When We Break

by Piper Lennox

  If that’s true, then it stands to reason that same muscle can become overworked. Strained. Useless, from time to time, while you test its limits and break it down, then wait for it to rebuild.

  Because they also say, “No pain, no gain.”

  “Yeah, well.” I open my car door and put one foot in, bracing the other on the pavement as I change my smile to reflect hers better: saccharine, bright-eyed, and, I’m learning, oh-so-fake. “We can’t all be so blessed in the ass-kissing arena.”

  Aidan’s jaw drops, quickly setting itself. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.” I get in and start the engine, rolling down my window as she starts to huff away. “Don’t get all high-and-mighty because you’re Aurora’s right-hand woman now.” I flick my hand at her lab coat. That blood-red stitching, swooping into a name that should be mine. “Lying to clients isn’t ‘talking to them the right way,’ either. But at least I’m honest. And,” I add, putting on the sweeter-than-sugar smile again as I back out, “at least Dr. Aurora knows what I’m doing, and knows it isn’t on purpose. Get back to me when she finds out you’ve been giving patients amazing prognoses, knowing it’s a straight-up lie, and then throwing her under the bus behind her back.”

  Aidan’s death stare tails my car all the way to the highway; I can still see her standing there when I check my blind spot to merge.

  Okay, so it wasn’t the smartest thing to say. But it’s true. More than once this past year, I’ve overheard Aidan whispering to clients that their beloved pet will survive, if she’s got anything to do with it. She revels in their hugs and tearful gratitude. She loves being a hero.

  Then, when the pet inevitably flatlines—if it hasn’t already—she loves being their crying shoulder, deflecting any blame from herself. “Dr. Aurora couldn’t clamp it fast enough,” or “I promise, I would’ve kept resuscitating....”

  The worst part is, Aidan has me to thank for the fact she hasn’t been caught yet. Whenever a client gets angry and starts gearing up to chew Dr. Aurora out, I step in. I give them facts, all the information and odds Aidan should have told them from the start, but didn’t.

  It doesn’t calm them down or rectify that shattered false hope—but it does let them yell at me, instead of Dr. Aurora. By the time she comes out to speak to them, they’re usually steely and accepting.

  But now? Fuck that. I’m done being Aidan’s lightning rod.

  In traffic, I watch the storm clouds swelling overhead and feel the flipside of my anger: fear. Aidan’s clearly more concerned with praise than ethics, so there’s a good chance she’s plotting to sabotage my new progress, right this second. Talking in Dr. Aurora’s ear about how I haven’t improved as much as she thinks, spinning lie after lie like the threads in that stupid coat.

  Beside me, a black pick-up truck crawls forward in the standstill. I barely notice it at first, until the window rolls down; a cigarette butt flies from the passenger window, skittering onto the asphalt between us in a flash of sparks.

  Their music has a heavy bass and tinny treble. I don’t recognize the song, but I recognize this feeling—beats and notes invading every inch of your body. Whether you want it to or not.

  “You like being honest? Then I guess it’s my turn.”

  I force myself to look at them.

  The driver isn’t Gage. None of them are. The entire group in the truck, rattling the cab with their air-drumming and roughhousing, is nothing but teenage boys I’ve never seen in my life. Certainly not at a party.

  My breath seeps out, lungs inflamed from holding it ever since the window went down. I roll up mine and scan the radio, looking for anything to drown out the assault of their music. It doesn’t work, but just knowing it’s not Gage in the next lane is enough to relax me.

  “People don’t like honesty,” Orion told me, that day in Kona. He’d meant other people, the world as a whole—not himself. But it was true. For him, for everyone. Dishing out the cold, hard truth had never benefited me. It had Orion writing me off at the very start, before he even knew my name. It got me demoted to the shittiest year of front-desk work I could imagine.

  It had made me terrified, in a way I’d never been of anyone else, to ever cross Gage again.

  Honesty cost me Eden.

  When what little momentum I’ve gained in the traffic jam is gone again, I dig through my purse for my phone and pull up Aidan’s number.

