“Give her to—What?” Merrick’s definitely burning some eggs by now. Or the basket. Or both? Whatever. “What’s wrong with Emily? I mean, I know what’s wrong with Emily. But what’s wrong with Emily?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What’s wrong with Emily?”
Kai stands, places his hands on his thin hips. “Oh, you know. Nothing. Except that she’s a loud drunk and she’s awful.”
Okay, so the answer is everything. Everything is wrong with Emily. Aunt Emily.
But I wonder if that’s just proof positive. That she maybe sent the box. Or that she knows who did. My heart starts to beat overtime in my throat, and the physical sensation of what I can only call anxiety sits in my stomach and flops around like a fumbled football.
I have to talk to her.
“Merrick, will you set it up?”
He glances at me, then slides a stacked plate in front of Kai. “Why are you so intent on this?”
“Please?”
He exhales. “You’re really gonna fight me on this, huh?”
“I just … yeah. So, will you please?”
“All right, all right. I’ll call her. See when she’s free.”
My stomach plunges again, if that is even possible at this point.
“So what’s your deal?” Kai says, mouth full of food.
I point. “You got a little something. There on your chin.”
He doesn’t even look up at me. Just smiles into his plate as he uses his fork to chop another massive slice off his basket of eggs or whatever. “I know. This for now, that for later. So?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a deal.”
“Aha. But you’re hashtag out here trying to have coffee with Satan’s favorite Barbie doll.”
She sounds kinda cool. “She’s my family.”
“Mm,” he grunts, mouth full. Then he pulls a pen out of his pocket and grabs my arm. He writes ten digits on it in the world’s most delicate penmanship. “If I’m not around when you meet her, text me. Before, during, after, I don’t care.”
“Why? So you can say I told you so?”
“No,” he says. “So I can come over and we can shit-talk her. Shit-talking someone is always more fun when all parties are on the same page.”
I mean, yeah, I guess so, but … “That really the only reason you want me to text you?”
Finished with his meal, he finally lifts his head, comes up for air. “What other reasons would there be?”
I flick his shoulder. Walk away. “I’m going for a run.”
Saturday, Kai’s MIA and Merrick is napping, which seems weird for someone his age, and it’s honestly the first time in a while I can say I’m bored, which is how I find myself as I’m sitting upside down on the couch with my head hanging off the end, wondering if stars feel things.
Slim’s name lights up my phone and I stare at it overly long before actually answering it this time. Mostly out of guilt, but I’d be lying if I said that boredom didn’t play a role.
“Wow, well hello, stranger. Nice to know you haven’t bitten the steel end of a—”
“Stacy, please be more dramatic.”
“What! This isn’t Dramatic Slim, Tasia. This is Pissed-Off Slim. I am angry at you and I’m even more angry that you think you can condescend to me about it. And if the roles were reversed, you would be just as peeved, so stop trying to make me feel like I’m overreacting.”
I pause. She’s right. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“My feelings are valid,” she continues. “And you’d know that if you—wait, what? What’d you say?”
“I said, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made fun of your feelings and I’m sorry I’ve been shutting you out.”
“Say you’re sorry for being a shit friend.”
“Slim …”
“Say it, Tasia.”
“I am sorry for being a shit friend, Stacy.”
“Good. What else.”
What else? “I sweater God—”
She laughs. “Okay, fine, fine! I feel like I don’t even know you anymore. How are you? How’s everything with your fam?”
“Uh. Okay. Just … if I tell you this thing, will you promise not to be upset with me?”
“I don’t make promises I don’t know that I can keep.”
“You need to promise me right now or I won’t tell you.” I will. But she doesn’t know that. Or probably she does. Slim is my best friend for a reason.
“I hate you. Scout’s honor, or whatever.”
“Good. Okay. Cool. So, uh. I sorta moved in. With Merrick. My birth dad.”
She’s quiet. And the music I heard playing in the background goes suddenly silent.
“Slim?” She says nothing. “Stace? Stacy.”
