“Mmm, what time is it?”
I rolled over and looked at the clock. “Two fifteen.”
“Huh.”
She sat up, her clothes rumpled and her face slightly flushed. She ran her fingers through her hair, working out the tangles. She was gorgeous, then. Silhouetted against the light flooding in through the window next to her, the sunlight peeking through her tousled hair, her bare legs twisted into some odd contortion.
And then she caught me staring, and immediately her self-consciousness ruined it all. She pulled back her hair into a hurried ponytail, pulled the legs of her shorts down her thighs, smoothed her shirt with her hands. “I really should go home.”
“Stay,” I implored her, grabbing her hand. I regretted it immediately. I sounded desperate, creepy. But maybe I was. The truth was, I missed her. She was standing right there, and I missed her. It made no sense. The word love ran through my head, a neon-lit sign flashing on the street corner. I ignored it. I had said more than enough.
She shook her head, pulling her hand away. “I have to go. Really. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
She was always leaving. Always.
Monday, December 15th, 5:59 PM
“I think he’s waking up.”
And I am. My eyes flicker open. It’s like one of those horrible movie scenes, with sluggish blinking flashes in front of the camera, the glaring white of a hospital room and the blinding fluorescent lights. I try to sit up, but can’t even get my head off the pillow.
Josephine moves to stand at the end of the bed. “You’re awake,” she say softly, sticking her hands in her coat pockets. She looks awkward and terrified. I wonder how long she’s been standing here, waiting for me.
“I’m awake,” I reply.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She bites her lip. “You don’t look too bad. Both of your shoulders are... I don’t know. And you broke your arms pretty badly. The doctor is coming in a minute, I’m sure. He’ll probably know what happened better than I do. The nurse just left a second ago to go get him, because you seemed like you were waking up.” She shifts her weight nervously from one foot to the other, her arms crossed over her chest.
“How’s Virginia?”
“She’s --”
The doctor breezes in at that moment, cutting her off. He’s middle-aged, bald, and jovial, with a salt and pepper beard and a twinkle in his eye. If he gained fifty pounds and donned a red suit, he would make a great mall Santa. “Good to see you’re up, Ulysses,” he remarks, coming over and adjusting the bed. I can see the whole room now – the chair by the door, the window beside the bed, my mother’s coat lying in a heap by the door.
“I’m Dr. Fathers. You’ve dislocated your right shoulder, it looks like. Both arms are broken. We had to put you in emergency surgery for that shoulder, so it may be a little sore when you wake up more – you had a bone sticking clear out of the skin, it really wasn’t pretty. We are worried about head injury, but you’re awake, so that’s a big step in the right direction. Internally, everything seems okay. You were wearing your seatbelt, so you were lucky there.” He paces as he talks, taking two steps forward and then two back, over and over again. It makes me nervous. It obviously is affecting Josephine the same way. She’s biting the nails on her right hand, staring at me without meeting my eyes.
“How’s my sister?”
He looks at me for a long moment, his pleasantness suddenly gone. “She’s still in surgery.”
“Why?”
He looks down at the floor. “Right now we think her airbag didn’t function properly. She was wearing her seatbelt as well, which helped keep her in the vehicle, but she hit the dashboard with remarkable force. We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything.”
“And the woman? The other woman?”
He manages a smile. “She’s fine. She was the one who called 911, actually. She was extremely worried about you two. She’s already gone home.”
He scribbles something on his clipboard and leaves the room with a spring in his step. I feel sick.
“Have you seen Virginia?”
Josephine shakes her head. “Just you. They didn’t even call us until after two o’clock. You were through surgery by the time we got here.”
“So Mom’s here? And Helen?”
She bites her lip. “They left.”
“They left?”
She sighs. “Mom can’t deal with any of this right now, Pookie. She’s... I mean, just think. She’s been through so damn much with all of us this year. I sent her home. I told her I’d call her when they gave us news about Virginia.”
“Oh.”
“Look, it’ll be fine. You both will be. Seriously.” She forces a twitchy smile.
“What if she’s not? What if...” I trail off. I don’t want to name the possibilities.
Josephine sighs, walking over to my left to stare out the window. “I don’t know. I... I don’t know. She’ll be fine. She has to be.” She smiles at me, grabbing my hand, biting down hard on her lower lip.
