When You Were Everything: List 4

There has been a palpable tension between Sloane and me since the day we met, and this rumor might be the last straw.

New Layla, the one who doesn’t look like she ever would have hung out with someone like me—someone unrefined and geeky and weird.

I jerk away from her, and I try my hardest to keep my face composed. To keep myself together while she’s watching me, clearly looking for a reaction.

I reach my door and push it open and I nearly faint I’m so distraught and overcome with emotion.

I’m pacing around the living room trying to digest what my mother just told me.

I lie in the center of my bed, trying to make sense of what I know. Of what Mom meant by close. Of what could have been happening between my father and Ms. Novak that was so intimate that my dad needed to change jobs, and that, even after everything, my parents still split up.

She’s studying me like I’m a gas tank and my face is the gauge.

Even though I called her a few hours ago sobbing, I still myself, putting on the best Poker Face I can muster.

I’m a little embarrassed that I was holding on to the childish sentiment of things lasting forever, of people being perfect.

My mom and I had established a delicate kind of peace, me admitting that decisions like marital separations aren’t made alone, her apologizing for trivializing my feelings on the day Daddy moved out.

Even if I didn’t find anything, I’d at least be able to take in all the lavish decorations and lights.

“You still don’t get it, do you? I don’t have a problem. I just don’t like you. And frankly speaking, Layla doesn’t either.”

It almost looked like pride, but it was a twinge darker than that. Layla looked self-satisfied. Layla looked almost smug.

She jutted out a hip and twirled a piece of her hair.

“Well, ain’t you the sweetest?” Dolly intones.

There are a few kids in galoshes splashing in puddles on a fenced-in driveway and a woman pushing a stroller covered in plastic, and I marvel at how, even in the rain, the streets here are never empty.

“Shakespeare, he used a lot of pretty words, and sometimes he used them to obscure the truth a little.”

And then, all at once, I can’t take it anymore: the smell of his skin on the clothes that I’m wearing, the inscrutable look in his eye.

“Action is eloquence,” I say, quoting Coriolanus, a play I’ve only read once.

By now you've probably heard the rumors that are going around about my dad. And if I'm honest, I'm worried this could have real repercussions for him if it goes any further.

In homeroom, Dom sits just in front of me and turns around every time I touch his shoulder or elbow or the smooth dark skin on the nape of his neck.

Like most things in this school, the episode was short-lived and seems to have already dissipated in the collective consciousness.

But I don’t think I’ll ever forget that Layla told Sloane desperate details about my family that I didn’t even know. That she willfully handed over something that could wound me so deeply, knowing that it would be used to do just that.

When I look up and see that it’s her, part of me seethes.

For a second, I’m so disoriented by her talking to me in a nonconfrontational way that I don’t know what’s happening.

“So, Baby Girl,” he says, not mincing words. “I won’t be able to sleep until we clear the air. At least a little. So do your worst. Where do you want to start?”

He watches me sip with forlorn eyes, and I watch him right back, trying to see past the person I thought he was and straight through to who he really is.

“Without further ado, I’d like to welcome our first guest.”

Her voice is like butter—melty and warm and kind of guiltily decadent.

The second there’s a bit of a lull in the steady stream of performers, Dom looks at me.