On the bottom, it’s signed with a little drawing of the sun with a smiley face in it which has to be the most out of character thing I’ve ever seen from her.

I head over to the utility room and there’s a perfectly folded pile of my clean laundry on top of the washer. When I open the dryer door, there’s nothing left in it but my abandoned boxer shorts.

CHAPTER 30

Nastya

“Ice cream.”

I know those words. I like those words. I look up from the Physics textbook that has been my close companion for the past three hours. I will never pass this test. I should never have even signed up for the class. I was reaching from the beginning. Josh is standing next to me and leans over, shutting the book. I have a feeling this may have something to do with the frustrated barrage of profanity that left my mouth moments ago.

Academics have never been my forte. I’m not very smart, a fact which I have no trouble proving to myself several times a day. Asher is the smart one. He checked off that box on the family rubric. Asher has baseball and school. I had the piano. Now I don’t have anything.

“You need it. We’re getting it. Now.” Angry dad voice again.

“Now?”

“Now. Remember when you said that bad things happen when you don’t get enough ice cream? Bad things are happening. You’re all stressed out and cranky like a teenage boy who’s not getting laid.”

“Nice analogy.” Do they get cranky?

“Sorry, it’s true. And nobody likes a cranky Sunshine. It goes against the laws of nature.” He pulls my chair away from the table with me in it.

“You make me sound like a petulant four year-old.” Petulant – sulky, crabby, peevish, moody, sullen. Picked that one up from Asher while he was studying for the SATs.

“You’re acting like one. With a more colorful vocabulary. Get your ass in the truck. We’re going.” He grabs his keys and stands in the entryway, holding the door open and waiting.

We pull up to a strip mall a couple miles away at eight o’clock and I follow him into an ice cream parlor that’s tucked away in the back corner of the plaza. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d probably never find it. It’s a Tuesday and it’s mostly empty except for a family at a corner table with a little boy whose clothes seem to have seen more chocolate ice cream than his mouth. I haven’t been in here before. I prefer to eat my ice cream out of the container at the kitchen counter where no one can watch me. Ice cream makes me happy. I like to concentrate on the joy.

This place is a little pastel paradise. It’s small and screams CUTE! at the top of its lungs from every direction. Six glass-top tables are scattered around the front of the shop. It must be a nightmare to keep them clean in a place full of melting sugar. The chairs have silver metal frames that match the table bases and padded vinyl seat cushions in pastel pink, yellow, blue and lavender. I look down at myself in black on black. I look like teenage Elvira walking into a Bonne Bell commercial.

There’s a girl I don’t recognize wiping down the tables in the front and a girl behind the counter that I do. She’s a senior named Kara Matthews from my ex-music class. She stares at us when we walk in. Then she must realize that she’s doing it, because she looks away, but it’s pretty obvious what she’s thinking. Nastya Kashnikov and Josh Bennett walk into an ice cream parlor together on a Tuesday night. It’s like the beginning of a bad joke. Or the apocalypse.

“What do you want?” Josh asks, knowing I can’t answer him here. I raise my eyebrows at him impatiently. He holds his hands out in surrender at the look I give him. “I didn’t want to be accused of being a chauvinist, but if you don’t tell me want you want, I’m just going to have to guess.” There’s mischief there and I don’t trust him. I shrug. I’m an excellent shrugger. It’s rivaled only by my ability to nod.

There’s nothing I can do. I sit down, facing the front windows, so I don’t have to look at Kara Matthews or let her look at me. I’m thankful that I’m still in my school clothes. Josh walks back to the counter and I can hear his voice but I can’t figure out what he’s saying. I do hear Kara Matthews.

“Seriously?” she laughs. I wonder what he’s said, but he spoke too low for me to hear. The thought of Josh Bennett flirting with Kara Matthews is outside the realm of possibility for my imagination. I trace my fingers around the beveled edge of the glass table and try to predict what kind of concoction he’s going to walk back with just to taunt me. Probably lime sorbet and peanut butter cup ice cream or some equally vile combination. The wait lasts forever. It shouldn’t take this long to order ice cream and I almost cave and turn around when I hear him walking back to the table with the uneven footfalls I have memorized by now.