“She doesn’t have to be. People die in car wrecks all the time. Poppy --”
“You said Poppy did it on purpose.”
“So?”
“So that’s different.”
We fall silent. I am exhausted, but I refuse to fall asleep. I lie there, staring at the wall. Josephine stands at the window and looks out at the city, wiping the occasional tear from her eye. We hope. But neither of us believes in what we’re hoping. We wait in a numbed agony to hear something, anything. We will take anything.
Monday, August 19th, 5:49 PM
“Are you sick, sweetheart? You’ve been cooped up in here all day.”
I sat up, groggily rubbing my eyes. “Mmm.”
“Oh!” She lets out a gasp of surprise when she sees my face. “Oh, Ulysses, what happened?”
I shrug. “Nothing. It’s... Just teenage boys. You know. We’re stupid.” And really, that summed up everything pretty nicely. Not necessarily this part, but my life in general.
“Is it broken? This looks horrible, Ulysses. Let me see.” She clucked her tongue as she examined it, shaking her head.
“Not broken. Just... I don’t know. It’s fine. Seriously, Nana, never felt better.”
She stepped back, her arms crossed, wearing a disapproving look. “You’ve been here barely one weekend and you’re already picking fights?”
“I didn’t... Look, he hit me, and I kind of deserved it, but I swear I didn’t hit back.” That much was true. Unfortunately.
“Who?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “I... Just... It’s fine, Nana. Seriously. I’ll be okay.”
“Who, Ulysses?”
I stared at her. Shook my head.
“I’ll have to call your mother.”
I pictured it in my head. My mother on the phone, listening. Crying. Virginia slumped against the wall outside her door, hair pushed back with shaking fingers, worrying. She was always worrying. But what could I really say to stop it? The truth was, my mother would cry and Virginia would worry, whether I gave them new reason to or not.
“Fine.”
She blinked at me, then shook her head slowly, her eyes never leaving mine. “You are so much better than this, Ulysses.”
But I wasn’t. I was protecting Poppy. In my mind, it was the only thing to do.
Tuesday, December 16th, 10:10 AM
“Hey sweetie.”
I force my eyes open. “Hey, Mom.”
She looks old. Very, very old. She takes my hand and rubs it between her own, her fingers frightfully cold. “How are you?”
“I’m okay. Just some broken bones and sh... stuff. No big deal.”
She manages a quick smile before her face collapses again. “Uh-huh. That’s good, sweetie. Your sisters have been worried about you.”
“Virginia?” I ask hopefully, my voice rising at least an octave.
She pulls one hand away and wipes her eye. “She’s still asleep.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She cracked her head open, and her seatbelt had to jerk her so hard it broke a rib, which punctured a lung,” chimes in a different, flatter voice. A voice I would know anywhere.
“Josie,” my mother admonishes. “Please.”
“What? You think thirty percent is a good thing? Do you carry an umbrella for a thirty percent chance of rain?”
My mother turns to look at her, eyes brimming with tears. “She’ll be fine.”
“If by fine you mean brain-damaged, can’t breathe, doesn’t know what the hell is going on then yeah, yeah Mom, she’ll be just fine.” Josephine sighs, staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“We’re going to talk about something else,” my mother says, trying to make her voice firm. It comes out shaky, warbling. I cringe.
“Is the thirty percent... What of?” I ask, ignoring my mother, terrified of the answer.
Josephine crosses her arms and stares at the ground. “Coming out alright. No significant brain damage and shit.”
“Josie,” my mother warns halfheartedly, staring down at our hands.
“She’ll almost definitely live. I guess. This was all a few hours ago, they haven’t really told us anything since earlier. The doctor was actually in here, but we didn’t want to wake you up.”
“I can’t believe this.”
Josephine closes her eyes and bows her head. My mother doesn’t look at me.
“We were just... I... She just...”
I give up. I give up on trying to give a voice this thing, this horrible dark feeling that is eating every shred of hope inside of me. Things like this do not happen to people like us. We’ve been through enough. We have survived everything that has been thrown in our path, but we are weak. We are tired. We are worn down. We cannot make it over this wall. We don’t even have the strength to try.
Tuesday, August 20th, 7:25 AM
“Are you going to walk me to school or not?”
“Oh.” I shouldered my backpack and grabbed my summer reading essay off the kitchen table, attempting to chew what was left of my granola bar without dislocating my already troubled jaw. “Mmmph.”
