17. The Calm After The Storm
THE CALM AFTER THE STORM
SUTTON
Lake Capitano is a hurricane. Not in the sense that she’s messy and unpredictable, but in the sense that she’s strong, unyielding, passionate. She loves without caution. She loves without boundaries. She channels her emotions into actions, and that’s more than I can say for myself.
I can’t believe I just stood there and let that snooty piece of shit speak down to her. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t my place—I should’ve had her back in there. I insisted on coming with her to the meeting. She had every right to lash out at me.
And fuck, don’t even get me started on the terrible things her brother said. It was bad enough that he took some gnarly punches, but from one of his hockey teammates? The people who are supposed to have his back on and off the ice?
As we sit on a bench in the peculiarly warm weather—a respite from what seems like a perpetual pall of ground-hugging fog—ice cream is a temporary fix. I can’t bring myself to eat.
Unspoken words stall on my tongue, and my stomach rolls with a nausea that can’t be tamed into clarity. I stare down at the overprocessed mound of sugar sinking into the biodegradable lining of my cup, and tiny runnels of condensation fall down the mountain range of my knuckles.
Meanwhile, Max happily laps at his ice cream a few feet away from us. Either he’s genuinely forgiving, or this is all just a ruse to make it seem as if his heart isn’t currently breaking into two.
Lake, on the other hand, is in the same boat as me. She hasn’t touched her treat since she sat down. She reminds me of a feral animal that’s still unfamiliarized with the good nature of humans—one that’s only eaten from a generous palm a single time in the past and deemed it a fluke.
A line of tension runs through my shoulders—which just so happen to be crowding against hers—and I silently negotiate with my heart to be still, as if she can hear the incessant jackhammering from where she sits.
She’s uncharacteristically quiet. I can only imagine the things she says to herself when no one else is around to hear.
None of this is her fault. She knows that, right?
When I gather the smallest metric of courage to speak, my voice is an overture to the crackling chorus of a vindictive storm. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t going to fix anything,” I say in a hushed whisper, falling prey to my hyperactive thoughts.
It takes a few seconds for Lake to snap back to the present. Wherever she went, I couldn’t follow her.
“Huh? Oh. No, this is”—she glances at her brother, who’s still blissfully lost to a sugar-induced haze—“this is perfect. Thank you.”
“It’s not enough,” I blurt out, watching her expression fall in real time.
I hate the way despondency clings to her brow, darkening the light that I’ve grown to look for in every room I walk into. Light as luminescent as Lake’s can’t be replicated or bottled. It exists in its own vacuum, and I’m one of the few idiots lucky enough to have experienced it.
A frown flits over her lips. “It is. I lost my cool back there, and I made my brother look bad. I made you look bad by association. I should be the one apologizing.”
“You shouldn’t apologize for being human,” I tell her, wishing that I could reach out and hold her hand right now.
She hyper fixates on the ski slope of sorbet glistening underneath the midday sun. Her inextinguishable self-hatred is a match that catches flame even despite the wind that forbids it.
Realization dawns a moment later. “Neither should you.”
I can’t help but chuckle. It’s flat, sure, but it’s a sign that I’m not completely numb. “You have an astounding track record for being right, you know that?”
“Mm-hm. It’s my greatest quality,” she says.
With my free hand, I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear with a reverence I only employ when it comes to her. She looks at me as my fingers delicately brush her skin, her pupils doubling in size.
“I think your greatest quality is empathy.”
“Empathy? I nearly bit Max’s principal’s head off back there,” she scoffs.
“Because you were protecting your brother. That asshole was out of line with you and was more concerned about upholding the school’s reputation than getting justice for Max.
” I feel a growl crescendo at the back of my throat, and I reflexively squeeze the cardboard cup in my other hand.
So tightly that I don’t even register the overflow of ice cream that has spilled down the rim and adhered to my fingers. I wipe the carnage off with a napkin.
Where I’m smoking like a fired gun, Lake wallows in a doldrum that’s been established for what I can only assume has been years. She’s tirelessly clawing her way up from the depths of a sinkhole just to lose her footing and slide back down into a mess of topsoil and groundwater.
“Why are you being so nice to me? I hid my true self from you. I intentionally kept my past a secret.” The capillaries in her glossy eyes are close to bursting.
“I’m not entitled to know everything about you. You weren’t keeping your past from me to deceive me. You were trying not to relive the worst moment of your life.”
I had no idea that Lake lost her sister, but her reality is my greatest fear. If I had to endure something as horrific as losing a loved one, I don’t think I’d ever be whole again. My mom walked out on her own accord. She wasn’t taken from me.
“You give me a lot more credit than I’m worth, Whittaker.”
I don’t think Lake will ever understand how much she means to me.
Seeing her so defeated is a death sentence that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy.
I have to take care of her. Not out of obligation, but out of the crushing desperation to be one of the few people she welcomes readily into her life.
I think before I speak—a common theme, I’ve come to notice.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask, uncertain if she maintains our close proximity because she needs a shoulder to lean on, or if she’s more afraid of bearing the weight alone.
I fight against the impulse to wrap her in my arms and never let go.
She consumes me—every waking thought, every breath I take.
There’s no corner of the earth that I could run to where her memory wouldn’t follow me like an unbreakable curse, the feel of her touch still imprinted across my hindbrain.
She pauses before setting her ice cream down. “It’s a lot to digest.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, I just—I want to warn you that you’ll probably see me differently after this,” she confesses with a heavy heart, eyes telescoped on a spot of grime discoloring the cement.
