“Are you still tripping about the Nova thing? Because I already told you, nothing happened between us. She was actually just asking stuff about you.”
“I know that…it’s not about that…I just worry about you overdoing stuff sometimes.”
He squints and examines me closely, then pats my arm. “Just relax, okay? What I do isn’t your fault.”
“It sure feels like it is,” I mutter as he goes back to unscrewing the light bulb. My hands are shaking with my nerves, my palms sweaty. I can’t believe I’m saying these things aloud, but the more I do, the harder it is to turn off my mouth.
“You really need to stop blaming yourself for everything.” The light bulb comes off and he removes the bottom of it and his eyes light up as he sticks out his hand and dumps out something that was stuffed inside the light bulb. A small plastic bag inside it falls out, but it barely has anything in it.
He curses and throws the light bulb on the floor, where it shatters. “Dammit!” he shouts, his sneakers crunching against the broken glass as he starts to pace the length of the floor. “I thought I was going to score with that find.”
Outside, the sky is graying. We’ve been here for a while—too long. “Let’s just take what we got and go. The last thing we want to do is get busted and be on someone else’s shit list.”
Tristan glares at me, the look fueled by his craving for his next hit, but gives in and stuffs the bag into his pocket. “Fine, but I’m only selling one of these bags and I’m going to go find someone who will trade me a bag of this for what I’m craving.”
“We need the money,” I remind him, following him to the piece of plastic tacked to the doorframe on the back of the house. “And besides, I hate when you do that shit.”
“Okay, Mom.” He rolls his eyes as he ducks and squeezes through the plastic, stepping outside.
“I’m just trying to look out for you.” I lower my head and wiggle through after him, putting the bag away in my pocket as we cut across the backyard, taking a short cut over a fence to our apartment.
He keeps walking, zigzagging around sagebrush, but he shoots me a quick perplexed look from over his shoulder. “You know, you’ve always been kind of weird with the whole heroin thing, but you’ve gotten a little more preachy the last week and I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t just a coincidence that it started happening a lot more when Nova showed up.” There’s insinuation in his eyes as he turns around and walks backward across the sandy backyard toward the space of desert behind it.
“It’s not because of her.” I maneuver around a cactus, eyeing our building in the distance, wanting to get back so we can stop talking and just do some crystal.
“It would make sense if it was.” He whirls around in the sand and walks forward. “That her goody-two-shoes act would wear on you since you’ve been spending time together…I can see it affecting you.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know…you’re just different.” He shrugs. “Less determined to give up on life because you want her and wanting her means being around to have her.”
I tensely massage the back of my neck as we reach the border of our parking lot. “I don’t want her. She’s just determined to come around.”
“You want her just as much as you did last summer. It’s why you’ve continued to draw her even after you two hadn’t seen each other for almost a year and why you were flipping out the other day when I went out with her,” he says determinedly. “You’re just fighting your want a little harder right now for whatever reason.”
I want to disagree with him again, but the lie gets stuck in my throat, because I do want Nova. A lot. “Want and deserve are two different things.” I draw my hood off, the sun and heat bearing down on me. “Just because you want something doesn’t mean you get to have it. Trust me…” I start to get worked up, thinking about how much I want Lexi and Ryder to be alive, how I’d die over and over again if they could be alive right now. “Besides, Nova’s too good for me and I don’t deserve her, so this entire conversation doesn’t even matter…” I kick at the rocks as I trudge along, my chin tipped down. “Nothing f**king matters anymore.”
He grows quiet for a while, reaching for the cigarettes in his pocket. “You know, I’ve often wondered what you saw the day you died that would make you feel like you don’t deserve anything.”
“I saw nothing, other than that I had to come back because some idiot doctor thought he’d save a worthless life,” I say, sounding harsher than I’d planned.
“Jesus, relax.” He surrenders, holding his hands in front of him, pulling a whoops face, knowing he’s pushed the wrong button.
I shake my head. “And besides, me dying has nothing to do with why I think I don’t deserve anything. It’s because two other people died.”
He starts to slow down and this strange look crosses his face. He opens his mouth and he looks like he’s struggling to say something super meaningful that could potentially free me from this internal misery. I’m not even sure what he could say that could do that and perhaps there isn’t anything. Perhaps I’m just hoping there’s something.
He never does say anything, instead offering me a cigarette. But the strange thing is, for the briefest moment, I saw something—felt something. Hope that perhaps something could change how I feel.
I have no idea where the hell the feeling stemmed from, whether I’ve done too many drugs for one day, or if Nova’s getting into my head even more than I realized. And the truly terrifying part is, part of me wants to go back to her, start answering the door, keep letting her get to me.
Let the hope build.
But the other part of me wants to shatter the possibility into a thousand pieces and keep heading to a young death, let myself rot away quickly until I finally stop breathing forever like I should have done two years ago.
Chapter 10
May 23, day eight of summer break
Nova
Time is starting to blur together. Every day is the same. It’s been four days since I’ve seen or talked to Quinton and I feel like I’m going to explode from the lack of moving forward. I’m trying to keep my plummeting mood hidden from Lea and my mom, but it’s hard when they can both read me like an open book.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come to lunch with us?” Lea asks as she collects her purse from the computer desk in the guest room. It’s the weekend and she and her uncle are going out to get something to eat. “I might go shopping afterward.”