FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHORS OF THE CHEATER.FAKER.TROUBLEMAKER SERIES (WATTY'S 2016, FICTION AWARDS 2016, HACHETTE AUDIO 2017), JENNY ROSEN & KRISTEN MAGLONZO.
After bullies, braces, and brutal heartbreak shatters his faith in love, soon-to-be fre...
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CHAPTER 61 (Part 1)
Lacey
My dad likes to say that life's full of little miracles--moments where it's impossible to ignore their presence no matter how skeptical or broken you may be. The day mom died, I thought I'd run out of miracles. I thought that when she left she took my whole world with her---my light, my laughter, all of me--gone in a single afternoon.
Once she passed, our house changed into a cage full of memories my father couldn't get rid of fast enough. Our walls were covered in her pictures and colored with the soft pastel paints Mom fought to convince Dad to let her decorate with.
She was a limitless creative, always finding ways to turn our very ordinary home into a place that could outshine the shadows that lived inside her mind. Her lingering artistic touches still comfort me, but the sight of them torture my dad.
He's talked about redoing the walls nearly every other week since she left us but hasn't ever found it in himself to erase all those memories. Instead, he erased Mom from our conversations. On his hardest days, he'd pretend she'd never existed even though her presence is still very tangible in our home.
I clung to her shadows while my dad ran from them. Even on a day like today, he's still running. Still keeping his distance from her graveyard for reasons I can't fully understand.
Given Dad's patterns, I always thought there'd be a divide in how him and I deal with her being gone.
But today a miracle molded into the personality of a boy bridged that gap.
Instead of having to spend this morning visiting my mom alone or sitting on the beach with my father pretending her resting place was out of reach, I got to visit Mom with another person who means the world to me.
A boy who allowed himself to let his guard down and shoulder the weight of this day along with me.
And even though I'm still struggling to find the right way to say it, I can't even begin to tell him just how grateful I am.
For everything he is.
For everything he's done.
For everything he continues to do.
The feeling's overwhelmed me into silence--and Elias is following suit.
He hasn't said much since we left Cliffside half an hour back. We both broke down after he left his heart with my mom in the space of a single speech. No one has ever spoken about me like that. No one's ever cared to.
When you spend enough time on the outside of normal high school life, you learn to live with your loneliness. When all of my old friends stopped talking to me at Cardinal, I got used to people-watching. I'd sit on the bleachers after school and watch couple after couple fall in love out on our sports fields.
