Page 85 of Tell Me I'm Enough

I stare ahead out the windshield, gently sweeping Lydia’s hair out of her face as she sleeps.

Lani glances at me in the rearview mirror, eyebrows pinched.

I look down, suddenly feeling very, very small. Like, no matter how hard I try…I’m not actually enough. Not enough for Tyler to want me the way he used to. Not enough for Lydia to open up to me anymore. Not enough to hold everything together the way I’m supposed to.

But I keep trying anyway. I always will. I’m supposed to get the picture-perfect life I’ve been working so hard for my entire life.

I know Tyler still loves me. If he’s loved me for the last five years…he can’t just throw those feelings away, right? I just want to feel it again. For once in our relationship, I don’t want to question how he feels, and I don’t want to force him to see that I’m enough…I just want tobeenough.

25

Mason

It’s insane to have mandatory Greek study hall, especially in my condition.

I drag myself every step to the building, pressing my knuckles into my temples every couple of minutes to ease the headache I have, complementary of the eight shots I took last night alongside whatever else I ingested at that party.

I can hear the chaos behind the doors before I even open them, and I would much rather be back at the Sig house right now, still in bed.

I haven’t slept for shit this week. Every time I start to drift, the thoughts keep me awake, and the sadness constantly tries to pull me under, tries to chip away at this fake happiness I’ve created here at college, when my reality is actually anything but.

My dad got home from whatever corporate world tour he was on for the last two months and immediately got on my ass about grades, football, life plans, the internship coming up nextsummer, and all the ways I need to improve from last summer. All the shit I don’t want to think about.

He hasn’t allowed the boys to call me once, and it’s killing me. He knows I have no other way to contact them besides him or Rose, and he’s taken that away, saying maybe it’ll be an incentive to get my shit together, as if I don’t already work my ass off to meet his impossible standards.

I hate that I know they’re asking to talk to me, and he’s feeding them lies that I don’t have the time or don’t want to talk to them.

He’s never had a problem trying to make me look bad to them. He’ll do anything to go after the few things I actually care about. And who knows how long he’ll keep them from me? It pisses me off to the point where I want to say fuck school and hop on a flight right now just to see them.

I shake that all off as I walk in and scan the room. It’s an organized mess in here—everyone in small groups or paired up, backpacks and papers everywhere, food half-eaten scattered on tables, and a coffee in every hand.

And in the middle of it all—Simone, trying to tame a Tank. I laugh under my breath, feeling bad for the girl, always getting sucked into tutoring that barbaric caveman.

I walk up to the table, where Tank is slouched in his chair beside her, his giant arms—that he spends way too much time working out every day for—crossed over his chest, while she points at his notebook like this is the fifth time she’s telling him the same thing.

“Okay, what’s the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics?” she asks, tapping her pen on the page.

Tank squints at the paper. “Micro is…like…smaller.”

She stares at him. “No shit, Sherlock. Try again.”

He grins, completely unfazed. “Micro is like…household level. Macro is the big picture. The economy as a whole.”

She points the pen at him. “See? You know this. Stop being lazy.”

“I’m just conserving energy,” he says. “I need it for all the parties this weekend.”

“You need it for your brain,” she shoots back, flatly.

I smirk, dropping my bag in the empty chair across from them.

“Trying to teach the Hulk economics again?”

Tank looks up at me, offended. “I’m not the Hulk. I’m more like The Thing.”

Simone snorts. “You’re like if The Thing and a golden retriever had a baby.”

“A buff, military-looking assbaby,” I tease, and then bump Tank’s arm as I sit. “It’s time for me to steal my tutor from you, man.”