“Tucks?”
I look at him.
“Say something,” River whispers, as if he’s afraid I’ll vanish into thin air if I don’t speak.
Panic rises within me. Every word was a fight.I can’t.
He takes the cell phone from my hand.What are you afraid of?he types.
I don’t know.
Yes, you do.
Maybe I’m afraid of life.
Which part of life? In any case, you’re no longer afraid of kissing, are you?He smiles at me with a wink, and I poke him in the ribs.
“Are you afraid of being abandoned because your mom left?” he asks softly.
I sometimes forget how much he knows.
I slept on the kitchen table for a year so I’d be the first to see her when she came back.
I feel the echo of longing well up within me, that hot, burning pain I felt as a child. I feel the endless disappointment when I woke up frozen in the morning. Alone.
River wraps his arm around me and pulls me to him. The touch, this kind of closeness, feels so good that I feel like crying again. “When I lost June, I did something similar. Only I knew she’d never come back... Hey, tell me more about yourself and your silence, okay.”
I look at him.
“With your cell phone.” He laughs, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Everything here is twisted. He cut himself, which is sick, but it made me say three words, and that’s incredible. So unbelievable that I still don’t understand it or know what it actually means. And now, here we sit, closer than ever. I type:
When Mom left, I stopped talking to people. I only talked to James, Arizona, and Dad. Not so much with Dad because he often scared me with his serious manner.
And when did you stop talking to your family?River types.
It started with a Ming vase story at your parents’.
He raises his eyebrows. “A Ming vase story at my parents’?”
Chester... twisted the facts. Told lies. Arizona hasn’t spoken to me since.
She probably entered his wing at the exact moment Chester pushed me against the wall in his living room and kissed me. At first, I was so paralyzed with shock and horror that it might have looked like we were kissing consensually. At least, that’s how I perceived it happened since I didn’t see Ari. And to this day, she still has no idea what happened afterward—how Chester tackledme to the floor and shoved his greedy hands under my shirt. How he lay on top of me and pushed his tongue into my mouth. He whispered to me that he would look after me at Kensington.
I thrashed, kicked, and accidentally knocked over a side table with a sixty-four-thousand crappy Ming vase on it. For a few seconds, it shocked him so much that he froze, and I was able to escape.
Unfortunately, I became lost and ended up in another wing. That’s where he found me—shaking and confused. Someone had seen me running, which was my salvation, at least in some way, although afterward, I often asked myself if it wouldn’t have been better if I had just let it happen. Chester dragged me out from under the bureau, and suddenly, his mom was in the doorway with huge, indignant eyes.
“She did it,” I hear Chester whispering to his dad. “Hurt pride, no idea what she was thinking. What was she even thinking? As if I could ever be into her.” He twisted everything, and everyone at the barbecue who noticed naturally believed the renowned head doctor’s son and not the mute, shy, strange Kansas Montgomery.
I lost Ari then, I continue to type.So all I had left was James and Dad. One night, shortly after the incident, Dad came into the laundry room and thought I was Mom.I tell him briefly about it, including the hug, which I held for too long and felt guilty about.Somehow, I couldn’t talk to Dad anymore after that. And James... I should have told him about Kensington. What they did to me... it started shortly after that barbecue at your parents’ house. I had...
I hesitate but continue typing.I rejected your brother. He punished me for it.
Concerned, River looks at me.
I should have told James what was going on, but I was ashamed. Of myself. Because I was weak.
What lies did Chester tell? What did he do?
