Chapter 32
July, Four Years Ago
I feel so alone.
It’s a feeling with teeth. I’m floating through a black hole of sensory deprivation. Food has no taste. Music sounds like nothing. My nose is stuffed with cotton.
As I splay on my living room carpet, the sunlight painting my legs through a window begs to burn me and fails.
And though I can’t sense anything, my body takes on sadness like water.
I keep imagining my whole family playing find the strawberry. In our backyard. In the park. In downtown Bristol. For an hour or two, everyone was so focused on finding me. Being the first person to get to me, stay with me, wait for the others to join us until we were all together.
All together.
Did Dad raise us with so much autonomy that my sisters gave all their dependency to me? Was it passed down like Maren’s laptop and Candice’s bicycle, Folly’s clothes, Zara’s books? Am I holding all their anxious attachment in my body?
I write lyrics in my head like a doctor prescribing a bleak diagnosis.
She swallowed their reliance
gathered up their drips of doubt
Lonely grew inside her body
where it festooned and made its house.
Quiet tears stripe down to decorate my earlobes.
I just want to be wanted the way I want other people.
I want Dad to call me more often than he does. I wish he’d send pictures of the farm every day instead of guiltily avoiding the details. I wish he could hear me play music without thinking of my mother.
I want my sisters to need me. Even one of them, even once.
I want Maisy to miss me the way I miss her.
I want Evan to admit that I was his na?ve little bed warmer.
I want him to take a polygraph and answer questions like Did you know what you were doing?
Did you know it wasn’t fair? Did you listen at all when I told you that you were my first time, my first boyfriend, or did you listen way too closely?
I want Liam—
I want Liam.
You walk through the world, perceive it, connect to it, in this one specific way.
I’m doing it even now. I lie there and write the entire song in my mind: “Lonely House.”
“Fuck you,” I whisper to the ceiling when I’m done, with no bite.
I don’t move for over an hour.
Folly eventually comes back from who knows where. She slips quietly into the apartment and says nothing. Just sits beside me on the carpet, her legs crisscrossed. I don’t look at her.
“What were you doing?” I ask.
“Got coffee with a friend from high school. She’s on her way to Baja, Mexico, and asked if I wanted to tag along and help with some odd jobs that she has lined up down there. House-sitting, landscaping, nannying, stuff like that.”
Fresh tears well in my eyes.
I still don’t even have a fucking passport.
“Sounds right up your alley,” I whisper.
“Paige, what’s wrong? Is Liam okay?”
Finally, I roll my head to look at Folly.
Concern is etched into her every pore. She’s listened to me all week as I described the surgery, his mental state, his drugged-up I love you, his daily updates while he rested at home in Savannah.
We’ve spent days packing up this apartment since the lease ends in two weeks and Folly isn’t planning to stay in Knoxville past then.
She’s been voicing ideas for what comes next for her, correctly assuming I’d orient mine around Liam.
I was planning to find a cheaper apartment, a studio, somewhere close to his dorm.
“You didn’t know?” I ask.
“Know what?”
Brokenly, I explain. Everything. Folly is far more interested in why Liam applied me than she is that he applied me behind my back. She’s always known me to be musical, but I admit to her that songwriting has become an important part of my life over the last two years.
Folly doesn’t even blink when I tell her Zara and Maren were both in on it.
“I’m sure Zara was on the fence and Maren convinced her,” she grumbles.
“Yeah,” I agree.
“Why don’t you want to go to Belmont?” she asks.
I sit upright, blood rushing from my head. My fingers rub at my temples. “It’s not that I’m trying to be contrary,” I say.
“Right,” Folly says, lips curving. “You aren’t me.”
I smile at her weakly as the sense of being in my body finally returns. “What if I can’t cut it?” I whisper.
She doesn’t hesitate. “What if you can?”
“What if the other students are out of my league?”
She shrugs. “What if you have to work really fucking hard to catch up?”
My eyes mist. “What if taking something seriously is what kills my love for it?”
“Well, now you just sound like my exes,” she whispers with a sarcastic smirk.
I laugh brittlely, pushing away my hair. “Really, though. I’m terrified to lose the purity of this. Songwriting has never abandoned me. When I keep it to myself, music can’t outgrow me or move on from me or leave me behind,” I say softly.
Folly chews on her lip. “Like the rest of us have,” she infers.
I shrug.
“Remember when I said the guy I followed to Portland convinced me to cut myself off from you all?” she asks, and I nod. “That was also so he could keep me to himself. So I couldn’t outgrow him, or move on from him, or leave him behind.”
“You’re saying I’m treating this thing I love like something I want to control.”
“I’m saying people aren’t meant to be controlled, and neither is art.”
I shake my head. “But what if it’s not even good art?”
“What if it is?” she asks. “And what if you had the chance to make it even better?”
She watches me with hope. A kind of optimism that kinetically transfers. I wonder if Folly’s aware she’s wearing me down, if she understands she’s turning a one-way door into a clear, open window.
Then I know she is when she says, “You can go and still be pissed at them. You can go and be frustrated at how you got there. You can be so angry that you block phone numbers, and write mean, ruthless lyrics, and do what they want out of spite and absolutely nothing else. I give you permission. I’ll be pissed at them too. ”
I laugh briefly. “They don’t get to say I told you so.”
“They don’t get to say you’re welcome,” she adds.
“I’ll learn enough to write one scathing song about each of them. And then I’ll drop out if I feel like it.”
“And you’ll meet me in Mexico.”
“And you’ll pick up the phone if I call,” I say, though it’s also a question.
Folly nods and whispers, “I promise.”
“I’m so fucking scared,” I say.
She grabs both of my hands and locks her green eyes on mine. “But if your curiosity and your fear were on a balanced scale—which side would weigh more?”
Stage five: acceptance.