Page 111 of On My Side
“I am too,” I rasp, slowly softening into her embrace. Her hug reminds me of Aunt Liv, and my heart aches at the reminder of how much I’ve lost. While that’s true, I’ve also found and gained so, so much. Piper. Ren.
Myself.
Chapter 35
Ren
Playlist: Everywhere, Everything (with Gracie Abrams) | Noah Kahan
“Unghhhh.”
I’m currently pantsless in my parents’ closet, while there’s apparently a ghost in the room.
“Uh, hello?” I call.
The ghost responds with another groan. I step out of the closet, a pair of sweats in hand and my jeans under my arm, and jump in surprise. “JesusChrist,Leo.”
“Hnnghhhh,” Leo, who is currently sprawled face down across our parents’ bed, turns his head to the side and smirks. “Would you look at that, you're a boxer briefs guy. What if I told you that’s a family…”
“Stop.”
He turns his head until his face is pressed into the mattress, letting out a long-suffering sigh.
I pull the sweatpants on, and head toward the door to leave.
“Wait, you’re gonna leave me here in my fragile emotional state?” I turn to see Leo’s flipped to his back, limbs spread out like a starfish.
“Uh…”
“How are you so good with girls?” He whines. “You’re such a nerd.”
I blink at him. “Thanks?”
“Not a compliment,” he specifies.
“Thanks for the clarification,” I sigh, rubbing a hand over my face. My parents raised eight children, but somehow, getting Leo to be a functioning adult is what’s going to get them canonized to sainthood. “What’s going on with you and Stella?”
Leo does the most un-Leo-like thing and is silent for a few seconds. He then lets out another long-suffering sigh and sits up. “I don’t know.”
I’ve never heard him sound so sad and dejected, and it’s disconcerting as fuck. I walk to the bed and sit on the edge, waiting for him to continue. “I don’t know if you heard,” he starts to say, fidgeting with a friendship bracelet on his left wrist, “but her mom has stage four uterine cancer.”
“Fuck,” I breathe.
“Yeah. Um… they thought it was treatable at first, but recently, her insurance said they wouldn’t cover the necessary, aggressive treatment doctors were recommending since it’s stage four and… it feels like I’m losing her. No, it feels like I’ve already lost her, and I don’t know how to get her back. She barely talks to me, and I get it. Her mom’s her priority, but I want to be there for her. I told her I’d take the semester off to support her and she gotsoangry. I don’t understand why she got so angry.” His voice quiets with each word in his last sentence until it’s barely a whisper.
“She’s going through a lot right now,” I said gently, placing my hand on his shoulder. “Try to give her the time and space she needs.”
“I hate that she’s doing it alone,” Leo mumbled, staring intently at his tightly clasped hands in his lap.
“Sometimes people need to do things alone.”
“Quinns don’t,” Leo says, so confidently wrong it makes me laugh.
“Maybe Leo Quinn doesn’t. But the rest of us have had to, at one point or another. There’s no right way. Everyone deals with life differently.”
“What if she breaks up with me?”
Leo and Stella have been together for years. She’s part of our family. Itisweird when she’s not with him.
