She turns and takes her husband with her, leaving me alone in the middle of my trashed but nearly empty bedroom. As soon as she’s out of sight, I sink down to the floor, crying into my palms in as silent a way possible.
When I hear movement, I lift my face up and find Parrish standing in my doorway, staring at me.
He doesn’t say anything, but I brace myself for an onslaught of meanness and petty bullshit. Instead, he moves over to the bed and starts picking things up, putting odds and ends into the nightstand drawer before refolding the clothes.
“You don’t have to do that,” I whisper, my voice cracking. I feel strung-out right now, empty. And so, so freaking sad.
Parrish scoffs at me and then gives a violent scowl.
“And you don’t have to pretend like you don’t need the help,” he snaps back at me. He pauses for a moment to dig around in his hoodie pocket, withdrawing my phone and then moving over to stand in front of me. He hands it out, and I sit there for a minute, just staring at it. “You shouldn’t trust me. I’m likely to tattle.”
I take the phone carefully from his hand, my fingertips sliding across his palm. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I’m almost certain that he shudders at the touch.
“They shouldn’t have trashed your room like this,” he murmurs, which is up there in the ‘nicest things my stepbrother has ever said to me’ category. I mean, other than, “Your nose looks good to me.” That was a real one-liner right there. Almost dropped my panties to the floor.
“I want to go home,” I say, my voice husky and broken. I’m not sure why I say it to Parrish of all people. Like he even cares. He pauses near my dresser, putting a stack of refolded clothes in the top drawer before turning to glance at me. I can’t bear to look at him anymore. He’s too pretty and too mean, and he confuses me with the things he does. One minute, he’s tearing my grandparents apart with Chasm’s help. The next, he’s helping me clean my room.
“I know, but that isn’t going to happen.”
My head snaps up and I stare in his direction, feeling the jagged pieces inside of me shift around and cut. But Parrish doesn’t look mean right now, just contemplative. He moves over to stand beside me again, crouching down so that we’re eye to eye.
“When I told you that Tess was never letting you go, I wasn’t just being mean.”
“I hate her,” I tell him, and he looks away, toward the windows and the weak flicker of sunshine on the surface of the lake.
“You shouldn’t,” he says, his voice this deep but apathetic drawl. Just a boy with too much money and idle hands. I suddenly want to kiss him because I must be a goddamn masochist. “She’s a good person, a good mom.” He looks back at me then and his pretty eyes drop to my lips, taking them in like he thinks I might have some pretty features, too. “Usually,” he adds, standing up suddenly.
I follow after him, wringing my hands.
“You know, girls are conditioned to be people-pleasers,” I start, and Parrish gives a small smirk.
“Well, you could’ve fooled me.” He says it in just such a way that it straddles the line between insult and compliment. I take a deep breath as I move over to my backpack and lift it from the floor by a single strap. It’s ripped, too, sewn back together by my grandfather’s careful hand. I added a piece of hot pink duct tape to keep it altogether. When Tess saw it, she cringed.
We don’t understand each other, like, at all.
Two sides of one coin, the faces forever separate, never able to look one another in the eye.
“But I’m so tired.” I rub my hand over my face before tossing the empty backpack on the end of the bed, bending low to gather the emptied contents. It’s like a timeline of my life at the Banks’ house: the stuffed unicorn I’ve had since the day Saffron brought me to her parents, a framed picture of my first camping trip when I was seven, a sweatshirt from my middle school. Go Lions! “I know I should be able to be happy here, with such a big house, and I mean, they bought me a freaking sportscar—”
“If money and things equaled happy, then my dad wouldn’t drink a fifth of scotch every Friday night and Tess wouldn’t have spent every February twenty-seventh crying over a cake with the words Happy Birthday, Mia written on it.” Parrish shoves the top drawer of the dresser closed and comes over to stand just behind me. Too close, really. Way too freaking close. I can feel his warm breath stirring my hair, that fresh citrus and clovers scent giving way to goose bumps on both of my arms. “Just let me know when you’re ready for that design, Dakota. My ink is ready.”