“You moved in with a stranger!”
I flip off the couch and fast-walk into the other room. “Oh my God, he’s not a stranger, he’s my dad.”
“Your dad that you don’t know. Your dad who is a stranger.”
“Stop. Saying that.”
“Does your mom know you’re there?” She gasps, then, all in one breath: “Ohmigod. Did you run away? Are you a runaway?”
“What kind of afterschool special … Slim. No. I didn’t run away. My mom knows I’m here. I found him. And then he came over and we all … uh, you know. Talked.”
“Talked?”
“Aha.”
I hit the speaker button on my phone and fall into a backbend, as I spend the next few minutes explaining to Slim what happened.
When I’m done, she says, “I just want you to know, I am so mad at you. I’m still just incredibly pissed that you kept all this from me.”
“I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want you to ask me a million questions.”
“Why?”
“Slim. You see? Don’t ask questions. Just … leave it. I don’t know anything yet. I don’t have answers. I just needed someone to get it. And I don’t think anyone really can. So I left.”
Here’s why Slim is my best friend though. She says, “Wanna see a movie with me and some girls from the team?”
Laughing, I fall out of the backbend. “Who?”
“Jessa and Kelan.”
I agree, jumping on the chance to get out of this apartment. All I want now is to hug my best friend. That’s all I want.
After I hang up, I head into the bathroom to change, but Merrick stops me.
“Who are you going with?”
I stop. I guess he overheard.
He’s asking me who I’m going to hang out with, and honestly, it’s weird. Mamma and Daddy never ask. Not because they’re bad parents, but definitely because they know I’m always with one of three people—Slim, Josiah, or Tristan.
“Slim. My best friend. And two other cheerleaders.”
“You play football but hang out with cheerleaders?”
“This isn’t the nineties, Merrick. I hang out with the Drama Club and the band and the stoners, too.” What a lot of people—parents—don’t know is that in most high schools, you take friends anywhere you can get them, so long as their interests speak to yours on some level. And eventually, you become a cheerleader who plays clarinet and blazes, too.
Merrick nods like this is news to him. “And Slim is … female?”
“Yeah. Stacy Lim, so, Slim.”
“Ah. Clever. Got it. She got a weight problem?”
“Merrick.”
“All right.” He holds up his hands.
“So, I’m going,” I gesture to the bathroom but say it like that’s my way out. It kind of is. This conversation, it’s not an interrogation per se. But it’s not the “have fun, be safe” send-off Mamma usually gives either.
“Yeah, yeah. Of course.”
Once I’m changed, Merrick gives me the address here so Slim can pick me up. He offers to give me twenty bones cash, but I decline. I’ve had a debit card for as long as I can remember and Daddy has always given us—Tristan and I—an allowance based on our grades. I can’t go out and buy sever
al hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine or anything, but I can do dinner and a movie with my friends anytime the thought strikes me.
I know I’m privileged. That thought doesn’t ever escape me. I have it good. But it is obvious Merrick lives paycheck to paycheck with small bouts of frivolous spending and lavishness sprinkled in.
I thank Merrick for the offer even though I’ve never thanked Daddy.
As I slide into Slim’s front seat, she leans over to look out my window. “That him?”
“Hello, Stacy. Who?” I glance over. Merrick’s standing in the doorway glancing down at us from the top of the stairway. “Oh. Merrick? Yeah.”
“He is sexy.”
I turn on her like she just ripped a chunk of curls out of the back of my head. “Eww, what?”
“Not, like, sexy … I meant, like, dad sexy.”
“Eww, what?”
“What?” She makes a left turn.
“Can you not.”
Slim lifts her hands off the wheel, steers with her knee. “Okay.”
I explain everything—about Merrick and his basket of eggs or whatever, about Kai El Khoury, except I try to keep that part brief, lest she think I’m more invested in him than I’m ready to admit so soon.
I change the subject before she can ask any questions in her very Slim-like way. “So remind me, who’s coming to the movie?”