  I’M SORRY, I text. JUST BEING A JEALOUS BITCH. LUNCH TOMORROW? ON ME.

  It feels indescribably slimy and spineless to hit Send. This isn’t me.

  I’m not the least bit sorry for what I said, and any jealousy I feel is more akin to outrage that someone so much worse at talking to clients can claw her way ahead of me, just because she does it with a smile. Sending that text is like handing Aidan the last of my dignity on a platter.

  But then I think again of everything this blunt, no-filter shit has cost me.

  People don’t like honesty. And when you give it anyway, you’d better be prepared for the blowback—prepared to see exactly what people are capable of, especially if you’re blasting their secrets for all the world to see. People will do anything to defend an illusion. And I hate to admit this, but I’m afraid to know what Aidan could do, if I threaten to shatter hers.

  Discipline might be a muscle you have to strengthen yourself—but fear? That’s the only one the world will strengthen for you. No matter how many times you beg it to stop.

  “You okay? You look a little out of it.”

  I blink as Orion refills my coffee mug. It’s half past nine; London, by some miracle, is still asleep. We’re sitting on his back patio with a carafe of black coffee and a plate of cinnamon toast between us, and I realize it’s the first time in the month I’ve been working for him that we’ve been alone more than a few minutes.

  “Yeah, yeah. Just doing math in my head.”

  Orion gives me a weird look, but smiles. “Okay,” he says, slowly.

  “No, you know what I mean. Like bill math, where you just start thinking, ‘Okay, what do I have to pay today?’ and then it snowballs into the entire month, then the entire year....” I shake my head at myself. “Never mind.”

  “I do that, too,” he assures me. “Just wondering why you’re thinking about that right now, I guess.”

  I shrug like I have no clue, but I know exactly why. It’s been a week since Dr. Aurora commuted my front-desk sentence. I love being back with the animals, but I’m seeing even more of Aidan’s lie-and-smile routine up-close. It’s enough to drive me out of the clinic. Literally.

  “I was trying to figure out,” I tell Orion now, “how much I could cut my hours at the clinic without going totally bankrupt.”

  His laugh is nervous; he can’t tell if I’m joking or not. “What about the whole ‘save as much money as possible’ plan?”

  “Still the plan.” My reflection in my coffee blinks back, a wash of sepia. “I just despise the girl I’m working with, ever since Aurora changed my schedule.”

  “Ah. New girl?”

  “That’s the thing—she’s worked there over a year now. But I’m realizing how shitty of a person she actually is.” Briefly, and keeping my outrage in check as best I can, I tell Orion all about Aidan’s faux heroics, blatant lies, and general underhandedness. By the time I finish, out of breath from run-on sentences, I feel better. Even if he’s giving me a wide-eyed look that must mean, “You’re insane.”

  “Wow,” he breathes, after a moment. “That’s a lot of information at once.”

  “I didn’t mean to start ranting.”

  “No, you’re fine. I’m just gaining a new appreciation for the fact I don’t have coworkers anymore.” He laughs, dissolving my self-consciousness. “For what it’s worth, I agree with you—that’s super shitty of her.”

  “Yeah? You think so too?”

  “Of course. Lying to owners, when you know their pet isn’t going to make it? And then blaming the vet? That’s awful.” He pauses. “Wait, why ar
e you surprised I agree with you?”

  I look at my coffee again. Then I take a sip, then another—anything to stall.

  I want to be honest with Orion. Completely honest. The more I get to know him, even in the small, piecemeal way I’ve been doing the last few weeks, the more I like him. I want to tell him everything about anything.

  On the other hand, that Colby isn’t the one he hired. That’s not the one he chats with during his breaks from work, or the one he pours a cup of coffee for every weekday morning, without fail—even adding the right amount of creamer, after watching her do it just once.

  Delivery, I remind myself, and take a breath so the words can rearrange themselves. “I just thought…because of you wanting to replace Buttons, if he’d died, maybe you might think what Aidan’s doing isn’t...all bad.”

