by McLean, Jay
Everything will do.
For now.
I graduated from St. Luke’s under “special circumstances.” Miss Turner sent my diploma to Amy’s PO box. It’s the only address I felt comfortable giving out. I’m not really sure what to do with a certificate that says Congratulations. You survived. Barely. She’s the only one I talk to from back home, and our phone calls have become less and less over the year.
Sometimes, when I get really lonely, my thoughts wander to my old life, to my old friends, to Connor. But I’m quick to push them away. I have to be. One thing I’ve learned from Miss Turner’s random emails she sends is that I need to stop punishing myself, and thinking about Connor is the worst form of punishment there is.
“How have you been, Mama Jo?” Trevor asks her.
“Same. Always the same.”
Trevor glances at me, and I can see the struggle in his eyes. I shake my head, mouth, “No.” Because I know what he’s thinking. He wants to give it all up. Again. Quit school and work and find a way to take care of her. Of us. But I won’t let him. And it’s not that I don’t think about it or think of other ways we can do this. Every day I wake up, and it’s the first thing on my mind, but we can’t go through all that again. We went through so much pain and so much heartache, and it’s not our salvation; it’s just a band-aid.
We stay for a couple of hours before Mom says she’s tired. I get her into bed and then manage to find a nurse so we can get our weekly rundown.
Everything is the same.
Her meds haven’t changed.
Her moods haven’t changed.
It’s always the same.
And that same has to change.
I just don’t know how.
* * *
Trevor drives me home, walks me to my apartment, his nose scrunched the entire time. From the busted stairs to the rickety hallway, all the way to my door that has to be kicked open with force. “Have I mentioned how much I hate that you live here?”
My neighbor, an old man wearing nothing but striped blue and white boxer shorts, opens his door and peeks outside. “Can I help you?” he growls.
Trevor’s brow dips. “Yeah, you can. By getting some damn clothes on.”
I pull on his T-shirt until he’s in my apartment, then close the door behind him. He jiggles the knob until the lock clicks. “Ava, you need out of this shithole.”
“I like it,” I tell him, and it’s not a complete lie. I like that I have my own space and that I can go from my bed to the kitchen to the bathroom in five steps, total. I like the crazy old lady a few doors down who sits out on her balcony every night and tells stories to no one about all the drunken sailors she courted once upon a time. I like the morning sun when it filters through my curtains, and I like the smell of my little herb garden I keep in the corner of the living/bedroom.
He reaches into a cupboard and pulls out a glass—I like that I can keep glasses out in the open and not freak out if it breaks. He fills the glass with water from the tap, then opens the fridge and stares at the contents. “Feed me.”
I tap on his shoulder until he moves out of the way and start getting ingredients to make him a stir-fry. Just as I pull out the chopping board, my phone rings. I take it out of my pocket and stare at the number, my heart racing. It’s a North Carolina number, but I don’t recognize it, and so I do what I do every time an unknown number calls me. I answer, but I stay silent. Trevor watches me, his brow dipped in confusion.
“Hello?” a lady on the other end says.
Trevor motions to the phone, as if to say talk, but I press my finger to my lips, tell him to shut up. I made a choice to block everyone’s numbers for a reason—to help heal my heartache—and I don’t want to go backward now.
“Hi, this is Lydia from Sunshine Oak Residential Clinic. I was hoping to speak to Ava Diaz if—”
“Hi,” I cut in, my eyes wide. “I’m Ava.”
Trevor steps closer, his glare panicked.
“Hi, Ava,” says Lydia. “I wanted to speak to you about your mother’s care—Joanne Diaz. Are you available to discuss this at the moment?”
“Yes,” I breathe out.
Trevor’s rolling his hands as if asking for answers. I put the phone on speaker and hold it between us.
“Great,” Lydia perks. “Well, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of us—”
“I have,” I interrupt. “I mean, I know of you and your services. You’re, like, the best of the best, so…” I exhale. “But… I didn’t apply there.” At least I don’t think I did, but maybe I was beyond desperate and wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Well, firstly, it’s good to hear that you think so highly of our program, and secondly, you didn’t apply.”
“Oh.” My heart sinks.
“However,” she adds, “we’ve just had an anonymous donor who wants to start an ongoing program dedicated specifically for people in your situation—for injured veterans and their families—and I mentioned it to a friend of mine who’s a director over at Riverside. Do you remember applying there?”
“Yes.” I nod, frantic.
“Well, my friend mentioned your case and about how he wishes he had placement available for your mom there, but since they can’t and we can, I was wondering if you’d like to take us up on our offer?”
“Um…” I look up at Trevor, tears in my eyes, while my pulse races against my flesh. “I mean, obviously, I would love to, but… we’re in Texas right now, and I’d need to come up with the money to fly there and… and I’d need to find a place to live…” My mind won’t stop spinning. “How—how long can you hold—”
“Ava,” Lydia interrupts. “This particular program comes with some very generous extras. It covers all travel expenses and comes with a fully furnished apartment nearby that you can either live in or just stay in whenever you’re in town.”
