Chapter 2 Lily
I hate leaving, but Mom’s waiting, and there’s a version of tonight where I don’t get home in time that I’d rather not find out about firsthand.
It wasn’t until high school that I understood how different my life looked from everyone else’s, how most of my classmates had never once had to calculate whether a parent’s mood would cost them dinner.
I wouldn’t be in school at all if the state hadn’t stepped in and made her send me. She still tells people it was her idea.
The truth is a lot less flattering. A guidance counselor at my old middle school noticed I’d missed forty two days in a single year and made a call that turned into a home visit, which turned into a caseworker, which turned into a very tense conversation at our kitchen table that ended with my mother smiling too wide and promising everyone involved that of course Lily would be enrolled by fall.
She kept that promise the way she keeps most of them, technically, and with as little effort as she could get away with.
She fought the placement, too, not because she wanted me home, but because the district with the scholarship offer was forty minutes across town and she wasn’t driving me anywhere for anyone.
So I got the school that’s falling apart instead, the one with the leaking ceiling tiles and a library that hasn’t ordered a new book since before I was born.
I used to be furious about it. I’ve mostly made my peace with the fact that fury doesn’t fix broken plumbing or broken mothers.
My best friend, if I can call her that without her arguing the point, is a girl named Priya from chemistry, the only person at school who treats me like a person instead of a rumor.
We eat lunch in the back corner of the cafeteria where the teachers don’t patrol, and she’s the only one who knows about Noah, or at least the sanitized version I’ve given her, the one where he’s just a hot older guy I have a harmless crush on.
“You’re doing the thing again,” she said last week, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “The Noah thing. Your brain just left the building.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told her, heat crawling up my neck anyway.
“Sure you don’t.” She let it go, because that’s what Priya does. She doesn’t push. It’s one of the only reasons I can stand being around people most days.
Priya’s the only person who’s ever met my mother and come away more worried about me than impressed by her, which tells you most of what you need to know about both of them.
Her own parents run a little accounting firm downtown, unremarkable in every way that mine isn’t, and sometimes when I’m at her house for dinner I catch myself just watching them pass the salt to each other like it’s nothing, like normal families do that every single night without even noticing they’re doing it.
I don’t tell her how much those dinners mean to me.
I don’t think I have the words for it that wouldn’t come out sounding pathetic.
Priya thinks I’m being dramatic when I say things like that.
She doesn’t know what it’s like to flinch at the sound of your own front door, to have a whole vocabulary of careful movements built around not making a bad mood worse.
I don’t resent her for not knowing. I just envy it sometimes, the particular kind of safety that lets a person be loud in their own house without calculating the cost first.
There’s a whole world out here I don’t know much about, and I know that.
I’m not naive by choice, I’m naive because nobody ever gave me the chance to be anything else.
I made myself a promise a long time ago that every single day I’d do something, however small, to build a different life than the one I got handed.
Most days that promise looks like saving forty dollars from a tip jar. It still counts.
My shift at the restaurant ran long today, some birthday party of twelve that showed up forty minutes late and stayed two hours past when they should have, leaving crumbs and spilled soda and a tip that barely covered what I’d have made in half the time from a normal table.
I didn’t complain. You learn fast in this job that complaining gets you nothing except a manager who remembers your name for the wrong reasons.
I just refilled water glasses and smiled until my face ached and pocketed what I could, same as always.
Noah came in around the middle of it, like he does most days now, folding himself into the corner booth with a newspaper he never actually reads.
I felt him watching before I even turned around, that particular prickle down the back of my neck that’s become as familiar as my own heartbeat these past few weeks.
I didn’t let myself look over more than twice.
I’ve gotten better at that, mostly. The not looking.
It’s the wanting to look that never seems to get any easier.
I adjust my bag on my shoulder and cut toward the corner store for the list of things we’re out of.
“Hey, Lily,” Jim says when the bell over the door jingles.
“Hi.” I give him a small wave, already scanning the aisles.
“Party up at Jackson’s tonight. You coming?” He wiggles his eyebrows, which is somehow both ridiculous and endearing.
Jim’s been asking me to Jackson’s parties since sophomore year, same easy invitation every time, same easy no from me every time.
It’s not that I don’t like him. He’s about the closest thing to a friend I have besides Priya, always good for a free candy bar when the register’s a dollar over at closing and he needs an excuse to round down.
It’s just that showing up to a party means explaining where I’ve been for hours, and explaining where I’ve been is a math problem I don’t have the energy to solve most nights.
“Errands for my mom.” I grab a few things off the shelf. It’s not a lie, exactly. It’s just not the whole truth either, the way most things I tell people aren’t.
“You gotta live a little, Lily.” Priya’s been saying the same thing for two years, usually right before dragging me somewhere I have no business being, with a mother waiting up to check my pockets when I get home.
Maybe after graduation, when she can’t track my every move quite so easily, I’ll actually take the advice instead of nodding along to be polite.
I bring the rest of my things to the counter. “Are you ever going to ask Jenny out?”
“Yeah.” He sighs, defeated already.
“It’s fine.” I bite back a smile, because it’s a little tragic watching a genuinely nice guy crush on a girl who’s never once looked his way.
“Your mom texted the store line. Says you should’ve been home half an hour ago.”
“Got sidetracked.” It’s the truth, if you count Noah as a valid excuse for anything, which I absolutely do.
He’s been distracting me for weeks now, ever since I first saw him at the garage, all quiet confidence and rolled up sleeves, looking like safety and danger wearing the same face.
I know he’s too old for me. I know it the way you know a stove is hot after you’ve already touched it, which is to say it doesn’t stop me wanting to touch it again.
Mom raised me to believe men can’t be trusted, that they’re all angles and appetite underneath whatever they show you first. I want to trust Noah anyway.
I don’t know what that says about me, only that when he looks at me, actually looks, something in my chest goes warm and reckless in a way I’ve never felt before and don’t entirely know what to do with.
“You okay?” Jim asks, holding my bag out. “You went somewhere for a second.”
“Great,” I say, too brightly, grabbing the bag and heading for the door before my face gives anything else away.
Outside, the evening’s gone that particular shade of navy it turns right before full dark, streetlights flickering on one by one down the block like the town’s slowly remembering itself.
I like this town less than most people do.
There are things that live in the cracks here that nobody talks about at church potlucks, men who collect debts nobody admits to owing, a handful of names people lower their voices around even when they’re only gossiping.
My mother knows some of those names better than she should.
I try very hard not to think about what that might mean for either of us, and mostly I succeed, because the alternative is imagining something I don’t have a plan for.
I make my way home the long way, past the garage, the way I have almost every day for a month now, telling myself it’s a coincidence every single time.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually go inside instead of just walking past. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find the nerve to talk to him like a person and not a teenager with a crush, because God knows I’ve had enough practice talking to boys at school who don’t matter half as much as one grown man who absolutely shouldn’t.
Tonight, the bay doors are still up despite the hour, light spilling gold across the lot, and I catch a glimpse of him bent over an engine, sleeves shoved to his elbows, forearms flexing in a way that should honestly be illegal.
He doesn’t see me. Or if he does, he doesn’t let on, which somehow feels worse and better at the same time.
I slow my pace without meaning to, stretching out the ten seconds it takes to pass the entrance, greedy for every bit of him I can get before I have to keep walking.
A radio plays somewhere inside, something classic and worn at the edges, and one of the other mechanics laughs at something I can’t hear.
It looks like an easy kind of life from out here on the sidewalk.
Simple. The kind of ordinary I used to think was reserved for other people’s families, not mine.
With my mind halfway made up, I head home. The last place I want to be, same as always.
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