I groan. “Ugh.” This is going to be a long week.
Holder and Sky get back tonight, but they’re busy until Saturday. Breckin has family shit. I can already feel the unavoidable heartbreak coming from Six, which is why I’ve avoided her all day. I really don’t want to be dumped over Thanksgiving break. Or at all. Maybe if I never text or call or speak to Six again, she’ll never be able to break up with me and then I can continue to live in my blissful ignorance.
I push off Hannah’s door and head toward the kitchen when she calls for me to come back. I turn around in the hallway, my whole body floppy and defeated when I reappear in her doorway.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks.
My shoulders are sagging and I’m in the midst of feeling really sorry for myself, so I sigh dramatically. “Everything.”
Hannah motions toward the beanbag chair across the bedroom. I walk over to it and plop down. I don’t know why I’m allowing her to summon me into her room, because she’s just going to ask questions I’m not going to answer. But it makes me a little less bored than I’ve been all day. And also, it beats doing the dishes.
“Why are you moping? Did you and Six break up?” she asks.
“Not yet, but it feels imminent.”
“Why? What’d you do wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say defensively. “At least, I don’t remember doing anything. I don’t know, it’s complicated. Our whole relationship is complicated.”
Hannah laughs and closes her laptop. “Med school is complicated. Relationships are easy. You love a person, they love you back. If that’s not how your relationship is, you end it. Simple.”
I shake my head in disagreement. “But I do love Six and she does love me and it’s still very, very complicated.”
Sometimes Hannah gets this look of excitement in her eyes, but it seems to happen at the worst moments. Like right now, as I tell her my relationship may be doomed.
That shouldn’t excite her.
“Maybe I can help,” she says.
“You can’t help.”
Hannah tosses her covers aside and then walks to her bedroom door and shuts it. She turns around and faces me, her eyebrows narrowed, the excitement in her expression gone. “You haven’t made me laugh since I got home. Something is changing you, and as your big sister, I want to know what it is. And if you don’t tell me, I’ll call a Wesley family meeting.”
“You wouldn’t.” I hate those meetings. They always seem to be an intervention for me and my behavior, when they’re supposed to be about the entire family.
“Try me,” Hannah says.
I groan and cover my face with both hands as I bury myself deeper into the beanbag. In all honesty, Hannah is the best voice of reason in our whole family. She might even be the only voice of reason. Chunk is too young to understand these issues. My father is too immature, like me. And my mother would flip out if I told her Six and my truth.
I do want to talk about it, and Hannah is probably the only person in the world besides Sky and Holder who I would trust with this. But Sky and Holder don’t talk about it because we made them pinky swear they’d never bring it up.
I’m scared if I don’t talk to someone about it, Six and I will be over. And I can’t imagine a life without Six in it now that I’ve had a life with Six in it.
I blow out a conceding breath. “Okay. But sit down first.”
The excitement in her expression returns. She doesn’t just sit down on her bed. She hops onto her bed, next to a lump of covers, and sits cross-legged, eager to hear what I’m about to tell her. She rests her chin in her hand, waiting.
I take a moment to figure out how to start the conversation. How to summarize it without going into too much detail.
“This sounds crazy,” I say, “but I had sex with a girl in the maintenance closet during junior year of high school. I didn’t know who she was or what she looked like because it was dark.”
“That doesn’t sound crazy,” Hannah interjects. “That sounds exactly like something you would do.”
“No, that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is that after I got with Six, I found out she was the girl I had sex with the year before. And...well...I got her pregnant. And because she didn’t know who I was, she put the baby up for adoption. A closed adoption. So I’m a dad, but I’m not. And Six is a mom, but she’s not. And we thought it would be okay and we’d be able to move past it, but we can’t. She’s sad all the time. And because she’s sad all the time, I’m sad all the time. And when we’re together, we’re double sad, so we don’t even really hang out all that much anymore. Now I think she’s about to break up with me.”