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If it hadn’t been for James, I’d have been a mess and I doubted I’d have had the courage to talk to Marnie in the way I had. I felt so much better once I had told her, and I knew she didn’t blame me for keeping Erin a secret. Although we’d never discussed Mom’s behavior, I was surprised when Marnie’s opinion about Mom had been similar to mine.
My parents had lived in New Jersey for more than twenty-five years since moving from Ohio, yet the night of my mother’s funeral was the first time I’d slept in their house. It said a lot about my relationship with my mom. However, I had still felt obliged to stay there to comfort Dad after she’d died.
James had no idea that lying in that same bed I’d had brought back horrible memories for me. Long after he’d gone to sleep I had felt a crushing pain in my chest that stopped my lungs expanding as I recalled how desperate I’d felt curled up in the dark at sixteen years old and pregnant. I glanced down at the brass ball on the frame at the bottom of the bed and it reminded me I used to hang my school athletic team hoodie on the end. It was weird the way my mind worked at times.
Exhausted as I was, that thought triggered another, which inevitably led me to the day that changed my life and left a void in my heart I had assumed would never be filled.
Chapter Nine
Tricia aged sixteen
“That’s it. We’re staging an intervention. You’ve been holed up in here for almost seven weeks now and the summer has passed you by.” Alice, my best friend since kindergarten, clambered through my upstairs window, her usual way of bypassing my mom’s interrogation of why she was calling and what she wanted me for. Jenna and Sandra, our two other friends, had quickly followed.
My girlfriends often snuck into my house without my mom knowing and ribbed me constantly about how she had always appeared to be up in my business.
I shrugged, feeling listless and bored. “Summer isn’t the same without Bradley here.”
“You’re sixteen,” Alice stated, Iike I’d had no clue about my age. Wandering around my room, she picked dirty clothing off my floor and stuffed it into my laundry basket.
“Your point being?” I asked, shifting on my bed from my back to my side, rising up on my elbow, and resting my head in my hand.
“How many times will you be sweet sixteen?” Jenna asked, her big brown eyes full of concern.
“Only the once, I hope, it’s a boring age. Too young to go visit my boyfriend in Illinois and too old to go outside and play on my roller skates in the street,” I muttered.
“Nonsense. Do you honestly believe Bradley is staying home every night in Illinois? We’ve seen those home movie clips of his grandpa’s farm. All those sexy stud cowboys and cowgirls gathering for cookouts,” Sandra chipped in, clasping both hands and resting them dreamily under her chin.
“What? So Bradley’s screwing a cowgirl now?” For weeks the girls had been badgering me about locking myself away while my boyfriend, Bradley, had gone to help his aging grandpa with some bookwork at his farm.
The truth was, I hadn’t been home a lot of the time. In fact, had they shown up twenty minutes before, I wouldn’t have been at home. This was the third time they’d arrived unannounced, and from the conversation I knew I’d been lucky to have been home on all of their unplanned visits so far.
“Could be,” Alice replied. “Wake up, Tricia, think about it. He calls you for an hour every night at the same time. Every. Single. Night. Is he calling because he misses you, or is it so that you don’t call him at any other time? I mean what’s he doing for the other twenty-three hours of the day? Not counting his grandpa’s earnings, that’s for sure.”
“Stop trying to undermine my trust in him, and anyway, it’s not a crime to miss him, is it?” I asked, shifting to sit facing them and crossing my legs, my hands holding my ankles.
“We’re not saying that, but slouching around on your bed must feel depressing.” By then I had only been slouching around half hour each side of meal times to fool my mom into thinking I had been in my room all along. The rest of the time had been spent in Donnie Clark’s barn tutoring him in math. No, that’s a lie. I’d been teaching him math for most of the time… the rest of it we’d hung out talking.
“And that playlist you were listening to the other day when we came up here?” Sandra rolled her eyes. “Talk about music to slash your wrists by.”
“All I can say is, I can’t wait to see when some poor guy is stupid enough to fall in love with any of you.”
“Right, and how likely is that to happen if we’re having to come here for hours every few days to coax you out of this stinking pit of a room? Really, Tricia, your slobby behavior doesn’t bode well if you end up playing house with Bradley at some point,” Alice added, flicking open a plastic bag she found tucked under my desk and had begun dumping empty chip bags and candy bar wrappers inside.
“Will you stop doing that?” I barked. My patience had been worn thin by Alice’s attempts to drag me out of the house, but at the same time l felt guilty I hadn’t spent more time with them.
“Are you showering?” Jenna asked tentatively.
“Are you serious?” I replied, staring wide-eyed at her in disbelief and scooted off my bed. Striding toward Alice, I attempted to pull the half-filled bag of trash out of her hand, but not before she’d tightened her grip and tried to tug it back. My eyes narrowed in a silent standoff with her, both of us holding it firmly.
“You used to be fun, Tricia,” Alice snipped. A pang of frustration shot through me, but I had been keeping a confidence and doing something good by helping Donnie. I was his only hope for college because his parents weren’t interested in education, they wouldn’t have paid for tuition, even if they could have afforded it, and unlike me whose father had put a regular amount away every month since the day I’d been born, he had no college fund.
“I’m still fun. Am I not allowed to miss my boyfriend?”
“Not if it’s at the expense of ignoring your friends,” Sandra replied. “How much time have you spent with us this summer?”
“Don’t give me that, we went to the mall the other day,” I replied, sounding indignant and trying again to snatch the bag from Alice. She pulled it close to her chest and my knuckles were grazing her boob. She glanced down at my hand and backed up. She glared at me and raised a brow.
“That wasn’t the other day, Tricia, that was three weeks ago.” Jenna said. Heat flushed my face when I realized how long it had been since I’d spent time with them. I hadn’t been conscious I’d spent so much of my time with Donnie at their expense. Was that really three weeks ago?