A tumor of worry pulsates in the pit of my gut, and I take two fingers and hook them under her chin, imploring her to face me.
She obeys the sleight of my hand, the normally brilliant blue of her eyes dreary and overcast with a shower of unshed tears.
It’s like all the life has been siphoned from her body, leaving behind the husk of a girl who’s had to accept pain as her new norm.
“That’s not possible.”
She doesn’t argue with me or laugh my comment off with that lighthearted smile of hers that could cure this world of rot and sickness and the clotted wound of immorality that coruscates under every jaundiced streetlight in a seedy back alleyway.
Her throat bobs with a swallow, and when her voice breaches the stagnant air, it doesn’t sound like it belongs to her.
“It was July fourth, and I was fifteen. My parents were outside drinking with some extended family, and I was responsible for looking after Max and my little sister, Audie. We were playing tag like we always did. It was getting dark outside, and I wasn’t looking where I was going, and—and something happened. Something bad.”
I’m sick to my fucking stomach because I know what she’s going to say, and for her sake, I almost cut her off. But I don’t. She needs me to listen to her, not fix something that’s unfixable.
I nod—a wordless reassurance that she’s safe from judgment.
“It all happened so fast. One second, sh-she was in front of me, laughing, and the next, she was on the floor, lying in a pool of her own blood. She had cracked her head on the corner of the coffee table. I screamed for help, but nobody heard me over the fireworks. I just sat there, with my sister dying in my arms, and I did nothing. When the paramedics arrived, she was already dead. There was nothing…th-they could do,” she sobs, a string of tears threading through her lower lashes, glimmering like pearls surfacing on a distant shore.
“Oh, Lake,” I coo.
She wipes her face roughly against her forearm.
“She was so cold. I-I couldn’t hear anything.
All I remember is the look on Max’s face.
He was confused and scared and I just stood there.
I fucked him up, Sutton. I ruined our family.
My dad couldn’t handle it and bailed. He’s not in Max’s life anymore because of what I did.
I was supposed to protect Audie. She was my responsibility. ”
The tears fall at an unprecedented pace, streaking through her foundation and merging into one rivulet that disappears under her chin.
Damning the fault line between us, I embrace her in my arms, providing her with the support that she never got from the people who were supposed to protect her.
Lake burrows into my frame, and I stroke the back of her head. “It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault. You were just a kid. It shouldn’t have been your responsibility to look after her.”
I feel her ball the back of my shirt into her tiny fists, her cries breaking off into hiccups that wrack the entirety of her body. She clings to me as if I’m the only lifeline she has—and it terrifies me to think about what would happen if she chose to let go.
“It doesn’t matter. My parents trusted me to watch her, and I failed them. I should’ve done more to stop the bleeding. I just…froze, and I’m going to be paying for my mistake for the rest of my life. It should’ve been me that night. It should’ve—”
“Please don’t say that,” I beg, feeling the wetness on my cheeks before I register that I’m even crying.
I rarely cry in front of people because I’ve been conditioned to compartmentalize my feelings, but I’m so tired of keeping people at a distance. Lake’s pain is my pain. Aside from my father, nobody has ever meant this much to me.
“It was a mistake. A horrible mistake, but a mistake all the same. You aren’t to blame, Lake. Nobody is to blame except for your parents putting all that heartache and grief on you.”
For the first time in minutes, Lake pulls back, still looking as beautiful as the first day I met her despite the twin waterfalls that cascade down her puffy skin.
She’s somewhat of an incorporeal mirage in my own line of vision, blurred around the edges, plucked straight from hypnagogia and dropped into a liminal space of consciousness.
A walking dream of my innermost desires—an empyrean heaven.
There aren’t enough words in this universe to express my undying devotion to her.
“I’m a terrible person. I ruin everything around me.”
Her confession has made me realize that she’s so much stronger than she appears—which is already an impressive feat considering she’s the strongest person I know.
Her quick wit and sharp tongue knocked me onto my ass, but getting to see this vulnerable side of her is a privilege I’ll never take for granted.
“Hey, hey.” I take my thumb and dab at some of the residual moisture on her cheek. “You don’t. You make things better.”
Her voice quiets. “No, I don’t.”
Three words that have my belly twisting and a haunting whisper of dread weaving in and out of the catacombs of my skull. If she’s adamant about giving up on herself, then I’ll work ten times harder to convince her to stay.
As one last gesture of reassurance, I cup her face in my hands, the tiniest ember of hope kindling inside of me. “You have for me, Lake. It’s barely been a month, but you’ve changed my life for the better, and I’ll do everything in my power to make you see that—no matter how long it takes.”
Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but I swear her eyes brighten the slightest bit, and the girl whom I’ve grown an unhealthy attachment to is back in the flesh, fighting every urge to disappear just so I can breathe easily again.
“I don’t know what I could’ve possibly done to deserve you,” she mumbles beneath her breath, leaning into my touch.
“Being you has always been enough.”
“Thank you for listening…and not running away.”
I chuckle. It’s cute that she doesn’t realize I’d move mountains for her if she simply asked to see the stars. “You’ll have to try a lot harder than that to get rid of me.”
She curls in on herself before raking her bottom lip between her teeth. “What am I going to do about Max?”
“He made a mistake, but he’ll get over it.” I gesture to her brother, who seems to be chasing a pigeon around the trunk of a tree. “See? He’s gonna be okay. And as far as the bullying situation goes, I think I can help with that.”