I can’t keep the smile from bursting onto my face, no matter how much of a dick he was when he dropped me off. And really, he was just being Royal. He didn’t do anything except be his asshole self, and I’ve accepted that he never will be. In truth, I’m fine with it, even if he does still irritate the fuck out of me sometimes.
“Wow,” Blue says. “That’s crazy.”
“I know,” I say, laughing. “He’s basically taking care of everything except the application. He said it’s really just a formality, because if I want to go, I’m in. They must have made a big donation. Can you imagine, me in New York?”
“Yeah,” she says, dragging on her cigarette and looking at me funny. “You’ve wanted to get out of this town since the day we met. Remember when we tried to hop the train?”
I nod, taking the cigarette when she offers. I inhale and twist the cherry against the step beside me, knocking the ash off. “I don’t know, though,” I say, reality sinking back in. “I mean, I want to travel, but my roots are here. I don’t know if I want to pull them up and put down roots somewhere else. This is my town. My home.”
“You sound like Maverick,” she says. “Except he’s got a point. He’s a legacy. His whole family is Crossbones. And he’s got the tattoo parlor all lined up. He’ll work there with his brother forever. What are you going to do if you stay?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe it wasn’t Faulkner I wanted to escape. It was my life here.”
I look at my drab house, the dirt on the bricks, the tiny windows. Poverty was always my cage, not the town itself.
“And he’s giving you a chance to escape it,” Blue points out. “Why wouldn’t you take it?”
“It’s too much,” I say. “I could never make it up to him. I don’t want to owe him all my life.”
“If you go to school there, you’ll probably get a good job,” she says. “You can pay him off from that, if he wants it back.”
“I know,” I say. “But I don’t want to take that much money from him, and more than that, from his family. It’s… Blood money.”
She gives me a funny look. That term always sounds so reasonable when Preston says it, but coming from my mouth, it sounds like an excuse.
“It’s money,” Blue says. “What does it matter where it comes from, if it gets you out of here?”
“I’ll come back,” I say, feeling guilty as I watch her drag on her last cigarette. She’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
“Why?” she asks incredulously.
“Because,” I say. “This town is fucked up. I want to fix it.”
“You’re going to fix Faulkner?” she asks, grinning.
“Maybe I am.”
She doesn’t have to believe in me. I know what I’m capable of.
“You don’t have to save everyone,” she says. “Just save yourself. You can’t take the town with you. All you can do is escape. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I didn’t have Olive.”
“You’re right,” I say. “But I’m not leaving yet. I have until graduation. Maybe I’ll feel differently then, but now… I don’t know. It doesn’t feel complete. My work here isn’t done. Maybe it’s stupid, but I do want to fix Faulkner. At least as much as I can before I go.”
“And how are you going to do that?” Blue asks.
I want to say that I’m going to get her out, but I don’t know how to do that. Even if I could convince Royal to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a complete stranger, she wouldn’t go. She’ll never leave Olive. She’s a part of Faulkner, like Maverick. Some people don’t get a chance to get out. Which makes me think she’s right—I should take the chance while I have it.
I know she won’t care. She’s not someone who will pull me back down, try to trap me here because she’s trapped, and if she can’t get out, no one can. No, Blue’s the opposite. She’s the kind of person who would boost me up, stand there and let me climb onto her shoulders and scramble up, even knowing she’d be left behind.
Right now, though, I still have six months to smooth things over between the Dolces and the Darlings. That’s the only way they’ll stop ruining my town. It might not be my fight, but I’m the one in a position to stop the never-ending feud between them. I’m the only one with a bit of power over someone in both families, the only one with a connection to both. If I want to have anything to come back to in four years, if I want to go away for college and not feel like a selfish bitch who turned her back on everyone, I need to fix what I can before I go. Which means I need to fix the Dolces.
I sit with Blue a little longer before waving goodbye to her and Olive, who’s lying on her stomach in the dirt, driving her cars along the sidewalk cracks in the fading twilight. I head inside, on guard thanks to Blue’s heads up about my mom’s latest binge. The lights are off, the house dark, but I can hear Mom moving around in her bedroom, which means she’s still on a binge. I sigh and step into my room.
I stop dead in my tracks. It looks like my whole room’s been tossed. Drawers are pulled out, clothes strewn across the floor. The mattress lays halfway off the bedframe, the box spring propped up against the wall. The closet door is open, shoe boxes tossed haphazardly around the door. Inside, most of the clothes are gone, only a few old shirts sagging halfway off the hangers.
My heart stops, and I have to swallow the wave of terror rising inside me like a tsunami. No, no, no. This isn’t happening. I don’t dare think about the possibilities.
I plow through the clothes on the floor, falling on my knees in the scattered shoe boxes. Panic roils up my throat like sickness as I throw the boxes aside, scrambling on all fours to the back of my closet, crawling like an animal, a scream building in the pit of my stomach.