The Halo Effect

31 | haunted

"You didn't need to say anything because your face did."

"It's moot. Your father says there's a Trip."

"A Trip?" I snorted, heat starting to prickle in my cheeks and along my hairline.

"Yes, a Trip." Mom gave a thoughtful pause before dropping a question I never saw coming, "What's his full name?"

"What?" I choked on air.

"Trip is a nickname for someone who's a third. For example, if your father was John Lancelot England III, he could've used Trip as a nickname."

Thank god Mom had her eyes on the road because I figured my face had turned Ferrari red. There was probably some part of me that knew that Trip wasn't actually named Trip, but I'd never thought of him as anything else. Trip was always Trip to me.

Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to prevent Mom's perfectly reasonable question from setting me ablaze in the passenger seat. Embarrassment and guilt doused each other's flame in gasoline.

I didn't know Trip's full name - his real name.

I'd never asked him, nor had I thought about asking him. I was beginning to realize that there seemed to be invisible boundaries between us and that I didn't realize they existed until I blindly stumbled into them.

I had to clear my throat before speaking. "He's...a very private person."

"There's nothing wrong with that," Mom said, her voice thoughtful. "Your father was an exceedingly private person when he first moved to Los Angeles, but not in a conventional way. John was one of those people who could say so much about something, but so little about himself. He knew how to talk to people without showing his cards. It's something I wish I'd learned from him."

My mind automatically drew a parallel to Trip, and paranoia overtook my blazing embarrassment. Whether she knew it or not, Mom had hit the nail on the head. Trip was unconventionally private; his elusive charmingness was never lost on me, nor was it on everyone else at Cannondale.

This wasn't the first time that I'd contemplated Trip McKenna's private nature, how he seemed to discreetly keep me at arms-length. I'd known this about him from the start, but it was only now that the fear that something had gone terribly wrong between us kept me up at night.

The brave thing to do would be for me to close that distance between us by admitting to knowing something that maybe I shouldn't, and relieve my consciousness of that sickening weight. But the brave thing wasn't always the smart thing. I wanted Trip to let me in, but I feared the truth would only prompt him to lock me out forever.

Why would I risk giving up Trip who constituted so much of the good in my life right now? He was a star that shined in the dullest daylight, and I refused to be left in the dark, haunted by the thought of Trip walking away forever alongside a piece of myself that I would never get back.

I twisted my hands in my lap and urged a question from my lips. "But Dad eventually showed you his cards, right?"

"It took time, and that was infuriating for a headstrong 23-year-old who wanted to make movies and fall in love."

"How much time?" I asked a little too quickly, too urgently.

"Long enough for me to tell him that he needed to let me in if we wanted to make it work. Sometimes, people don't realize they have walls up with no visible doorway until someone else tries to knock them down with a sledgehammer."

I opened my mouth to ask another question but realized I was one question away from tuning our forced-proximity conversation into a mother-daughter heart-to-heart about love or what could be love. And that wasn't what I wanted. I wasn't ready to start showing her my cards again.