“Uh-huh. You’re a real charmer. Your face looks a little better, at least.”
I nodded, glancing over at her for the first time. She wore a brown tweed miniskirt and a lime green tank top, with a brown corduroy jacket thrown over her arm beneath several textbooks. She had her hair down and waving, with a brown leather headband pushing it out of her face. She looked beautiful. Not just in the way that everyone seems to the first day of school, when there’s still hope for a year unmarred by histrionics and stress and general teenage miseries. But Poppy looked legitimately beautiful. Take her to prom beautiful. Think about the future beautiful. Fall in love beautiful. On her best day, Cassie had looked half as gorgeous. I wondered how much of that was physical and how much of it was my perception. If Poppy only looked so perfect because I wanted her to, because I was starting to love her. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to imagine she looked that way to everyone. Damaged and fragile and lovely. I wanted nothing more then than to be allowed love her. To follow her everywhere, for the rest of her life, and never be cast aside.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, obviously self-conscious, smoothing her tank top with her hands.
I shook my head. “Nothing. Let’s go.”
We walked out the door and down the driveway, her flip-flops thwacking against the pavement. “Ready for your first day at Quincy? It’ll be a sauna today. You’re going to regret those jeans.”
I shrugged. “I’ll live.”
“That’s what you think now. You’ve never had the pleasure of spending hour after hour stuck inside the sweaty bowels of our nation’s sixth president.”
I grimaced, my still swollen face protesting in a fit of pain to my change in expression. “That’s a nasty mental image.”
“It’s the only one that fits.”
I looked around us at the empty street. “Where is everyone? Nana said everyone walks.”
“Not on the first day. The Scav, remember? Everyone has their shit in their cars. And the little kids don’t start until 8:30.” She shrugged. “But we get out an hour earlier than they do, so sucks to be them, really.”
“What are you doing after school?”
“Probably hanging out with Lia. If Todd comes, you can. I’ll let you know. We’ll probably have all the same classes.”
“Seriously?”
She raised an eyebrow at me, shifting her books in her arms. “There’s an honors/AP track and a regular track. Try to remember that our class has about seventy kids in it. We don’t have all the fancy shit that you did back in Jefferson.”
“And you’re in the honors track?”
She nodded. “Yeah. We have three AP classes, too, that you take senior year – Politics, Calculus, and Spanish Language. You’ll be in all three. There’s an honors French IV class, too, but it’s only got like, ten people in it, if that.”
“So you don’t have much class choice, I take it.”
She laughed. “God no. They can tell you by second grade what classes you’ll take in high school.”
“Huh.” We turned the corner and started down the road toward school, my jeans already starting to stick to my legs in the early morning heat.
We were about fifty yards away when the noise started. As we drew closer, it became unmistakable – it was the sound of school. Of hundreds of people talking all at once, chattering about the summer they had all spent together and the trips they had taken to nowhere special. Poppy walked through the crowd unfazed, waving and smiling at nearly everyone she passed, but never stopping to say a word of greeting.
“You know everyone?” I shouted to her.
“Of course,” she replied, finally reaching the other side of the crowd. Lia sat on a railing separating the school from the bank next door, resting her feet on the lower rung. She snapped her gum as Poppy approached, unhooking her Stilettos and jumping up to hug her.
“Senior year!” she squealed, and Poppy squealed in return. I fought the feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was beginning to dawn at me that this was, in fact, my senior year. That I was damned to spend it here, at John Quincy Adams High School, with its ugly brick and its three hundred students and its lack of ventilation. It was enough to make anyone a little nervous and a lot miserable.
Lia eyed me for a second and then gave me a quick hug, as well. I stood there awkwardly, not sure what to do. She smiled warmly. “What happened to your face, Kennedy? Are you okay?”
I nodded. It seemed like a sufficient response. Lia evidently agreed, and returned to gushing to Poppy, something about Todd and the Scav and her summer reading paper. I had no idea how all three things could fit together and frankly didn’t really care very much.
“Are you Kennedy?”
I turned around. A tall, sturdy guy stood behind me, his hand stuck out, a friendly smile on his face. “I’m Max. This is – wait a second. Emma!”
