. Especially after he’d already done this, I should’ve known better.”
I realize then that this woman isn’t the same woman who raised me. The same woman who taught me to be confident and humble, always reminding me who I was and where I came from despite whatever challenges life threw in my direction. She would’ve never let me lose sight of who I was, no matter what. And she especially would’ve never let me shoulder another person’s faults when I was clearly the victim.
Now, looking at her, I see how weak she is. She let my dad shrivel her down into this broken version of herself, willing to take the blame for the sake of her marriage.
“We’re leaving tomorrow.” Her voice is cold, and the iciness of it drains all the blood from my body.
“What?”
She stands from her seat and walks off up the stairs. I follow close at her heels. “I got a flight leaving first thing in the morning,” she continues, not bothering to look me in the eyes as she tells me she’s uprooting me once again. “Pack what you can, and I’ll come back for the rest. Or I’ll send someone.”
“Mom, this is ridiculous,” I plead. I start to feel clammy and shaky. I don’t know what to do or how to convince my mom to change her mind. We can’t leave. We just can’t.
“No!” she shouts.
She turns to face me, a darkness cast over her features. It shadows the warm, loving woman who never raised her voice at me. Who used to laugh and play with me and hold me when I woke up in the middle of the night from a scary nightmare. “Everett, we are leaving. This is not up for discussion. I’m not going to stay here so you can stay out all night with your little friends while my marriage falls apart! You are just going to have to make this sacrifice!”
She ends her sentence by turning away and slamming the door behind her as soon as she walks into her room.
I’m dumbfounded. Completely speechless. I can’t believe she’d say that to me. As if I’m some martyr in this whole mess, taking the brunt of everything like I’m being punished. As if she and I aren’t the ones suffering after what my dad did.
I start to think of ways to work through this mess. How am I going to pack all of my things in less than twenty-four hours? And what about school? Am I just going back to my old school? Or finish out the year from home? My mom has to have thought about that before coming to this decision.
Or maybe…maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe I can convince her to let me stay. She wouldn’t have to worry about transferring schools, and it’ll only be for another couple of months until I graduate. I’ll be eighteen soon, in a little over a week, and I can be here on my own in this house. I can promise her I’ll be good, be on my best behavior. I can finish out my senior year and go off to college like I’ve been planning. And maybe once I fix things with Teeny, we can talk about her joining me up north. She hasn’t told me where she wants to go to school, and maybe we can have that discussion as soon as things settle at home.
I just need to talk to Teeny. Let her know what’s going on so…I don’t know. Maybe she can hold my hand through this? I can’t do this without her. I need her on my side.
I just need to talk to her.
* * *
I’ve been sitting at the curb between mine and Teeny’s house for the past two hours, waiting for her to come home, hoping I can get a minute with her. So I can tell her what’s happening and my plan. We can figure this out as long as we have each other. We’ll work through this.
My head jerks up when I hear a car pull into the cul-de-sac followed by the familiar rumble of the engine from the car Teeny and Josh share. She sees me as she pulls to a stop at the curb, and her eyes turn cold as she looks at me through the passenger window. I stand as she exits the car and hooks her backpack over her shoulder. She ignores me, beelining to her house, but I stop her.
“Teeny, can we talk?”
“I don’t really want to talk to you,” she says, her back turned to me.
“But you have to let me explain?—”
“Everett,” she interrupts, whipping around to finally face me. She has a hand cut across the space between us, her stance concise and unbending. “Look, I’ve been thinking, and maybe this is for the best. You’re leaving for college in a few months. There’s no way this would’ve worked.”
Confusion starts to edge its way into every nerve ending in my body. My jaw twitches with the effort to not argue with Teeny, and my face transitions into a full scowl at her assumption. How could she think this? And how long has she thought this? This whole time, while I’ve been planning visits back to San Diego during long weekends and holidays in the fall, plotting the quickest route from Sacramento to her, and even looking up flights so we could make the most of my short visits, was she already thinking about ending things?
“Teeny, how could you think that?” I try to keep my voice calm and collected, wanting to make sure I stay as levelheaded as possible so we can figure out a way for me to stay, but I’m buzzing with the urgency and desperation to fix things. My chest feels like it’s being compressed, making it hard to breathe, and my hands start to feel numb and clammy.
“You’re going to have your own life up there, and you don’t need an annoying girlfriend hundreds of miles away, calling you all the time and wondering where the hell you are.”
“You know it’s not like that.” I focus on Teeny’s eyes. Dark pits of chocolate with golden whiskey rings, and layers and layers of different shades. Mocha, chestnut, bronze, sepia. Even with the sadness and hurt cloaking them, they somehow ground me. Right here, between our homes and in her arms. I can’t lose her.
Her lips purse and her chin trembles, evidence that she’s holding back her tears. “I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you can trust me.”
She responds with silence, creating a barrier between us by crossing her arms.
Not knowing what else to say to convince her, I tell her, “I’m still me.”
“Are you?”
“Of course,” I plead, stooping down to meet her at eye level. “I still love you. I still want us to be together. I still want to make this work after I leave.”
“I don’t know if I want that anymore.”
“Are you serious?” Everything evaporates. All of the plans I laid down for us, me staying here and finishing school so I can be near her, all of it revolving around my life with her. It disappears into thin air. She wants nothing to do with me.
Her lips pucker as she exhales a shaky breath. “I can’t be here wondering if you’re going to be hooking up with girls, going to parties, and getting drunk. I can’t—I wouldn’t be able to stand it if you…”
“I’d never hurt you.”
“But you did.”
“Teeny, it was a mistake,” I tell her.
“And how many more mistakes are there going to be before we realize it isn’t going to work?”
“So this is what you want?”
Everything about her body says yes. Her squared shoulders, her arms still braced over her chest, the firm line her lips are set in. But not her eyes. They tell a different story. Fight for me , they say. “Don’t you think it’s for the best?” she finally responds with a shrug, letting that uncertainty ring higher.
“No,” I tell her. “No, I don’t.”
That speck of hope that glinted in her eyes begins to waver. They start to well with tears, and a moment passes where she considers it. My plea, my regret, my guilt and remorse. Her face softens as if she’s going to break, letting me have that chance that I want with every fiber of my being.
But then it fades, the stone-like restraint reminding her of the night she had.
“Everett,” she whispers. She closes her eyes, and a tear slips down her cheek. “I don’t want to make this any harder than it needs to be. Please, just give me some space. Let me get over you and move on.”
I stay quiet, letting her words echo and ring in the air. I watch as she turns away and walks inside, never looking back at me once.