29. Skylar #2
Her thumb lifted from the screen and her mother’s voice, the one she carried in the space between memory and invention, reminded Skylar that the camera sees truth; your job is to be brave enough to show it.
The truth on the display was a semester-long record of a woman who had crossed a line she swore she’d hold.
She’d walked through willingly, eyes open, lens focused, and never once turned around to measure how far she’d come from the girl who arrived at Thorndale with her mother’s mission and her sister’s scholarship and a hatred of everything this marble kitchen represented.
Had she become what she hated? The Heffernan family lived in a world of marble and money and zero consequences.
Skylar stood in a kitchen made of the same stone, holding a mug she didn’t pay for, wearing a hoodie she didn’t buy, editing photographs on a laptop she accepted as a loan she hadn’t yet repaid.
The distance between the two worlds had disappeared, and the erosion happened while her camera was pointed at the light instead of the rot.
The refrigerator cycled on behind her, a low mechanical hum that filled the kitchen, and the ordinariness of the sound pressed against the extraordinary weight of what she’d just seen on the camera’s display.
That might not be the worst part: the light might be temporary.
Charlie’s girlfriends have expiration dates.
Brennan had told her as much, that Charlie’s girlfriends came with expiration dates, and the bribe she still hadn’t mentioned to Charlie sat sealed away with the rest of what she kept from him.
When it ended, when Charlie’s attention moved on the way his father promised it would, the memory card would be what was left of him.
A folder of warm, tender frames of a man who no longer wanted her.
She knew what a photograph of someone you’d lost was worth, because the only Kate she had left lived in a frame on her desk, a girl wrapping a blanket around a stranger’s shoulders in a flooded town.
She had aimed her camera at the one person she’d sworn she wouldn’t need, and without meaning to, she had already begun turning him into someone she could only look at.
Her phone sat on the counter beside the credit card.
She could call Poppy. Poppy who she hadn’t seen in a week.
Or Rosa who was prepping for the dinner rush.
The words were simple enough: I reached for his card without thinking and I don’t know who I am anymore.
But Poppy would tell her she was overthinking, and Rosa would tell her she deserved good things, and neither answer would touch the thing that actually frightened her, the ease of reaching for Charlie’s credit card, the absence of alarm in her own body, the way her hand had known where the card was before her brain caught up.
That wasn’t a problem her friends in New Haven would understand.
Her own card came out of the wallet. The numbers went into the payment screen. Forty-seven dollars left her checking account, and the sting of the withdrawal spread through her, sharp and necessary.
Charlie’s credit card stayed on the counter, black against white marble. Six inches of cold stone between her hand and the plastic, and she needed every inch.
Her phone lit up. Jake’s name, and a photo of a shiny gray metal box.
Jake:
New panel installed. Told the electrician the family’s good for balanced owed.
She set the phone down. Jake was covering a funds shortage with nothing but his own word in a town that took a man at his good reputation, buying her time to earn the bonus that would clear the rest. Her gaze shifted to the black card.
She’d spent the same weeks learning the warmth of a card that wasn’t hers.
Somewhere underneath the shame, a far-off version of this had her clearing that balance herself one day, then the next one, taking the weight off Jake and off Grams for good, her grandfather’s shop hers to protect.
She looked at the black card on the marble, the one that wasn’t hers, and the daydream soured. She couldn’t cover her own coffee.
Her fingers curled against the cold marble, the same hand that had reached for his card without asking, and she pressed it flat until the knuckles ached, as if holding still long enough could undo what the reaching had already told her about herself.
Then she walked to the living room and pulled the quilt over her shoulders and sat in the failing light with her hands folded in her lap to stop them from shaking.
Senior Night was two days away. The final promotional event. The last payment. The bonus that was supposed to make her whole again.
Her thumb found the hollow at the base of her throat and pressed, and she held still, breathing, while the November dark filled the condo.
The elevator would open soon. Charlie would walk through the door with that look he saved for the moment he found her in his apartment, the one that said the day had been long, but this part was worth it.
She would stand up and cross the room and press her face against his chest and breathe in grass and ocean and let herself be held by a man whose warmth she could no longer separate from her own.