A girl appeared next to him. She looked suspiciously like a Berenstain Bear and her hair had been highlighted to the point that it was lighter than her tanned skin. “Hi. Emma. You’re Kennedy, right? Cute name.” She didn’t seem convinced.
I took Max’s still outstretched hand and shook it, giving them both a tight smile. “Poppy mentioned you both.”
“Did she?” Max seemed interested, perhaps a little too much so, but Emma just looked annoyed. It seemed like a consistent trend.
“What’s this I hear about myself?” Poppy sidled up behind me, resting her head on my shoulder. I tried to ignore it. I was falling in love with her by the minute, or at the very least in like, and she wanted no part of it. She was just bent on making it as hard for me as possible.
“You’ve been talking about him, apparently,” Emma said, rolling her eyes. She reminded me of Virginia, a little bit, except I didn’t think she had anything good buried beneath her surly exterior. “What, describing your past conquests to your newest beau?”
“You’re still so sweet, Emma,” Poppy said, smiling toothily and holding out her arms for a hug. “And such great company. It sucks that this is our last year together!”
I searched her words for the snotty comeback. I couldn’t find it. It was alarming.
“Please don’t touch me. I don’t want your diseases,” Emma replied, shying away from Poppy’s reaching hands.
“What’s going on over here?” Lia appeared beside Poppy, towing Todd, who looked disgruntled. “I made everybody cookies for the first day of school. I already put them in my locker, but I’ll hand them out at lunch.”
“What if they don’t have the same lunch?” I pointed out.
Everyone stared at me. “He hasn’t really gotten this whole ‘small town’ thing yet,” Poppy explained, shooting me a patronizing smile. “Lia and Max will be in your classes, too, by the way. Emma won’t, which sucks, but you can get to know her over lunch.” She smiled sweetly in Emma’s direction. “And Todd is stuck in junior year, because he had to repeat his freshman year. We miss him dearly. But you’ll see him at lunch, too, if Lia isn’t too busy licking his face or something.”
There it was. That Poppy I recognized. Lia glared at her, and they both exploded into a fit of giggles. Okay, not so much. But it was a start.
“What happened to your face?” Emma asked, wrinkling her nose. “Did Clay do that?”
“He hasn’t even met Clay,” Poppy replied, shaking her head. “He just got into a fight out in Mason. He won, of course. He’s got great muscles.” She laid her head on my arm, grinning up at me. “Kennedy, show her your abs.”
“I’d rather not.”
Emma shot Poppy a look and rolled her eyes again. She was reminding me more of Virginia every minute. “Where are Josh and Lindsay? And Clay, for that matter? I haven’t seen him, and he’s kind of hard to miss.”
“I heard he got busted for that party he had in July,” Max noted, crossing his arms. “Serves him right. Kid is a fucking idiot, telling all the freshmen. Freshmen shouldn’t be invited to parties.
“They’re not freshmen anymore,” Lia noted, but nodded in agreement.
Lindsay walked up just then, looking exhausted. “Jesus Christ. Dad told me I could have the car and then got pissed at me, so I had to run halfway here. I’m going to smell like crazy BO all day.” She grimaced. “Where’s Josh? Jesus, he’s got to be here. We have to judge the Scav today.”
“I’m right here.” He emerged from the crowd, shaking his blonde hair, winking at Lindsay. “What a beautiful day to be educated.”
Poppy laughed. “It is my favorite pastime.”
The bell rang just then. “Go to the front office,” Poppy instructed me, pointing. “We’re all off to homeroom. You’ll get your assignment there. Okay?” She had to shout to be heard over the stampede of students heading off to their first day of torture.
I nodded, looking in the direction she had pointed. The building glared back at me, taunting. “The front office. Right. I can find it.”
She smiled at me and patted my arm. “I’ll see you, then,” she shouted, and was swept away into the crowd.
I waited until the path was clear to walk alone down the sidewalk to the entrance nearest where Poppy had pointed. The door was unlocked. No security guard stood inside waiting to look through my bag. No metal detectors blocked my path. I didn’t even have to enter a code on the lock at the door (a code that was supposed to be secret at my school in Jefferson but, of course, was not). It was surreal. I walked down the hallway, where only a few stragglers remained, toward the glass-front office at the end of the hall. Even that had been easy to find. This school was not a maze where all the hallways looked the same, where were it not for room numbers you would have no way to know if you were on the second floor or the third. It was a different school, to say the least.