  I freeze. Even my eyes don’t dare move, as much as I’m dying to see his reaction and know if I got that mystical, impossible balance between “honest” and “ sugarcoating” just right.

  “I can see why you’d think that,” he says, after a silence that probably feels much longer than it is, “but, no—I don’t think of them as being the same. I wanted to shield London, but I wasn’t lying to her, the way Aidan is doing to some of the owners.”

  Oh, shit. I’m not sure I’ll ever get good enough at sugarcoating to fight a disbelief like this one.

  And I may never forgive myself for ruining our bicker-free streak.

  “‘Shielding’ her? How is replacing her dead pet before she can find out not lying?”

  Orion raises his eyebrow, like I’m coming out of nowhere with this. “I said I agreed with you—Aidan’s doing a terrible thing. But motive counts for a lot. My motive was to protect London, who’s a child. It sounds like Aidan’s motive is to get all the glory, when pets do survive, and avoid all the blame when they don’t. Totally different things.”

  “Different degrees of ‘wrong’ are still wrong,” I mutter, because, apparently, I just can’t leave well enough alone.

  “Wow. Okay.” Orion finishes his coffee and gets to his feet, rubbing his back like it’s sore. He switched his desk chair to an ergonomic one last week, but it doesn’t look like it’s helping.

  “Both are pretending death isn’t a possible outcome. Both things are wrong, because you’re giving someone completely false hope, knowing it’s false. Knowing you lied. Sure, yours wasn’t done with malicious intent or whatever—but Aidan could argue the same thing. She’s just giving people hope. But when you give people hope and let them believe something that just isn’t true, you’re setting them up for this way deeper hurt, down the line.”

  Orion stares at me the entire time I’m talking. I can’t read his expression. More than anything, he looks tired.

  Tired of you, idiot, I think. Nice job.

  “I should get back to work,” he says, finally. “Help yourself to more coffee or whatever. If London’s—”

  “If London’s not up by ten, wake her, so it doesn’t throw off her sleep cycle,” I finish, muttering into my coffee mug. The soft echo of my own voice, that betraying bitch, makes me even madder at myself. “I know.”

  Orion hesitates, then nods. “Yeah.”

  I wait until he’s gone before I go inside, that click of his bedroom door even worse than the silence.

  Fourteen

  Orion

  My computer screen flickers to life. I stare at the new logo I’m designing for SB Auto Exchange: black and white, simple, clean.

  I have to look away again. All the negative space hurts my eyes.

  So Colby’s blunt. This isn’t news; after all, it’s the reason I was drawn to her to begin with. Even if that draw happened entirely against my will.

  When I got sick, I noticed something changing. People treated me differently, once they knew—their voices were softer, kinder when they spoke, all the rough edges sanded down.

  But the sicker I got, the softer their words became, until so much was sanded clean, I didn’t know what was the truth and what was bullshit. When doctors gave me glimpses of hope through promising statistics, I’d research it myself online and find the real numbers. When nurses told me I was doing better every week, I didn’t take it at face value anymore—I looked at my old charts and journals, every scrap of paper where I tracked my symptoms, and saw for myself just how steep the backslides were.

  They weren’t lying, Walt reasoned. Just putting more emphasis on the one speck of positive truth they could, even if it meant downplaying the ocean of bad news around it.

  But without that ocean, a framework of greater truths to show you how that one little speck of positivity, true or not, stacks up? You start losing faith. In everyone else, in yourself—to the point where any good news starts feeling like a lie.

  It’s like the design in front of me, right now. Without negative space, that absence of shape and creation, you’d have nothing.

  I get up, the desk chair spinning.

  Colby and London are playing Save the Firelight—a game of London’s invention that, in the last month, has evolved more rules than I can possibly follow from eavesdropping alone. But now, seeing it in action, I doubt I could follow it even if I’d been present for its invention myself.

  “...the west wing! The west wing!” Colby’s shouting, from inside an elaborate couch fort. “We have to close it off before the storm hits!”

  “Here, take this!” London, briefly visible through a gap in the cushions, crawls past with an armful of glow-in-the-dark bouncy balls. “The crystals are the only way we can close the gate.”

