NICOLE
I drove way too quickly on the way home, my foot pressed firmly against the gas pedal and my hands gripping the wheel with white knuckles. Mom hadn't texted me against since I replied and told her I was on my way, and worry was making me sick. When I was forced to stop at a red light and glanced into the passenger seat, I remembered Morgan sitting there, and surprised myself by beginning to feel tears leaking out of my eyes.
Once I'd pulled up into my driveway, slamming on the breaks of my car right in front of the garage door, I grabbed the shopping bag from the pharmacy and ran up to the front porch steps. Purchasing the shampoos and conditioners earlier that day seemed ridiculous now: I'd dyed my hair, contoured my face a little, put on color contacts and convinced myself I was a new person. What kind of fantasy had I tricked myself into, thinking I could turn into someone else as if my mother and a magic wand?
I twisted the key in the lock and pushed open the front door to see both of my parents in the foyer as far away from each other as they could manage, their arms crossed. Dad was seated on our red couch, reclining against a plush pillow as he stared up at the crystal chandelier on the ceiling. My mother, all the way across the large room, was leaning against a white column near the door. Her eyes were red and bloodshot with hastily wiped-away tears.
"Where's Nicholas?" I asked, because my little brother was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw both of my parents before me in obvious distress and the little seven-year-old out of sight.
Mom ran her hands through her blonde-to-purple hair. "He's okay," she said softly. Her voice shook and she swallowed noisily, as if trying to gulp back more sobs. "He's at soccer practice right now."
I'd almost forgotten that Mom had enrolled him in soccer practice after school a few days ago to try and get him to spend less time in our broken home, playing with his toy cars as he listened to my parents' fiery arguments downstairs in the kitchen.
"Okay," I said slowly, shutting the door behind me and kicking off my shoes, "So what's wrong?"
Mom exhaled, a slow rush of air that seemed to be preparing her for something, but before she could say a word Dad interrupted. "You've changed again," he said.
I pressed myself against the door, not sure what to say.
"I thought you'd learned your lesson when you turned into that silver-haired girl and then got your heart broken by your player boyfriend."
His mention of Noah made my head throb, and I shut my eyes tightly against the memories of what had happened as Lindsay. My transformation today had been another escape, and again, it had failed. Instead of feeling free, I'd been faced with my best friend in a total wreck and with a boy I cared about confused, half of the truth laid out for him and the other half still concealed.
"She doesn't need to hear that right now," said Mom carefully, her words running together as if she'd said that sentence in one enormous breath. She reached up to wipe her eyes again and I saw another glistening tear sliding down her cheek. "She needs to hear the truth."
I started to ask her what she was talking about, but Dad interrupted again. "You need to stop defending her!" he exclaimed, standing up from the couch. "She's her own person. She doesn't need you constantly stepping in on her behalf, and she needs to accept that she can't always go around running away from her problems."
"I know that!" shot back Mom. She wasn't leaning against the column anymore, either; her stance was rigid and she was glaring at Dad with something that broke my heart: loathing. How had these two people ever loved each other, ever cared for each other enough to get married? What had happened?
I choked on a sob as realization hit me. I had happened. I was slowly tearing apart their marriage, and the more I tried to fix it, the more it broke.
Mom wasn't finished with her rant, and she ran her hands through her hair again and again until it stood up as if it had been electrified. "I'm not trying to help her run away from anything," she said staunchly. "She's a girl. You wouldn't understand."
"So you dye her hair silver for her?" demanded Dad. His voice had raised so loudly that it cut me to the core. "You never monitor her behavior or what she does. I was the one who realized that these makeovers were harmful for her. You're just oblivious, happy changing her from person to person, not even noticing that she's breaking. Or do you not even care?"
Now, Mom was screaming. "I do care!" she shrieked, slapping the column with her palm. "Don't you dare accuse me of not caring about my daughter."
Slowly, I slid to the ground until I was leaning against the door, huddled up in a little ball as tears started to flood down my cheeks. I tried to cover my ears so that I couldn't hear the things they were saying to each other, but they were yelling too loudly for me to block it out. The truth was that none of this was either of their faults: it was all mine. I had caused this when I had come up with my devious plan to discover Noah's true motives. And now that I had, I was too afraid to fix anything. I would always be to afraid. I couldn't even tell Troy the truth, and I knew that if Morgan texted me back accepting my offer to explain, I wouldn't have the guts to tell her, either.
