Lie Until You Laugh

47- Epilogue

“This is the extra room,” Penn explains, opening one of the doors. It was a plain white room with nothing inside of it, looking completely stark and boring. “We can use it for something but I didn’t know what you’d want to put in there. Since I get my office, you can make it whatever you want.”

“A guest bedroom,” I decide, hardly even having to think about it all that much. “Stella insists on staying here once the tour is over.”

“Is she still on Broadway?” Penn asks me.

I nod. “Yep. And she’s on Broadway until the end of the month but after that, she’s going to come visit. That’s okay, right?”

“I don’t see why not,” He shrugs.

At the end of last year, Stella had a performance as part of her dance courses there at Julliard and there was a Broadway scout there who insisted that Stella go to auditions. When she did, she got one of the main dancing parts in the musical, Chicago. So after she graduated a semester early from Julliard, she started doing Broadway musicals which is super amazing for her. After this musical, she says that she’s going to take up singing lessons, hoping for a better part if she can do both dancing and singing.

Speaking of my friends, Mason and Brian are still together and they just graduated from Berkeley like they had planned. They’re moving back to be in Los Angeles again since both of their families are there and they missed home even though they weren’t incredibly far away from them or anything. Mason got a major in tourism and event planning so she’s going to be a wedding planner, hopefully, she’ll start her own business after a while. At least, that’s what she wants to do. Brian got a major in computer science so he’s going to start his job as a computer programmer. They’ll need to stay up here in Seattle sometimes too because I absolutely refuse to go too long without seeing some of my best friends. Sure, I made some friends while I was at UCLA and they’ll come visit too or I’ll go visit them but Stella and Mason are like sisters to me now.

“I think a guest room is the best option considering how many friends we have and how many of them will want to come and visit at some point. Not including Ana and Jo as well.”

“And your mom will probably want to come too,” Penn adds. “We may need more than one guest bedroom.”

I laugh and roll my eyes at him. “My mom has a job and she’s very serious about it. I doubt that she’ll take off time to come visit.”

After my father was arrested, it took a very long time for my mother to gain my trust again. She got help with a psychologist and she also went back to school for accounting, which is what she’s doing now, she’s an accountant and a pretty good one, actually. She lives in her own house now and is totally independent from Chase’s help. I think that she’s even repaid him for all of the help that he’d given her at the beginning. It took a lot of convincing for him to take the money, but she was very stubborn about it. Anyway, she still lives in Oxnard and Jo, being twelve now, is going to be going into seventh grade after this summer.

As for my father, we got a letter in the mail about three years ago saying that he was stabbed in prison. They never gave details about it, but he died after the attack, which was a major relief for everyone. I felt kind of bad for being happy that a man was dead but thinking about all of the terrible things that he’d done to us and the fear that we were living in, even with him in jail, was awful so him being dead honestly made everything easier for everyone. There’s no paranoia about him getting out on parole or anything like that anymore, he’s just gone. It’s over.

“Okay, so moving on, this is the office,” Penn announced, opening the door across from the guest bedroom to show a small-ish room with a huge bookshelf covering the back wall but there’s barely any books on the shelves yet and then there’s a desk sitting in the middle of the room that has nothing on it except for a framed picture of me and Penn from a few months ago and then another framed picture of Penn and Ana. Then, there’s a small couch in the corner of the room that looks like it could fit two or three people on it.