“For how long?” I ask, my voice hoarse with emotion.
“For as long as your mom needs the care. It covers all living expenses for her, as well as any and all medication, and we have the best doctors…” She continues to speak while all air leaves my lungs, and I look up at my brother, see the hope in his eyes, feel the magic floating between us.
“So, what do you say, Ava?”
I can’t speak through the giant lump in my throat, can’t see through the tears of relief welling in my eyes.
Trevor grasps my shoulders and then pulls me to him, his arms tight around me.
“Ava?” Lydia asks. “Are you there?”
I wipe the liquid salvation from my cheeks. “How soon can you take her?”
“How soon can you get here?”
Chapter 45
Connor
Austin throws a sock at my head, but I manage to duck it just in time. “Why are you trying to ruin my life?” he yells.
Nose scrunched, I pick up his dirty sock from my bed and throw it back to his side of the dorm room. “Why can’t you get your own social life?”
His eyebrows lift, and he motions up and down the length of his torso. “Have you met me?”
I shake my head, grab my basketball, and spin it around my finger. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Austin.”
He sighs, taking the ball from me and hiding it behind his back. “Says the jock who has every girl vying for his attention.”
I scratch my head. “What do you want?”
He adjusts his glasses. “Take me to the party with you.”
“I’m not going to the party,” I reply.
“Thus, you ruining my life.”
I chuckle. Austin and I were randomly paired to room together in the dorms, and I don’t know how Duke decides who gets roomed with who, but you couldn’t find an odder match if you tried. At least on paper. He must’ve felt the same way when we first met because I’m pretty sure he hated me. It took a good few months of us living and breathing in the same space for him to realize that I was nothing at all like the jocks who apparently bullied him all through high school. Now, he c
alls me his best friend. I’d do the same, except mine is somewhere in Texas, probably living with a guy who managed to coerce her into his home, or worse, his bed.
No, I’m still not over it.
And clearly, I’m still not over her.
“I’m never going to get laid,” he mumbles, throwing himself on his bed.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I repeat honestly. “You’ll find a girl when you least expect it. I was eighteen when I lost my virginity.”
He sits up, eyes narrowed, then shakes his head. “So, what are we doing tonight?”
I pick up my laptop. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I have to study for finals. We can’t all be geniuses like you.” Like me, Austin got a full ride to Duke, but unlike me, his is purely academic. I still don’t really understand what his end game is or what any of the subjects are that he takes. Something about computers and science and algorithms and I don’t know… sometimes I see him on his laptop, his fingers flying across the keyboard, and on the screen is a bunch of letters and numbers and symbols, and then he taps a button and boom; he’s just made a couple hundred dollars for someone in less than five minutes.
So he says.
Austin groans into his pillow, clearly frustrated. “If I help you study—”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because every time you do, you make me dumber.”
“I make you feel dumber. Trust me, being around me has made you smarter, and you don’t even know it.”
“Probably,” I mumble, getting off my bed to sit at my desk. “Hey, is your dad still cool to have me work with him over the summer?”
Another groan from him, this one louder. “Yes, Connor. My dad loves you. He would love nothing more than for a Duke Blue Devil to work with him at our family’s junkyard… but why the fuck do you want to?”
“Money?” I shrug, lying. Truth is, I’ve had a shitty year on the court—my focus elsewhere—and I plan on spending the summer getting some extra training and coaching in. “Besides, my dad’s going to be in Europe—”
“You mean your dads.” He snorts, laughing childishly to himself.
“Idiot. They’re not married.” Yet. “And did you say shit like that in high school? Because if you did, it’s no wonder you got the shit kicked out of you.”
He holds a hand to his heart and jokes, “You’re hurting my feelings.”
“Uh huh.”
He stands beside me, looking over my shoulder.
I open my laptop.
He shuts it. “Are we really not going to this party?”
I open my laptop again and look up at him. “We’ll go for a half hour on one condition…”
“What’s that?”
I smirk.
He sighs. “This shit again?”
I nod, moving to the side so he can reach around me. Fingers swift over my keyboard, he taps, taps, taps at the keys, and with one large inhale, and a final sigh, he taps one more time until the Duke logo appears at the top left of the screen. He’d just hacked—so he says—into the school admissions database like he’d done many times before, and just like all the previous times, I click search, my fingers much slower than his when I type:
A
V
A
D
I
A
Z
And then I smile. “Let’s go try to get you laid.”
Chapter 46
Ava
It’s incredible how much things can change in just a few weeks. Even though Trevor and I had looked up pictures and reviews of Sunshine Oak, we were blown away by the facility when we saw it in person. Sunshine Oak isn’t just a treatment facility; it’s a community, and it’s filled with people who love what they do and the patients they care for. Trevor was only able to stay for a few days before he had to go back, but he left more than satisfied; he left happy… and a little jealous.
