Page 16 of Give In to Me
She flattened her palms against her thighs. Kept them there. Counted to ten. Her eyes burned, but the tears wouldn’t come. They were stuck somewhere behind her ribs, lodged in the hollow space he’d scooped out with his nothing expression and his rehearsed speech and the wordfixation, and they sat there, heavy and hot and permanent, but they wouldn’t rise.
Seven minutes on the bench. Then she stood up, retrieved her bag from the locker, changed out of the polyester polo she would never wear again, and walked out the back door of Haven Country Club for the last time.
No resignation letter. No goodbye to Maui or Speedy or the kitchen staff who’d saved her a bread roll on her first day. She walked to her car in the staff lot and sat behind the wheel and put her key in the ignition and thought about driving home and eating dinner with Amy and going to bed and waking uptomorrow in a world where Julian Ventura had called her love a fixation to her face.
Her hand wouldn’t cooperate with the key. She tried again. The engine caught.
She drove home on muscle memory, signaling turns and braking at lights and doing all the mechanical things a body does when the person inside it has gone somewhere very far away.
Amy was in the kitchen when she walked in. Textbooks on the table, paralegal coursework spread across the place mats, a pen behind her ear. Her mother smiled and said “Hey, baby, how was work?” and Katy said “Fine” and went to her room and closed the door and lay on her bed and let the ceiling blur above her.
She didn’t cry that night. Or the next morning, or the morning after that. The tears stayed where they were, heavy and unmovable. He’d broken something so fundamental that even her grief couldn’t find the exit.
On the third day, Amy knocked on her door.
“Kates?” Gentle. The voice of a woman who’d learned to read the silences in her daughter as Katy had once read the silences in her. “You quit Haven?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
A pause. “You don’t have to be okay.”
“I know.” She pulled the pillow tighter against her chest. “I will be, though.”
Amy didn’t push. She’d learned that, too, in recovery. That sometimes the people you loved needed you to stand outside the door and let them know it was unlocked. “I love you, baby.”
“Love you too.”
She heard her mother’s footsteps fade down the hallway, and then the apartment was quiet.
On the fourth day, Katy bought a dress.
PROM WAS ON A SATURDAY. She drove herself to Luke Dryer High School at six forty-five in the evening, parked in the student lot between a minivan with a PROUD SENIOR PARENT bumper sticker and a pickup truck that belonged to someone on the football team, and sat in her car for four minutes facing the gymnasium doors.
The dress was green. Twelve dollars from a thrift store on Vermont, cotton, a full skirt that hit below her knees. It wasn’t a prom dress. Prom dresses were satin and sequins and cost more than her car payment. This was a dress for a girl who wanted to show up anyway. A girl who was going to walk into that gymnasium alone and stand under the rented disco balls and drink punch from a plastic cup and prove to herself that she could still enter a room without him in it.
She’d done her own hair. Pinned it up like she always did, and then taken it down and left it loose around her shoulders, because he’d only ever seen it pinned and she wanted one thing, just one, to be different from the version of herself that he’d destroyed.
She checked her reflection in the rearview mirror. Green eyes. Freckles. Red hair past her shoulders. A girl going to prom alone. A girl who’d been brave and gotten her heart ripped out for the trouble, and who was putting on a twelve-dollar dress and showing up anyway, because that was who she was. The girl who ran toward things. Even when the things ran away.
“Okay,” she said aloud. To no one. To herself. To whatever version of Katy Gates was going to walk through those doors and survive the next four hours. “Okay.”
She got out of the car. Smoothed her skirt. Squared her shoulders and lifted her chin and walked across the parking lot toward the gymnasium doors, where the bass was thumping through the walls and the string lights glowed in the windows and someone inside was laughing, and the sound of that laughter was the loneliest thing she’d ever heard.
Head high. Heart in pieces.
She went in.
Chapter 5
THE GYMNASIUM SMELLEDlike fake fog and warm bodies and the particular chemical sweetness of a rented smoke machine working overtime. Katy stood near the punch table with a plastic cup in her hand and told herself she was fine.
She wasn’t fine. But the green dress was doing its job, and her hair was doing its job, and she was upright and present and not crying in a bathroom stall, so by the standards of the last four days, she was exceptional.
The theme was “Starlight Serenade,” which meant someone had stapled silver streamers to the ceiling and hung paper stars from fishing line and aimed three spotlights at a mirrored ball that sent scattered diamonds of light across the basketball court floor. The DJ was playing a heavy bass line. A group of senior girls in sequined dresses were laughing near the photo booth. Two boys from Katy’s English class were attempting a dance move that resembled a wrestling hold.