  I listen a moment, amused but baffled. Mostly, though, amazed at Colby’s ability to abandon rules and logic, and jump so readily into this world. It’s something Walt’s really good at, too: old-fashioned pretending. Whenever London invites me to play, I realize, I steer the game into something structured. I can’t remember the last time we did anything even close to this.

  “Excuse me, princesses?” I lift a corner of a blanket, thrown over the cushions to serve as what can only be a roof. “Can I talk to Colby for a second?”

  “Our forcefield!” London screams, and snatches the blanket back. Okay, so it’s not a roof. “Daddy, you almost let in the tornado!”

  “Sorry, bug. Didn’t know.”

  “And we aren’t princesses. We’re female warriors.”

  Colby’s head pops up through another blanket. Or forcefield, apparently. “That was my idea. Princesses are so played out.”

  I nod, tonguing my cheek to hide my laughter. Slowly, she reaches up and feels the headlamp still strapped to her face.

  “Oh. The firelight.” She blushes, takes it off, and passes it to London. “I’ll be right back—keep patching the west wall, okay?”

  We can still hear London, never once breaking character, as we slip into my bedroom. I shut the door.

  “Shit.” Colby kicks the mega-pack of deodorant in front of my closet. “Excessive sweating? Or do you just like buying in bulk?”

  “Ah...no. More like, I ordered cases of this natural deodorant when my kidneys were failing because my old stuff could kill me, and it’s gonna take a while to use them all.”

  Her laugh, raspy as she works to catch her breath from the fort, fades. “Sorry.”

  “I’m kidding. Kind of. It wouldn’t have killed me—I just got paranoid about everything going in and on my body.” I scratch my head. “And...don’t be sorry for what happened on the balcony, either. Not that you are—I don’t know that. I’m just saying, it’s me who should apologize, for trying to make you feel bad about that. You were right.”

  “About the cat thing?”

  “About all of it. The whole ‘wrong is wrong’ angle. I still think I’m right, that what I did wasn’t as bad as what your coworker’s been doing—but I see your point, and...and it can be right at the same time. We both can.”

  Colby shifts her weight from foot to foot. “It didn’t bother you that I went all ‘no filter’ for a while?”

&
nbsp; “It did...but then I remembered how much I hated people lying to me, back when I was sick. Or not giving me the whole picture. Lying by omission, or whatever.” I stuff my fists into my pockets and risk stepping closer to her. There’s still a foot between us, but in the context of my bedroom, the distance feels smaller. “That’s one of the things I really liked about you from the start—how honest you are.”

  Her blush starts at her ears, meeting in the middle of her nose. I stare at the freckles there and think of that day on her kitchen floor. It feels like a lifetime ago, but not because of time.

  It’s because of me. I feel different. Now I can stand to admit to myself how badly I wanted to kiss her. How badly I still do.

  “It seemed like you hated that,” she whispers, and tries to laugh, but can’t.

  “Sometimes I do. But that’s my problem, not yours. I could stand to take things less personally.”

  She looks down at our feet. They’re bare. We both love the feeling of clean carpet on our skin and would actually go everywhere barefoot, if we could.

  It’s weird: I don’t remember when I learned that about her.

  “Do you want to get dinner tonight?”

  Colby looks up. Her hair’s tangled, flyaways around her face like a lion’s mane; the couch fort brushed it with static. I find myself wondering what it would feel like to reach out and smooth it under my palm. To be allowed to do that to her—to have her expect it from me.

  To have her want it. Maybe she already does.

  “Dinner?”

  “Uh...yeah.” My nerves catch up to me, and I eye the deodorant on the floor like I might need to reapply it all, just to stop the sweating that suddenly hits. This “blurt it out” approach she’s so good at is much harder than I thought it’d be.

  “Like you, me, and London?”

  “No, not....”

  “Us and Walt?”

  “I’m asking you on a date,” I clarify, the words untangling just as I spit them out. “And no offense, but you’re not making it any easier.”