It was so much worse than my imagination.
Previously white columns were charred black. The front porch was sunken, the blown-out windows covered in blue tarp, but from what I understood, the bulk of the damage was in the back of the house, near the kitchen. The trees stood tall and proud, undamaged.
Austin hadn’t understood why I needed to get off the cruise ship as quickly as possible when I heard that Miss Barb’s house had caught fire. He’d thought I was being dramatic.
But Austin had a whole-ass family. He didn’t have a friend—onefriend—who was his family. He didn’t understand it or care to.
When it happened, it was my dad who finally got ahold of me to tell me. He’d been vague in his message and left out the parts about Miss Barb being missing and Bree getting hurt. At the time, I hadn’t thought how strange it was that it wasn’t Bree, Vinh, or even Liem who’d called. I’d just known I needed to be there.
“Just wait,” Austin had said. “I’m sure they’ll update you soon, and then you can decide.” And when I refused, it became:“It’s a bad look when you keep forcing others to cover for you.” He simply did not understand that I needed togoand gave up arguing about it but from a place of surrender. Not understanding.
That’s when I saw the writing on the wall that it wouldn’t work out between us.
And if there was one thing I’d learned while stuck on a ship with a boyfriend who gave up on me so easily, it was that I never wanted to be made to feel like that again.
By someone else, or by myself.
Because the person I’d been on that ship? He wasn’t worthy of anything.
Not love, not adventure, not even understanding.
But I was home now, and I was going to do better.
I was going to be better.
And it needed to start with a fight.
“Last year,I left you behind. And not because you’re a bitch, but because I am.”
“Hey—” Bree tried to interrupt my speech, but I wasn’t having it.
“No, let me finish. You’re a bad bitch. The baddest I know, even if your hair blinds me in the summer sun and you laugh like a demented hyena. And watch TVwith subtitles.”
“But they talk so fast,” my best friend sighed, repeating the same argument she’d been giving for years. “And I need to know every word.”
Damn, the hyena thing didn’t land. I might’ve used that one too much over the years.
“You know every word already, Cher. You used to bring a portable DVD player to FU so you could watch Rory and Lorelai while the other casino daycare kids played air hockey and raced down slides into the ball pit.”
The motion theater pod we were strapped into jerked as our on-screen boat banked on the Nile River. She snapped her head toward me as our characters stole horses and galloped away from unseen foes. “The hell do you know that?”
That was a damn miscalculation, but alsodamnmy dad for putting thoughts of Ace in my head.
Dammitreallywas a good summary of our last year.
But still, I confessed, “AJ. He told me about it at some point.”
Our horses really started to… gallop? Was that the word? I was no horse girl, but they were going fast enough now that the pods were jerking up and down—in relatively close time to the action on-screen—that our conversation blessedly had to pause there.
Eventually the horses made it just in the nick of time to an oasis where whatever had been chasing us couldn’t follow.
A confusing but happy ending.
The pod lowered back to its starting position, and we unstrapped our harnesses. I followed Bree out, but she didn’t exit the theater. Instead, she guided me over to the steps that lead to the next row of pods and sat on one, her freckled cheeks slightly flushed from the ride and her expression distant.
I took the seat beside her and nudged her with my knee. “Do you remember when the stories sometimes didn’t have happy endings?”
She smiled wistfully. “Back when there were only lap belts and not full-blown five-point harnesses?”