"If you care so much, then why haven't you noticed what's wrong?" Dad snapped. He had grown to his full height, towering over six feet, his voice low with ferocity. "Did you not see her the night she came home from that party? How about about she had silver hair? How about now? Look at her?"
I just kept sobbing, my shoulders shaking, knowing I was a perfect example of exactly what Dad was saying but unable to stop myself.
"She's miserable," Dad growled, and when he stumbled over his own words I looked up long enough to see that tears seemed to be coming to his eyes. "Look at your daughter. Don't you see what you've done?"
"You've done it, too!" screamed Mom. "Don't act like you're the innocent one. You've always been there to yell at her and pressure her every single time she's walked through these doors. Do you think you've helped her, either?"
"She needs order! She needs a parent who is actually responsible!"
And then my strong, beautiful mother, the one who was always there to tell me to keep going and not let anyone or anything scare me, the one who had forced me to try the tallest water slides when I was little or to ask out my crushes in middle school when I was afraid—my mother did something I thought she would never do. She gave up.
As if in slow motion, she slowly slid down the column just like I had slumped against the door, relying on it heavily as if it were the only thing that kept her from toppling over. Her hands went up to her face until she had buried her eyes, usually so bright and inquisitive. Once she hit the floor, her shaking figure curled itself up into a little ball and she cried, the same exact way I had.
"Mom," I said quietly, scrambling to my feet and hurrying over to her. I crouched down on the cool marble in our expansive foyer until I was beside her, my hands resting on her shoulders as I tried to stop the trembling. She wouldn't lift her head, though, even though I could hear her muffled sobs.
"Nicole," Dad said quietly, sounding defeated, "Please go up to your room."
I hugged Mom tightly, rocking her back and forth just like I had with Morgan, trying to will the same love and will to keep going into her that I had with my best friend. When I looked up at Dad, he seemed so heartbroken I wanted to hug him, too, but I knew I couldn't. Even though it was unfair of me, I blamed him for all of this.
Still, the least I could do was obey, so I quietly stood and, after giving Mom one final hug, made my way upstairs.
The second I reached my room, I shut the door against everything that had happened downstairs and collapsed onto my bed. Sobs still silently shook my body as I grabbed a pillow and held it tightly against my chest, as if trying to hold together my fragmenting heart. The yelling downstairs resumed, and I buried myself in my sheets to try and block it all away.
Even though I tried to take deep breaths, I couldn't get myself to calm down. Everything seemed wrong. When I pulled out my phone to check my texts, I saw that Morgan hadn't even read the one I'd sent her trying to apologize, and Troy hadn't texted me since I'd ran out on him. Maybe he'd given up on me, too, just like everyone else.
My head found my mattress as I laid back and stared at the ceiling, and the can lights that blinded me with their brightness. The one in the far corner was out; Mom had told me that she kept meaning to fix it and had kept forgetting.
I squeezed my eyes shut, burning my eyes, and saw only darkness. Somehow, that comforted me, and I focused on canceling out the screams from downstairs with only silent noise. Images flashed through my head: Morgan, with her hair jaggedly cut and her eyes dulled with exhaustion; Mom, and the way she'd completely lost her will to fight on after she'd struggled for all her life to be strong and independent; my little brother, and the way he'd looked at me when he'd seen me transformed into somehow else, and the way I'd broken down in front of him.
Tears started to stain my sheets, and I eventually cried myself into a fitful sleep.
The sound of a door opening quietly startled me out of my sleep, and I pried my eyes which had been glued shut with tears open to see Mom's petite silhouette framed in entrance to my room by the afternoon sunlight.
"Hey," she said quietly as I sat up in bed and watched as she approached me. She didn't walk cheerfully and purposefully, with her strides long and a smile pasted onto her genuinely beautiful face. Instead she seemed to shuffle into my room, the shadow created by the sun larger than her small frame.
She came a stop at the foot of my bed and smoothed down my sheets. "We have to talk, Nicole," she said gently, her voice shaking a little bit. Every breath she took seemed to be labored.
"All right." I didn't know what I expected, only that my heart stopped as I waited for her to explain what she had to say. She'd never told me why she was so desperate that I come home so quickly.
