Page 52 of Electric Blue Love
“I don’t know. JC Engineering is giving me until the end of next week to decide. I’m going to meet with my advisor next week and try and decide what’s best.”
“What’s best for you or…” I didn’t finish the sentence, but she knew.
“There are things you don’t understand,” she started. “My family needs the help. I have two brothers who are going to want to go to college and move out and I’ve seen the starting salary for someone with a master’s degree. It’s a lot more than what I’m being offered now – it more than makes up for an extra few semesters of school if I can continue to keep my scholarship. The boys may have to wait a year to start college, but I can help them this way.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t even know money was a consideration. I wanted to kiss her for being the kind of person who worried about things like taking care of her family and shake her for always putting other people’s happiness in front of her own.
“I told you before. This isn’t just about Todd,” she said quietly.
Just.
Notjustabout him. Which meant part of the reason was him.
“So,” I plastered on a smile. “Tell me about your brothers.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything.”
Everything. I wanted to know everything about her and her life, which included her brothers.
“Donnie is quiet. Not shy, just reserved and serious. He’s protective and loyal even though I’m the oldest,” she smiled shyly. “Leo is the most outgoing of the three of us. He’s an artist – sketching and painting mostly. He’s practical, too, though, so I have no idea what he’ll end up doing. He’ll be great at whatever he decides,” she said in a proud voice.
“Have they started looking at colleges?”
“No, they’re both adamant about staying in New York and going to NYU. They don’t run in the same circles all the time, but I think they want to stay together as much as possible.”
“Sounds nice. They sound nice,” I added.
“You could meet them for yourself. They are hard to pin down while I’m in town, but we have a standing Sunday morning breakfast at a little diner by our house any time I visit. Nine tomorrow – you could join us.”
“I don’t want to intrude on your family time.”
“It’s no intrusion. The more the merrier.”
The look on my face must have given away my discomfort at the thought of having breakfast with her family. I was sure they were great, really, but sitting around the table with a big, happy family like Bianca’s sounded as torturous as it did tempting.
“Just, don’t answer now. If you show up, you show up. If not, I get it.”
But she didn’t get it. Not really. I wasn’t even sure I understood why I was hardwired the way I was. I had abandonment issues, blah blah. I heard the diagnosis the therapist said so blandly to my then foster parents and I wanted to roll my eyes exactly like I’d done then. I’d wanted to argue then that just because my shitty birth parents bailed didn’t mean I had to carry around their mistakes like some sort of illness. Yet, here I was all sorts of fucked up about having breakfast with Bianca’s family.
I wondered if I’d been any better off if I’d actually listened to the therapists who’d tried to help. Was that kind of early betrayal something you could really move on from? The timer from the kitchen saved me from having to delve too deep in that dark corner of my mind.
“Ready to eat?”
She nodded. “Ready.”
It was beautiful outside, a clear sunny spring day that deserved to be soaked up, but I steered Bianca to the living room with our plates.
“We’re eating in the living room?”
“Rectifying a gaping hole in your education,” I said as I turned the TV on and navigated to10 Things I Hate About You.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so excited.” She practically bounced onto the couch and her unbridled excitement made me feel like a fucking hero. While I worked to get the movie started she bit into the potatoes and the moan that escaped her lips made her cover her mouth in embarrassment and her face turn a lovely shade of red.
“Good?”
“So good,” she mumbled around the food.
