When I reach my room, I empty my new sartorial booty on my red chair. I take off the jeans and brown lacy tank I wore for my “car date” earlier and pull on the blue monkey T-shirt, then the new jeans. I move over to the door and consider my outfit in my full-length mirror. I’m still wearing the new necklace, which doesn’t quite match the rest of the ensemble, and my charms. It’s kind of a haphazard look. I peer closely, and I swear I can see whisker burn on my chin, around my lips. I touch my face, feeling for the remnants, the marks of kissing someone who has a five-o’-clock-shadow. I can see them. Does my mom not see them? I lean my nose to my neck and sniff myself, wondering if I smell like him, if I smell like I’ve been kissed by a man. I can smell his scent on me.
In the mirror, I can see all these parts of me. I can see all the different pieces, all the ways I assemble myself for different people—for Noah, for Lane, for Amanda, for Caroline, for my dad, for my mom.
For me.
I don’t look like myself. I don’t look like a girl who’s about the pull the rug out from under her mom.
But that’s who I’m about to become.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Kennedy
The next day, I make a mental note of Caroline’s shoes—a satiny taupe—as I walk in the door. I say hello, but I don’t give her a chance to make shrinkie-dink small talk. I dive in.
“I’m seeing Noah again, nobody knows, my mom is fooling around with Amanda’s dad, Lane asked me to prom and I said yes, Jay Fierstein is following me around and also suing my dad, the women I leave letters for are figuring it out and calling, and someone is also sending letters back to me by leaving them on my doorstep.”
The corner of Caroline’s lips curls up. “Just your average week in between visits.”
“Also, I decided that I’m going to send more letters to everyone, so eventually this whole thing blows up on my mom and she’s forced to stop.”
Caroline raises an eyebrow. “Really? You think she’ll stop?”
I nod, my jaw set. I’m resolute. “She’ll have to. She’ll have no choice. Her covers will all be blown.”
Caroline purses her lips. “I’m not so sure you can do that to an addict.”
“I’d be forcing her to hit bottom,” I say, my voice rising as I stab the air for emphasis. “What choice would she have?”
“She’s an addict, Kennedy. A junkie. You can’t force her to hit bottom. She has to find it on her own,” Caroline says, her tone so calm that it rankles me.
“She’ll find it this time. She’ll have to.”
“Bottom isn’t something other people make you find.”
“I’m expediting it for her. Moving things along.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then I move out, go to college, move in with Noah, and live happily ever after,” I say, holding my hands out wide as if to say isn’t it obvious.
Caroline nods. She doesn’t scoff or smirk or laugh. She should do those things. I recognize the incredulity in what I’ve just said. But it’s also what I desperately want.
“How are things with Noah now that you’re back together?”
“Never been better,” I say, straightening my spine, energy coursing through me as I think of him, and how being back with him is like having gravity work correctly again.
“Are you going to tell your dad this time? That you’re involved with your mother’s agent?”
I shrug. Consider my cuticles. Tug at a dead piece of skin.
“Do you think you should?”
Another shrug. Another push of my finger into the nailbed. I don’t meet her eyes.
“Kennedy. Look at me.” The tone in her voice, strong and commanding, forces me to look up.
“I think you should. I’m just going to say it. I definitely think you should. You and Noah have enough challenges in this relationship and the least you can do is start it honestly.”
“My dad will flip.”
“How do you know?”
“Um, maybe because he flipped in the first place when he found the letter!”
“And you told him the letter was to Jay. To his forty-five-year-old business partner. Not to your mother’s twentysomething agent. So it’s hard to know what he’d do, isn’t it?”
“He has a history of flipping,” I say through clenched teeth. “And you know what? I don’t need this crap from my parents anymore. I am this close,” I say, holding up my hand and showing a sliver of space between my thumb and index finger, “to getting out of their homes. I don’t need to mess it up.”
“What are you going to do?”
I flash back to my kamikaze rides through traffic, to the balancing act I pull off of weaving daredevil-style through cars and cabs and buses. I can do that. I can do anything. “Not mess it up.”
“Okay then,” Caroline says, and folds her arms across her chest, imitating me.
“Okay then,” I say, like a copycat.
She skips a beat, waits for me. “Kennedy,” she begins, and tells me I am setting myself up to be hurt even more by my mom. She tells me too that relationships with older men rarely work.
“You’re wrong. You’re just wrong,” I say, crossing my arms.
We have reached an impasse. She doesn’t bend, and I won’t either.
When I leave, I am fueled by tankers full of frustration. I am driven by years of the pent-up pressure of secrets and lies. I want to light them up, watch them catch fire and burn into the night sky.