I readjusted so that I was sitting cross-legged on the mattress and she sat down beside me, pulling my blanket up over her lap. She played with the edges of the soft fabric, running them through her fingers, as she spoke without looking at me. "I'm sure you know by now that your father's and my marriage is dysfunctional."
I didn't say anything, because that was so obvious she should have just taken it for granted. Even innocent little Nicholas knew that something was wrong, and he wasn't even old enough yet to truly understand the idea of a husband and a wife.
"All your dad and I do anymore is fight," Mom continued, her voice desperate as if she were pleading for me to understand. "We can't agree on anything anymore, much less on how to raise you and Nicholas."
"It's my fault," I said. I squinted my eyes shut tightly against her face as I added, "I'm the one who's causing you to fight. I know it, you don't have to tell me."
Mom gripped my shoulders with surprising strength considering how weak she seemed in that moment. "Nicole, look at me," she ordered, and when I reluctantly opened my eyes, I saw her fiery her gaze was.
"Your father and I both love you very much," she explained, still clinging onto me tightly as if she were begging me to understand. "Just in different ways. Sometimes it's difficult because we see things so differently."
I just stared into her eyes, willing for her words to be the truth even though I knew that they weren't.
"Things were easier when we were younger," my mother continued, her eyes misty with both memories and unshed tears. "Back then there was only love to worry about. We didn't have common sense, and I had no intuition. I didn't know that things would end up this way. You have the same determined spirit I do, Nicole, and I want you to learn how to use that spirit better than I did."
Slowly, her hands slackened on my shoulders until she'd dropped them into her lap again, the fire gone from her eyes. "We both love you very much, Nicole. We love Nicholas, too, and that's why we've made a decision. We're going to get a divorce."
My chest crumbled and I felt my entire world tumbling down. Noise that I knew I was just imagining rushed through my ears, drowning out all the rest of the sound. I felt like I was suffocating.
"Nicole?" asked my mother—her voice sounded distant, as if she were yelling at me from across a stadium. "Are you okay?"
I could only shake my head, too broken for words or even for tears. I had been hoping, despite everything that had continuously been going wrong, that my parents would somehow fix their relationship and rekindle their love for each other. Looking at Mom, though, I knew that the last week or so had been the final straw. She couldn't handle it anymore, and I guessed Dad couldn't, either.
"How long have you known?" I finally asked her. I could barely speak above a whisper, and my throat felt dry and scratchy as if I hadn't drank water all day. I clutched onto my blankets with an iron grip identical to Mom's, as if it were the only thing I could cling to.
She looked up at me with watery eyes. "We just decided."
Slowly, the truth of the matter began to sink in. Nothing would ever be the same anymore. One of my parents would move out, and I'd be forced to live with one of them primarily until I turned eighteen. And what about Nicholas? It would be terrible for him to live in a divided household.
And yet maybe my parents were right. Maybe divorcing and living a life separately but in peace was better than living one forced to be together when it was tearing apart our own family, anyway. I had barely been able to live with the stress that had recently come as their marriage had crumbled, and I guessed they weren't able to function with all of the chaos anymore.
Then I remembered that Mom had texted me while I was out at Aroma Mocha, asking for me to come home. If she hadn't wanted me at home to tell me about the divorce, what had she needed to say to me? I couldn't imagine news worse than what she had just explained, and yet her face when I had walked through the door had been more disturbing than I'd ever seen.
"Mom," I said slowly, my stomach somersaulting inside of me again as if it couldn't settle down until I knew, "Why did you want me home? Did you need to tell me something?"
Mom looked away, her eyes distant again. "I think you've had enough to deal with for one night, Nicole."
But her voice wavered when she said it, and when she looked up again, two identical tears had slipped down her cheeks, glistening in the sunlight like crystals before dripping onto the sheets.
My heart thumped in my chest so loudly I was sure she could hear it. It would have been easy for me to just shrug and wait until tomorrow to hear what she had to say, to spend the rest of the night upstairs in my room just trying to cope with the fact that my parents were divorcing. But something told me that what Mom had to say was too terrible to hold back. I felt like I was owed the truth.
And so I took a deep breath and forced the words out: "Please tell me."
Mom turned to me, heaving unnatural breaths, her fingers still wound so tightly around the blankets I thought she'd lost the circulation in them. I thought she'd say no, but then, with yet another tear sliding down her face, she whispered, "Okay."