“Can I help you?” The secretary looked me up and down, seemingly perturbed. “You’re not a freshman, are you? Freshman orientation is down the --”
I shook my head. “I’m Ulysses Kennedy? I’m new.”
She thought for a moment and then nodded emphatically, a warm smile lighting up her face. “We were expecting you. You don’t look much like your picture, but --”
“It’s the haircut. And the face,” I said, with what I hoped was a charming smile, but charming smiles were hard to come by when you could only feel half your face moving and had to trust that the other half was doing the same.
“Of course,” she replied, pulling a form from the top of a pile. “We’ll need you to fill this out, just some basic information, and then you can go to your homeroom. You’ll be in F through O with Mr. McMahon. That’s room 137.”
I nodded, accepting the pen and paper. “Where is that, exactly?”
“Down this hall to the end, then turn left. It should be on your right somewhere.”
“Uh-huh.” I filled in my name, address, and phone number, tapping the pen against my teeth. “Will I get my schedule there?”
She nodded. “You need one more emergency contact.”
I looked down at the form. Trying to think of someone, anyone, who would count. “Can I... I have family in Jefferson. Can I just put them down?”
She looked at me over the rims of her glasses. “Just leave it blank. I know your grandmother. She’ll be home.” She smiled.
“Yeah.” I handed over the form. “Room 137, then?”
She nodded. I called a quick thanks as I walked back down the hall. Ready to start over, at a school where no one had heard yet that I was crazy. Where I was just the new kid with the messed up face. And where she was. That, more than anything, was the important part.
Tuesday, December 16th, 4:55 PM
“You can’t do that,” I caution her. “You have to rewrite g as a triple product and use the triple product rule. You can’t find the derivative until you’ve done that. Like you did in the last one. Seriously, this is like a continuation of that one.”
“This is impossible. I’m going to fail.”
“Are you taking it tomorrow? What about the ones you missed today?”
She shrugs. “It’s an excused absence. They have make up days at the end. As soon as we have some definite news about Virginia I’ll go back. Which is why I need to study for this. Now.” She makes it sound so simple. As soon as we have some definite news about Virginia. I don’t want definite news. I fear definite news. The test results, the brain wave scans. I’ll gladly look the other way.
“You think she’ll be okay?” I ask softly, my eyes welling up. I swallow the tears down. I’m instantly embarrassed. I attempt to wipe my eyes, but my hand doesn’t move. Damn it.
Josephine looks over at me, biting her lip. “I hope so. She... She’s Virginia. You know?”
I know. For the first time in my life, I know her. And yet a part of me still feels impossibly far away.
“She’s just had a really tough year.” I stare down at my lap, at Josephine’s open calculus book. “Right? And...”
“I know.” Virginia was the one who knew what to do. It was the crazy thing. This girl who had never seemed interested in anyone but herself had come to life when the rest of us were dying. Had held us together when we were falling apart. She had saved us, in more than one way. We owed her everything. And now she was the one who was helpless and needy. And none of us could do anything but wait.
Josephine picks up her pencil and shifts her notebook in her lap. “Let’s just work, okay?”
I nod. “Right. Try this one. It should help you with the chain rule. You just need to get used to applying all of this. You’ll be fine.”
She shoots me a grateful smile, but there is no light in her eyes. We are all dying, slowly, and will not stop until we know that she will live.
Tuesday, August 20th, 11:54 AM
“Having a fun first day?”
I collapsed onto the picnic bench, glaring at her. “No. No, I am not having a good first day. I am hot. And people keep looking at me funny. And you, you are mean.”
She batted her eyelashes innocently. “Me?”
“Yes, you. Way to ditch me in econ. That was sweet of you.”
Poppy rolled her eyes. “You did fine. You and Brianna seemed to get along.”
“Yeah, well. Next time there’s a seat next to the awkward new kid who has no friends yet, please take it. He feels really damn stupid sitting alone in the back of the room by the window.”
Max laughed. “Yeah, you’re so dejected. The women around here think you’re Jesus or something. I think you’ve spoken to every girl in town in the past four hours.”
“Well, he’s cute,” Lindsay pointed out, shooting me a grin. “And tough. What with the face and all.”
Emma scowled. “Can we stop flirting with him, please? You people are ridiculous.”