When Lydia at Sunshine Oak informed me that I had a fully furnished apartment, I expected something similar to the one I had back in Texas, so when Trevor pulled up beside the building, we had to just stop and take a moment. It wasn’t anything grand, but it was a hell of a lot better than what we’d assumed. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about half-naked old men and crazy old hussies here, Ava,” he murmured. And I cackled, so loud and so free, that it had him doing the same, and it felt so good to laugh, especially with him. We were dumbstruck, unable to comprehend the pure luck that had been dropped on us. We needed saving, sure, but this was beyond anything I could’ve ever imagined. And then the apartment itself… two bedrooms, with a bathroom attached to the master, open kitchen and living with dark floors and new appliances. The living room opened up to a balcony that overlooked a communal pool, and I couldn’t wait to sit out there with the sun and the stars above me.
It was just a tad better than the apartment—not room—Mom has at Sunshine Oak. Hers overlooks the community garden, and every morning she wakes up and looks out the window, and there’s color. So much color. Not just through her vision but in her life. And the doctors… my God, where the hell have they been the past few years?
In a way, I hate that it’s taken the help of a random stranger with money to spare to get Mom the care she actually needs, but I’m grateful. So very grateful. And so is Mom. I can see it in her smile—because she does that now. She smiles. At everyone and everything. She’s started taking some classes; painting and gardening, and she’s even considering learning a second language.
“There’s so much to do here,” she tells me, looking through a pamphlet while we sit at the in-house hair salon. “Oh, Ava!” she laughs out. “Guess what I did yesterday afternoon?”
“I don’t know, Mama,” I say through a smile. “What did you do?”
“Pottery.”
I glance at her. “You did?”
“I had the room in a fit of giggles when I used my stub to make the opening of a vase,” she laughs, unable to control herself. “It reminded me of that night we went to the court with Connor. You remember that?”
My chest tightens. “Yeah, I remember.”
Her smile only widens. “Remember when we tried to spin the ball on each other’s fingers, and it went flying?” Another laugh, this one louder.
I try to keep my expression passive, but it’s hard. “Uh huh.”
She sighs, wiping at the tears of joy from the corner of her eye. “God, I miss that boy.”
Me too, I don’t say aloud.
“What happened to him?” she asks, her eyes serious when they meet mine. “What happened to you two? You were so—”
I cut in, my voice cracking when I say, “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
She offers another smile, but it’s sad. “Okay, baby. I just… he’s such a good boy, you know? I wish it had worked out for—”
“I know.”
Nodding slowly, she looks back at herself in the mirror. “This place is good for me, sweetheart.” She focuses back on me, a hand to her heart. “I can feel it in here.”
“Feel what?”
“The Happiness.”
Tears well in my eyes, and I reach over, grasp her hand in mine. “I’m glad.”
“You’ve spent too much of your best years taking care of me, Ava. And you know how much I appreciate you, but now… maybe it’s time for you to start taking care of yourself.”
I inhale a huge breath. Hold it.
“When are you going to be happy, Ava?”
I shrug, look down at my hands. “I am happy.”
“You’re also a liar.”
“Mama,” I whine.
“He’s at Duke, right?”
“Who?”
She rolls her eyes. “You know who. Connor.”
I shrug. “I think so,” I lie. I know so.
“You know I can see Cameron Stadium from my window.”
My eyes widen. “You can?”
“Uh huh,” she sings. “Wouldn’t it
have been great if you had gotten into Duke…”
I stare at her, right into her eyes, and she stares back, waiting. She knows… she knows everything. “How did you…” I whisper.
“I heard everything you had to say to each other the night we left. Damn near broke my heart, Ava. But what could I do? You’d made a choice, and you were doing it for me, and I love you for that, but now… now I’m here, and I’m happy, but I’m not as happy as I could be…”
My heart settles into my stomach, tied there by the weight of what I know is coming next. “You want me to go to Duke, don’t you?”
She smiles like mothers are supposed to smile at their children. “I need you to go to Duke, Ava. I need you to start living your life.” She reaches up, cups my face in her hand. “And I need you to start believing in magic again.”
Chapter 47
Connor
“Sorry I’m late,” I rush out, eyeing Austin sitting behind the desk at his family’s junkyard. “My training session ran late.”
Austin rolls his eyes. “As if I care.”
I grab my employee card from the shelf and clock in, then highlight the time I got in and make a note that I was late. I don’t want them paying me for the time I wasn’t here. “What are my jobs today?”
“Your job is to look pretty,” he mumbles, tapping on the keyboard. He pauses, looks up at me. “Oh, wait. You do that anyway.”
I chuckle. “These insults are getting old, Austin.”
“I’ll stop when my bitterness does,” he retorts, his shoulders lifting with his shrug. “And it’s quiet today, so there’s not a lot to do.”
I heave out a breath, calm my racing heart. I hate being late, especially for his parents. They’ve been so generous with giving me a job and letting me stay at their house for the summer, and the last thing I want is to disappoint them. I lean against his desk, arms crossed, and ask, “Hey, you think I can take you and your parents out for dinner sometime this week? I just want to say thank you for letting me crash with you.”
