Page 38 of When the Stars Fall
I stopped leaving notes in her locker. I stopped trying to talk to her. Stopped sending texts that went unanswered.
I stopped giving a shit what she did or who she did it with. Which would have all been fucking peachy if only it were true. I missed her spring rain and honeysuckle scent.
I missed the way she kissed me. Like I was her oxygen and she couldn’t breathe without me.
I missed her laugh, low and throaty, and kind of dirty. I missed her smile. All her smiles. The devious ones and the happy ones and the sweet and shy ones.
I missed the way she used to fight me and argue with me.
I fucking missedherbut instead of dwelling on it, I hooked up with girls who wanted to be with me. The generically pretty ones with names like Ashleigh and Megan and Kylie. Okay, I hooked up with all three of them.
But what the fuck? Rebel was making me crazy.
The only way to keep my mind off of her was to pretend she didn’t exist.
Chapter Eleven
Lila
Seven months.That was how long it took Derek to decide he had no interest in looking after his dead wife’s kid.
One month after my mom died, Derek brought his girlfriend home to meet me. Ha, joke. He didn’t bring her over to meet me. I just happened to be there when he pulled up on his Harley and she climbed off the back of it. Her name was Mindi with an i and she wore painted-on jeans, plunging necklines and acrylic nails. Her bleached blonde hair had two-inch roots and her heels left divots in our front lawn but Derek acted like she was the best thing since sliced bread. If he was trying to find the antithesis of my mother, he’d succeeded. Biker Barbie had moved into our house and into my mother’s bedroom that she shared with Derek. For six long months I had to deal with Mindi, her makeup and cheap perfume littering the shelves of the bathroom, her cigarette smoke wafting through the screen door and polluting my air.
I’d dug up the garden that Jude had helped me plant because I didn’t want Derek and Mindi to have a nice view.
I was small and petty and bitter.
Everything was dead and broken.
The only surprise was that Derek had hung in there for as long as he had. He’d waited until the day after my seventeenth birthday to inform me that he was putting the house on the market and moving to another town with Mindi.
I didn’t even know where Derek was moving nor did I care to ask.
Now it was June, school was out, the house was sold and my life had been packed into a few boxes that were being shuttled over to the McCallister house.
The one bright spot in my junior year was Christy Rivera who jokingly called herself The Tampon Girl. I called her a lifesaver. Pathetic as it sounded, she was my first true friend who was a girl. As for my other two best friends... I missed them. So much.
Especially Jude. I missed him like a missing limb and as I watched him go from one girl to another, I knew I had no one to blame for our rift except myself.
I told myself it was for the best. I couldn’t bear to lose another person I loved. Jude was leaving, he was going to enlist and leave Cypress Springs right after we graduated high school, so it was better to keep my distance. If I got too close, it would only hurt more.
But now, I was moving in with his family and I had no idea how to navigate this uncharted territory. Avoiding him would not be an option.
* * *
“How’s it going, L?”
“Let’s put it this way. I had two choices. Shitty. Or shittier,” I said, using his words from four years ago. It felt like another lifetime ago.
“Yeah, I get that.” Brody flopped down on my bed and tucked his hands under his head, staring at the ceiling. “You’ve got a sky full of stars though.”
“What?” I asked, transferring my clothes from my suitcase to the oak chest of drawers.
This bedroom used to be the guest room and I’d heard that Gideon was supposed to move out of the room he shared with Jesse but now that I was here, he had to forfeit his own room. Which made me feel bad, just like so many other things about this living arrangement.
“You’ve got stars,” he said, pointing at the ceiling.
I looked up but at first, I couldn’t see anything.