As we pull into the parking lot and Slim parks her Miata, she gives me the rundown. And I’m shocked. It’s mostly football guys, plus the two cheerleaders she mentioned. Which would be fine if that were Slim’s bread and butter. The football guys are not her preferred company. I am Slim’s preferred company. And Slim is my best friend because we have almost no personal interests in common. What we do have is where we come from, what we look like, and where we go to school. And maybe that’s enough.
I think one of the things that makes us closest is that we’re just more comfortable around girls than guys. That isn’t any less true because I play football and she cheers. Two sides, same coin.
At eighteen, I don’t think either of us has it entirely figured out. We still laugh too loudly and for far too long at things. We also know what it takes to get a boy and keep a boy—and neither of us is new to that, but who wants to operate like that all the time anyway? Constantly on. Constantly fighting whatever it takes not to eat your lunch too fast, or to ask the members of your lunch table to clarify something that might make you look dumb.
But it’s nice. After the movie, the other cheerleaders leave and Slim and I are the only girls, and that’s weird, but we still enjoy ourselves. We all pile into a booth at Duke’s, and it’s only then that I realize Josiah and Slim are talking to each other more than either of them is talking to me.
Slim touches his arm, and he flicks one of her tight little barrel curls.
Josiah picks a stray eyelash off her cheek, and she shoves him a little every time he makes her—specifically her—laugh.
All in all, it’s a nice distraction before I ask Slim to take me North, to my house, so I can pack a few more things and get my Jeep.
Luckily my parents aren’t home.
Luckily Tristan is, because I’m hoping he’ll help me carry some of the heavier things out to my car.
Tristan does not help me carry a single stitch out to my car.
“Have you even thought about this?” he says as he follows me outside, a spectator. No Good Samaritaning for this Quirk child.
Jerk.
“Trist, don’t talk to me like I’m five. It’s already happened. This place, Mamma and Daddy, they make me uncomfortable. If you were in my place you’d—”
“Get it,” he finishes. “Yeah. I know.”
“Okay, so just … stop acting like I’m leaving the country.” It’s so far beyond what I’m used to from Trist, this reaction. I would never wish this on someone else. Ever. But I do wish he really could understand.
“Whatever. See you at school.” And that’s all he says before he walks back into the house and I continue to load my life into my nineties-era monstrosity on wheels.
When I get back to Merrick’s after nearly an hour and a half of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405 North, he’s asleep on “my” couch, wearing the paint jeans and a white T-shirt with a tear around the collar.
I wheel my suitcases into the back bedroom and find the bed Merrick promised is there. There are sheets, pillows, and blankets on it.
Instead of storage, the space is now my new bedroom. And it’s great. I love the way the ceiling is too high to reach and how there’s a skylight. How there’s a reading nook right next to the window. But even given all that, I still don’t feel good about calling this place “home.”
There’s a Post-it stuck loosely to my pillow.
Dinner with Emily tomorrow at nine. Been in OZ 2 months and now she’s back, you’re welcome. Let me know if you want to cancel. I would be happy to do exactly that. (I mean, there’s nothing wrong with her that you should WORRY about, but. Just.) Anyway, you’re welcome. —Merr
I close the door and lock it. Take my clothes off and sprawl, naked, as exposed as I can possibly get, on the floor for long minutes.
Chapter Sixteen
“How do you like your new space, kiddo?”
My first thought the next morning is whether Merrick will make me breakfast every day from now on. Because he’s at it again, but this time it looks like French toast.
I don’t miss the fact that a woman wanders out of his room. She doesn’t speak to me or acknowledge me in any way. She’s pretty. Got dark skin, like Mamma. But where Mamma has dreads she’s been nurturing for years, this girl has hair like mine. A lion’s mane of tightly spiraled curls, hers inky where mine are copper and gold.
She lifts an arm in the air and calls out, “See you later, Merry. Thanks!” as she leaves.
