Far From You

31

NOW (JUNE)

When I get home, I stare at the evidence board on my mattress because I can’t think about anything else. I take Kyle’s picture down, rip it in half, and toss it on the floor, barely resisting the urge to stomp on it a few times.

“Sophie?” My mom knocks on my door. “Your dad said your knee was hurting. I came home to check on you.”

“Just a second.” I scramble to push my mattress down. My sheets are in a tangle on the floor, and I don’t have time to do anything but pile them on the bed, shoving Kyle’s torn picture under my pillow and throwing myself on top of the mess. “Come in.”

She frowns when she sees me, flushed and guilty-­looking. Knowing Mom, she probably has a numbered list of things to watch out for when it comes to her junkie daughter.

“What are you hiding?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Sophie.”

I sigh, reach next to my bed, and grab the shoe box stashed underneath my nightstand. I flip it open, spill the contents onto the comforter. Photos spread everywhere. “I was looking at pictures.”

My mom’s face softens, and she picks up a photo, one of me and Mina, our arms wrapped around each other, neon-green swim caps clashing horribly with our pink tie-dyed racing suits. “This was before your growth spurt,” she says.

I take the photo from her, trying to remember when it was taken; some sunny day during swim practice. Mina’s missing a front tooth, which means we must’ve been about ten. She’d pitched headfirst off her bike that summer, racing me. Trev had run all the way home with her in his arms, and later I found him checking her bike to make sure it was safe.

“That was before a lot of things,” I say. I put the photo back into the box, grabbing up others, shoving them out of sight.

“I want to talk to you.” Mom sits down on the edge of my bed, and I keep on putting the photos away to give myself something to do. I pause at the photo of Trev and me, standing on the deck of his boat, sticking our tongues out. There’s a pink blur on the side of the photo: the edge of Mina’s finger, obscuring the lens.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did about your college essay,” Mom continues. “I’m sorry. You should be able to write about anything you’d like.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

She takes another photo, this one of me, fat and happy in the lap of Aunt Macy. “You know,” she says quietly, “my mother died of an overdose.”

I look up, and I’m so surprised she’s brought it up that I drop the stack of photos. “I know,” I say, bending over quickly to pick them up, grateful I won’t have to look at her right away.

Mom rarely talks about my grandmother. My grandpa lives on fifty acres of wilderness, in a house he built with his own hands. After the crash, he’d clapped his hand (a ­little too hard) on my shoulder and said, “You’ll get through this.”

It’d been almost an order, but I’d felt comforted by it, like it was a promise at the same time.

“I was the one who found her,” Mom says. “I was fifteen. It was one of the worst moments of my life. When your father searched your room…when I realized that you could’ve followed her down that path…when I realized that someday I might walk into your room and you wouldn’t be breathing…I knew I’d failed you.”

It’s unimaginable, the words coming out of her mouth. She had failed me, but only after I’d recovered. She’d refused to see the changes in me, the things I’d overcome and accepted about myself—the ones she never could. She’d stood there, stone-faced to my begging and tears, my heart still a fresh wound pouring out grief and shock, and she’d seen it all as guilt and lies.

I hate it, but there’s a part of me, the sliver that’s not consumed by Mina, that can understand why she and Dad didn’t believe me. Why they shoved me into rehab and practically threw away the key. They wanted any way to keep me safe.

I understand.

I just can’t forgive them for it yet.