Page 69 of Take Me Home

“I never said—”

“We didn’t miss a dance payment. That’s what they told you, right? They wanted expensive winter formal dresses. I gave them the same deal as Maggie and June, a reasonable budget and chores for anything extra, but they decided it was easier to lie to you. And instead of checking with me, you gave it to them.”

Ash sighed. He could throttle his sisters for playing him, especially for how it cut him off at the legs now. “Why is it such a big deal that I gave them money?”

“Your car is twenty years old. Your apartment is a storage space. You’re barely scraping by when you could have a comfortable life. Honestly, as your mother, it drives me crazy.”

“I’m doing fine, Mom.”

“See, when you tell me that, I believe you.” He doubted this was entirely true, but he got her point.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He wanted to mean it. He didn’t quite though. He still felt right. Still felt a current of anger tugging him back.

“Don’t leave that girl waiting,” she said, turning to look down the long, quiet hallway. “I’m going to see if I can rustle up some coffee.”

Hazel didn’t respond to his text. In fairness, he’d been vague:Sorry, got caught up with a family thing. Thirty minutes. Hour, tops.

He heard for himself from his father’s neurologist that therewere no indicators of anything serious—no concussion from the fall, no lesions related to the MS. The hip was also in good shape, so his father was cleared to return home to rest.

The good news was met with passive-aggressive sighing and muttering from his sisters, who claimed to have known all along none of this was necessary.

“It’s not like Iwantedthere to be a problem,” he muttered, rushing them out of the house. He was so late meeting Hazel.

His happy anticipation from this morning had been fully hijacked by the familiar, whole-body tension and anxious restlessness he’d fought to mask back in high school, during the onset of his father’s illness. Back then, Ash turned inward to contain it, pulled his energy back wherever he could, from school, from baseball, from his best friend whose plans for their future suddenly sounded trivial.Thatwas the version of him that Hazel had first met. Constant worry exacerbated by his futile pining. And because of it, she’d read him as apathetic, selfish,broody. Thought he’d hated her.

He couldn’t go to her like this.

But he couldn’t stand her up. Which meant, instead, he was going to have to explain. All of it. Somehow.

Chapter

Fifteen

Hazel was hiding in the girls’ locker room at her old high school, and she didn’t care if that made her a coward.

Ash had blown her off. The place was swarming with semi-familiar faces. And her father had dumped her on Val, who meandered through the Winter Fest craft fair in the gym while telling Hazel about her father’s two botched proposals before the one that stuck. “He never even said he loved me before the first one. When I pointed that out, he tried to tell me I was mistaken,” Val said, laughing. “Like a woman might forget a declaration of love. But you know your dad. He thinks just because something’s obvious to him, it must be obvious to everyone.”

When a text came from Ash saying he’d be a while yet, Hazel had hastily excused herself to pee, and now she was sitting alone on a hard bench in an alcove with beat-up lockers at her back and a mix of cheap perfume, hair spray, and stale sweat in the air. Across the room, two sinks dripped in mismatched rhythms, the mirrors above them dirty with kiss smudges.

She reread Ash’s brief text. No explanation. No sense of urgency. It didn’t mesh with the guy who, just last night, gave her his childhood tree ornaments. Even though his proposal of an uncomplicated physical relationship had taken her by surprise, he hadn’t been weird or gross about it. In a way, it was the very thing she’d told him she wanted.

She checked her school email to find a message from her lab listserv. Zach, the combative fourth-year, wanted everyone’s spring schedules to establish a new weekly meeting time. If she didn’t suck it up and submit her transfer request to Dr. Sheffield, she’d be dooming herself to work withbothof them for another semester or more. She vowed not to chicken out, to just send the document tonight.

Dreading going back out to the festival, Hazel took a picture of herself under the Lady Bulldogs mural by the door. She’d brushed off four texts from Sylvia since arriving in Lockett Prairie, and if she’d learned anything from seeing Franny again, it was that unresponsiveness was a slippery slope. She didn’t want the same thing to happen with Sylvia.

P.S. I’m alive, she texted.But I welcome death. Am being forced to bond with my father’s fiancée. At my old high school, no less.

Sylvia’s immediate reply was a GIF of a guy dragging a stubborn bulldog down a sidewalk.You can do hard things!she added.

Hazel smiled at the platitude, intended to make her groan, from her relentlessly positive friend. Hazel loved her for it. She considered confiding to Sylvia her frustrations with school and her disappointment that Ash was late, but it’d require so much background she didn’t know where to start. Besides, Sylvia was probably with Dave, or working at the restaurant…

These sounded like excuses. Censoring, withholding, avoiding being too needy. So instinctual she hadn’t realized she was doing it. But she realized now. She would open up to Sylvia. Soon.

Hazel replied,Live, laugh, shove me off a cliff. Gotta go. Wish me luck.

LUCK!

On her way out of the gym, a bright blue sandwich board sign stopped Hazel short.Lockett Prairie PALS: Partners in Academics, Leadership, and Service.It was the same one she’d hand-painted nearly seven years ago when the group consisted of her, an advisor, and three other students. Two girls were selling ornaments, and a banner behind them listed all the elementary and middle schools they partnered with now—easily triple the number from Hazel’s days. She wandered closer, warmth spreading in her chest.

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