“Who’s ridiculous? Linds, what the hell are you doing?” Josh stood over her, looking confused. “We’re supposed to be judging.”
“Shit.” Lindsay shoved the rest of her granola bar into her mouth and waved a silent goodbye to us all as she chewed, shouldering her backpack.
Max stared at Emma. Emma stared at Poppy. Poppy’s eyes were trained on Lia, who was kicking Josh under the table. And for a moment, I felt like a part of this place. This tiny school in a nowhere town in the middle of farm country, miles and miles away from everyone I had ever met before. And the ties holding me to Jefferson slowly began to unravel.
Tuesday, December 16th, 6:21 PM
“This looks appetizing.”
I stare down at my plate as she pokes at it with a fork. “It looks like someone put a weasel in a blender and poured it onto a plate. With mashed potatoes. And Jello.”
Josephine wrinkles her nose. “Okay, first of all, weirdest comparison ever. Second, ew. And third... I brought you a Snickers from the vending machine.”
I groan. “Thank god.”
She pulls the candybar out of her bag and unwraps it, breaking off a piece. “Open.” I oblige, and she pops the candy into my mouth. “This is weird. Don’t you think?”
I nod, my teeth stuck together with caramel.
“This isn’t how I pictured my last exam week of high school. Or Christmas. Or any of it. I mean, not that it’s not fine.” She breaks off another piece and shoves it between my lips. “It’s just weird. We’ve had a really weird year.”
I chew and swallow. “No kidding.” I attempt to scrape the chocolate out of my molars with my tongue, grimacing. “The past six months have been insane.”
“Yeah.” She stares down at the candy bar, turning it slowly in her hands. “I’m worried about her,” she says after a moment, not looking up.
“We all are.”
She shakes her head. “I just... We’ve all been so damn lucky. Even though we haven’t at all. You know? Like, it’s been bad, but in that really weird way where you know it could have been a lot worse.”
“Yeah.” I bite my lip. “Look, she’s Virginia. She’ll be... I mean, she’s Virginia. She’s a hardass. Remember when we were kids, and she fell out of that tree?”
“And she broke her arm, but she didn’t tell anyone until two days later, even though it must’ve hurt like a bitch?” She the corners of her mouth twitch. “Yeah. I remember.”
“And how they didn’t pick her for the lead in the school play in eighth grade, but she learned all the lines anyway? And she hung out with the girl who got the part and slipped in all these little jabs until she had her convinced that she was a horrible actress who was going to forget all of her lines?”
“And she got the part at the last minute when the girl inexplicably backed out. Yeah.”
“And last summer, she knew exactly what to do when the rest of us were going crazy. And she did it without thinking.”
Josephine bites her lip. “You really think she’ll be okay?”
“She’s Virginia,” I repeat, shrugging. “She won’t die from something mundane like a car crash. She’s way too hardcore for that. She’ll go out from hypothermia, skinnydipping in the Arctic Ocean on her fiftieth wedding anniversary.”
“Trying to ride a buffalo in South Dakota.”
“Parasailing into piranha infested waters.”
“Choking on a peanut butter sandwich with just a little too much peanut butter.”
She grins up at me. “We’re horrible people.”
“Yeah, well.”
“She’ll be fine, then.”
“Of course she will.”
She still doesn’t look entirely convinced. For that matter, neither am I. But we’re trying. Trying to believe. She holds up a piece of the Snickers bar and puts it in my mouth. “She loves you, you know.”
“Who?” I ask, my mouth full.
“Virginia. She slept in your room all the time while you were gone. She had to wear like, three sweatshirts sometimes. But she missed you.”
“You think?”
She nods. “She felt really horrible. About how she treated you before we left.”
“That was my own fault.”
“No it wasn’t.”
She feeds me the rest of the candy bar, then stares down at her hands.
“Look, I know I blamed you for a lot of shit back then. I know we all did. I was just...” She sighs. “Look, what I’m trying to say...”
“Just say it.”
She looks up at me, her eyes shining. “Thanks.”
It’s the last thing I expected to hear.
“Why?”
She shrugs, examining her fingernails. “You did what you thought was best for me.”
“So?”
“So I love you. Now shut up.”
We sit for a while in silence. Josephine reaches for the TV remote just as our mother pokes her head into the room. She’s grinning from ear to ear.
“Your sister is awake.”
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