Page 19 of Surrender
My home.
Rolling her eyes, Lucy hooked her arm through mine, steering us into the living room to the left. “You’re such a drama queen,” she teased, but her smile didn’t hide the way her nose twitched at the musty air.
She wasn’t entirely wrong, though. It was like stepping back into my childhood. The wallpaper was the same eccentric floral pattern that made your eyes hurt if you stared at it too long. The carpet was fluffy in some places, a faded avocado green, but worn threadbare on the paths people had trodden day after day.
Nothing had ever been changed, redone, or renovated since my parents sold it ten or so years ago.
I could practically see our sofa pressed back against the wall in the center of our large bay window. And the bed of pillows my mom made for us underneath the staircase, so it was like a little cubby. Thankfully, she didn’t get under there very often becauseJames had carved his name into several of the boards.
“Well,” Lucy said, breaking the silence as she glanced around. “At least it’s… consistent?”
“Yeah, that’s what scares me,” I whispered, walking through the archway into the kitchen in an effort to avoid the staircase that filled the corner of the living room. If there were already this many memories and emotions filling me downstairs, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go up and make the walk past my brother’s bedroom, let alone step inside mine.
These walls screamed grief and loss, and whether it was that or the thick dust in the air, I was already struggling to breathe.
“Whoa.” Lucy grabbed my arms, holding me steady as I sucked in a couple of long, wheezy breaths. “Come on.”
She rounded me, pushing gently at my back, through to the attached dining room that was always an office and never once used for dining, but there was a single lost chair in there, one of those folding ones you took camping.
“Lucy, I don’t—”
“Sit,” she ordered sternly, her brow creasing in a way I hadn’t seen for a long time. My beautiful friend opted for monthly Botox instead of giving in to the aging process. “Because neither of us can afford an ambulance right now, and we both know that you might be a graceful ballerina, but you get clumsy as hell when you start to have one of those attacks.”
I huffed out a laugh as I fell into the unsanitary-looking chair.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t wrong, and I’d learned that lesson on more than one occasion.
The director of the ballet company I danced with last year almost threw me out because I panicked about an hour before opening night of theNutcrackerand tripped over mypointeshoes trying to get to a quiet corner, collecting my head on the snow queen’s sleigh on the way down.
It was my first time playing the Sugar Plum Fairy, and Iwasn’t about to give that up, so I went on anyway. I don’t remember much of the show, given I danced it with a wig covering the gash in my head and a full-blown concussion.
But I learned a lot about getting off my feet first and then trying to work through it.
Find me in the room.
“You good?” Lucy asked, tilting her head and watching me closely. “You’ve got that ‘deer in headlights’look going on. Should I clap or something to snap you out of it?”
“I’m fine,” I answered, shaking my head.
She scoffed. “Define, fine.”
I cleared my throat dramatically, trying to hide the thick emotion settling within it as I shifted awkwardly in the crooked camping chair. “A satisfactory or pleasing manner,” I enunciated clearly, ignoring the way she mumbled under her breath about how the hell she ended up with a dictionary for a bestie. “Can we move on now?”
She huffed out an annoyed breath. “Fine.”
“Exactly…” I laughed, trying to keep it from sounding like it was shaking. “It’s all fine. I’m perfectly fine with standing in this house that smells like old wood and broken dreams.”
“Ah, got it,” she said, grinning and leaning back against the window that looked out over our backyard. “Finemeans spiraling but refusing to admit it. Good to know, because while we’re already on our way down, I have something else to tell you.”
Her tone immediately made me groan. “What did you do?”
She gasped, her hand flying to her heart. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Then why did you start this conversation like we’re on an episode ofDr. PhilorJerry Springer?”
Her mouth opened and closed, the guilty look on her face doing little to convince me of her innocence. “Okay, first of all,rude. Second, this isn’t about me.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, crossing my arms and leaning back in the chair as much as its wobbly frame would allow. “Who is it about then?”
