After I hang up, a weight settles on my chest in her absence. I miss her—miss the days when, if I wasn’t with Sol, I was with Ruby, on the phone or in person, surrounded by the love of my bestie and my brother at all times. But Ruby has Will now, and Sol has West Virginia, and I have…
School. And work. And wedding planning. And, I guess,Roman.
Life is so unfair.
Chapter Twelve
CHA! RAC! TER! GRO! WTH!
Roman
“Is itreallythat hard to think about her own personal safety and take measures to protect herself? Because I don’t think it’s that hard. Especially when wewent over precautionsbefore she left, and shepromised me she’d be smart. Was she smart, though? No! Biking off into the twilight like she’s begging to get attacked. How can she be sostupid, Will? Seriously. She’s not dumb. I know she’s not dumb. But then she goes and does something so unbelievablydumb. I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.”
My knife hits my cutting board a little more aggressively than necessary, chopping at the onions I’d begun prepping before Elodie called. My eyes pay the price for my ill temper, watering as Will takes advantage of the first bit of space I’ve left for him to speak since he picked up his phone ten minutes ago.
“Elodie isn’t dumb,” Will confirms. “I agree with you that what she did wasn’t very smart, though, but I think she was doing what she thought would be best to get her home. And then, when she realized she’d made the wrong choice, she called you, right? Right away?”
I place the now-cut onions into a plastic pint container, begrudgingly agreeing. “Yes. I guess. She called me as soon as it started to get dark.”
“And then you went and got her and… yelled at her? The entire way home?”
Excuse him.
“I did notyell,” I grumble. “I haven’t yelled at her in months.”
“Okay, so, you lectured? For the entire car ride home?”
“She was out in the streets alone!”
“So you lectured her,” Will sighs. “Roman, when you tell a person they can call you in an emergency, no matter the emergency, no matter if they’re drunk or at a party with drugs or with a bad group of people in the middle of the night, and then theydocall and you pick them up and get them to safety, you don’t lecture them. You don’t judge them. To lecture and judge is to take this space, which you’ve said was safe for them, and turn it into a space that they can’t trust. What do you think will happen next time she’s in a situation like that and she needs to call for help? Do you think she’ll want to call you, or do you think she’ll call someone farther away in order to avoid the safety speech?”
“Elodie’s not a teenager,” I counter. “She’s a grown woman who should know better.”
Will groans, and I hear a few bumps through the phone as he, I assume, hits his head against something one, two, three times. “Okay,” he says, coming back to me. “Look at it this way. Ruby? Your sister, who you love? She’s been on this journey lately, doing her best to understand me and be kind as I, inevitably, do things that are so stupid she’d like to strangle me. It’s a normal part of living with another person and being around them all the time. Sometimes that other person does something stupid, and sometimes, the person not doing the stupid thing has to stop, take a breath, and choose to look at the other person’s intentions when deciding how they’re going to respond. Were Elodie’s intentions bad? No. They rarely are. She’s a sweetheart. So right now, you’re going to take a big, deep breath and you’re going to look at her intentions as you decide how to respond going forward. Because while Elodie may have made a dumb decision, you, my friend, are the one being an idiot.”
Will waits while I absorb what he’s said, turning it over in my mind, looking for the space where I can insist that I’m right and she’s wrong, and she should just listen to me and do what I say. My brows furrow as I try to find a way to berightand my shoulders drop when no such way exists.
I really am being an idiot. Ameanidiot, because Will’s correct—I’ve tarnished a space that should have been safe for her.
I curse, wiping my hands on a kitchen towel, thrown over my shoulder, so that I can grab my phone without getting onion juice all over it. “I have to go,” I tell Will. “I need to call Mom.”
Will laughs as he replies, “Smart man for an idiot.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter. “I’ll talk to you later. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Tell Mom I miss her!”
“Call her and tell her yourself.” I pause, thinking better of it. “In an hour, when I’m done.” Priorities and all. I am officially in needs-mom-advice mode. Will can wait.
After we hang up, I waste no time calling Mom. As the phone rings, I move to the freezer, pulling out one of the frozen pizzas I keep prepped in there for nights when cooking a fresh meal isn’t an option—or nights like tonight, where I need to drop my meal plan to make room for other, more important things.
“Roman!”
“Hey, Mom.” I drop the pizza on the counter. “I need some advice.”
Chapter Thirteen
A girl could get used to this.