My second thought—curiously enough—isn’t about her or who she is or her awful taste in nicknames, even though maybe it should be. No, my second thought is if Merrick really thinks it’s okay to call me “kiddo.”
“My space is good. I can just eat cereal, you know. Or a granola bar.”
“Bah. Cereal? Really, kid? Cereal? Cereal isn’t real food.”
I shrug. “Umm. Hey. Was that your … girlfriend? Or … .”
He laughs? He laughs. “No, not my girlfriend. She’s my friend.”
“Your super-comfortable sex-friend?” It’ll be, honestly, just really fricking annoying if Merrick is That Guy.
He chokes on his sip of coffee. It’s better than laughter. “Jesus Christ, Tasia.”
“I’m eighteen. I know what an FWB is.”
“I don’t!”
I lift a finger as I explain each one. “Friend. With. Benefits. She’s your fuck-friend.” I shrug.
“I don’t think your mother would like that you just swore. Now, back to breakfast?”
“Are you telling me not to?”
“Swear?”
I nod.
“No, it happens.”
Okay. “There won’t be time for French toast and eggs in a basket on school days.”
Merrick stops abruptly. “School days.”
“Yeah. The mornings before school. Six a.m. wake-ups. Although, now probably five a.m., since commuting will take an hour and a half with traffic instead of fifteen minutes.”
“Commuting?”
“Merrick. The travel time relative to distance between places? You know what a commute is.”
He waves that away. “No, no, no. I know that. It’s just … I honestly didn’t think you’d last the weekend. Which is—well, that’s on me, but, I should have taken you seriously. Should have planned better and considered the reality of all this.”
The feeling that comes over me is like when you turn a ceiling fan off and it slowly comes to a stop. “I—Oh. You didn’t mean for me to …? But the bed?”
“Yeah. For when you visit. I thought you’d visit from time to time. Maybe a couple weekends, or a w
eek here and there over summer, or—Kid, I just didn’t know you were serious about being here, and—”
Here they are. The outpouring of words, building inside me that I’ve got no control over.
“Oh, no. See … Taze … er—Tasia. I just—”
Aaaaaand here’s the levee. The dam. The fissure, the crack. Broken. Drowning in this heavy tornado of emotional sludge.
“I can’t live with her,” I say, as though he’s suggested something so outrageously disgusting, something so laughably ridiculous. “They don’t get it. They don’t get it at all.” Oh God. “Dammit,” I whisper. “They lied to me.”
“Tasia—”
“They lied to me. They lied to me. They lied to me and nothing will change that. And you know what, I still don’t even know why they lied, because none of them will help me understand. Because none of them can help me understand.” By the end of it, I’m screaming. Shouting at him.
And he’s holding me together and he’s whispering that I can stay, that he’ll talk to them and make it right, that he’s glad I trust him. And that just makes the tornado swirl faster in the cavity of my chest, because I don’t. I don’t trust him. I want to, but I don’t yet. But I’d rather stay with a near stranger than these people who have lied to me my whole life. Merrick’s just the lesser of two evils. Merrick is the new start that I wanted, that getaway I asked for. Merrick is my skeleton key to that rusted lock of a box. Merrick is a means to an end.
Soon he’s on the phone with Mamma.
I get a text from Tristan that seems to come only minutes after Merrick gets off the phone with her.
he’s pulling you out of westview?? seriously? he’s about to pull you out of school?
I shrug as I text him back. I don’t have words. I don’t wanna go back there
to wv?
to that house, tristan
He doesn’t text back.
It’s after-hours on a Sunday, but I hear Merrick on the phone, the speaker blaring at full volume, the tinny voicemail cracking like it’s pushing through puberty, as Merrick leaves a message for who I assume to be the administrative team at El Camino Real High School. After Merrick hangs up, he asks me to log on to my Westview web portal and print my unofficial transcripts. And that’s when the realization starts to really settle in my bones, in my chest, in my heart and lungs, if this anxiety is anything to go by.
Home and Away Page 9
