Page 91 of #Awestruck

Rory was gently teasing me, trying to get me to smile. It didn’t work, and so she changed tactics. “So things got pretty messed up?”

“Yeah. I made some really dumb decisions. I regret them.” Which was probably the understatement of the year. There were no words for how bad I felt about the choices I’d made. Or, like my mom said, the choices I had just refused to make.

My sister moved my knitting to the floor at the side of the couch. “You know, Mom was telling me the other day that the decision-making parts of our brains aren’t totally developed until we’re twenty-five.”

“You’re saying I have an excuse.”

“Yep. Factory installation error.” She rubbed her hands together, playing with one of her rings. I recognized her telltale signs that she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure that she should.

“Spit it out, Rory.”

“Look, I’m not the person to tell other people how to live their lives. I’m barely keeping mine together. But at some point, you have to accept that this is your life now. Evan’s not a part of it, and he’s probably not coming back. You can’t stop living just because he’s gone. You need to eat and shower and go outside once in a while.”

I nodded. Maybe Rory was right. I had to make some effort to be normal again. To try and live my life the way I had before Evan had become such an important part of it. I needed to fix the parts of me that felt too sad to do anything. Even if that meant faking until I made it.

I couldn’t keep sitting around my condo feeling sorry for myself.

Or was that more of me taking the easy way out?

Maybe my mom was right, and I needed to put myself out there. Be vulnerable with Evan. Take a risk.

“Rory! Stop trying to counsel Ashton to get out of work,” Aubrey said. Rory rolled her eyes with a smile and went back into the kitchen.

Charlotte was coloring in anAlice in Wonderlandcoloring book on the coffee table. I was a little envious of her and how easy her life was, to be able to get caught up in an art project and tune out the rest of the world.

She caught me looking at her and offered me a crayon. “Want to color?”

I took the blue crayon and sat down next to her on the floor. I colored on the left page, while she colored on the right. It was soothing and relaxing to focus all of my efforts on what I was doing, making something beautiful with my niece.

I put down the blue crayon and reached for the green, intending to color in some grass in my picture. I must have been gripping the crayon too hard when I started shading, because I managed to both break the sharpened tip and snap the crayon in half.

The wax paper made it so that the pieces still dangled together, but it was broken and useless.

Like me.

“What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked.

I held up the crayon. “I broke it. I need to toss it out.”

She took it from me and peeled back the paper. “It’s fine, Aunt Ashton. Broken crayons can still color. See?”

At that I sobbed, like a dam had burst inside me, unleashing tears I didn’t even know I had.

Charlotte came over and put her arms around my neck, hugging me tightly. “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”

I hoped she was right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Turned out that Charlotte was right. So was Rory.

And even my mom.

I started to exercise and went back to my intramural basketball league, and everyone there was thrilled to see me. I kept my eyes away from the bleachers during the games, not wanting to remember what it was like to have Evan there cheering me on. I even went with my teammates to sing karaoke. My heart wasn’t really in it.

I hoped someday it would be.

Christmas came and went, and I moved into my old room at my parents’ house. Which still looked just as it had when I’d left for college. I decided that if I was living here, I was going to have a grown-up room. After I’d unpacked all my clothes, I pulled down the bulletin board where I’d thumbtacked ticket stubs and pictures from high school. As I peeled off the layers of photos, I found some candid pictures of Evan in our basement that I had forgotten about.

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