“Dinner,” Josh says, coming around from behind with what can only be described as a trough of ice cream. He sets it down in front of me. He must have gotten every kind of ice cream they have. It reminds me of something my dad would do. Something so utterly ridiculous that I would have no choice but to be cheered up from whatever tragedy had befallen my young life. Back before I knew what real tragedy was. When the hard things were the fact that Megan Summers had better clothes or that I had messed up during a performance. Charles Ward was the master of cheer ups when I was little. Better than a barrel full of puppies. Maybe even better than melty ice cream.

“I didn’t know what kind you wanted so I got them all.” He’s not lying. I look at the trough and I’m fairly certain the only ice cream flavors not in there are the ones they haven’t invented yet. He sits down across from me and leans his elbows on the table, unsuccessfully trying to stifle the shit-eating grin on his face.

I don’t have a pen and talking here is out, so I grab my phone from my purse and text the boy sitting across the table from me. His phone beeps a second later and he pulls it out to read the two-word message I sent him.

Where’s yours?

And then he does something that shocks even me. Josh Bennett, king of the brooding stoics, laughs. Josh Bennett laughs and its one of the most natural, uninhibited, beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard. I know Kara Matthews is watching us and people will talk tomorrow. But right now I can’t even care. Josh Bennett laughs, and for one minute, everything is right in the world.

***

“We’re going on vacation over Thanksgiving,” my mother tells me on the phone when I get home from Josh’s.

It’s ten o’clock and there were three messages from her, along with a text that simply read Please call. Ten o’clock is never too late for my mother. Not anymore. She pores over pictures until all hours. Before the attack, I never remember her working through the nights like she does now. But after, it was all she seemed to do. My mother went through the most prolific period in her life while I was recovering. She’d say she stayed up because she wanted to be awake if I woke up and needed anything, but I don’t think she could sleep. It was easier to crawl into a computer full of her photographs than a bed full of her nightmares. I’d sit up with her sometimes, because I couldn’t sleep, either. I’d watch her, amazed at just how much a person could accomplish fueled by tea and regret.

“We’re staying in a beautiful house. We’d like you to come.” She waits for a reaction. She always waits. There’s a hope my mother never loses that, one day, I’ll fill that pause. She probably wouldn’t even care what the words were at this point, just that they were there.

“We thought it would be fun to go skiing.” Skiing? Seriously, Mom? With the hand? I don’t want to go on vacation. I certainly don’t want to go skiing. I’d rather be hit in the face with a dodgeball. Repeatedly.

“I already talked to Dr. Andrews. We can make an appointment to have your hand looked at again before we go. She thinks it should hold up fine as long as it isn’t for too long of a period. If it starts to bother you, we can go in and sit by the fire and drink coffee.” I hate coffee. I can’t ski. I’m from Florida. I have no sense of balance or coordination and a hand that likes to randomly lose its grip at inopportune times. Not to even mention the fact that it’s so full of plates and screws that it will set off every metal detector in the airport.

My brother is the athlete. He must be in heaven. I don’t want them not to go because of me, but I don’t think that’s an issue. They’ll go whether I do or not. And I’m not going. I’ll be miserable and then everyone will be miserable and it’ll be my fault. Again. I’m tired of being responsible for other people’s misery. I can’t even put up with my own. My mom keeps talking. She’s not afraid of being interrupted, but she wants to get all of her selling points made. Like the faster she gets them out, the more convincing they’ll be.

“The house is big. It belongs to Mitch Miller, your father’s boss, and he’s not using it this year so he offered it to us. Addison is coming, too.” Addison is coming? It fits. Morals were never the big issue with my mother, just excellence. Asher and I could probably screw half the country under her roof as long we didn’t lose focus. I wonder if it would still apply to me now that I’m not good at anything anymore. Knowing Asher, he probably isn’t even sleeping with the girl yet, but it’s an easy thing to judge my mother on so I use it.

I tap the phone three times which means I’m hanging up.

“Please at least think about it. Margot’s going to come, too, and I don’t want you to be alone on Thanksgiving.” I hang up before she can tell me that she loves me. Not because I don’t want to hear that she says it, but because I don’t want her to hear that I don’t.

***

My life outside of school has become virtually unrecognizable, but almost nothing between the hours of 7:15 and 2:45 has changed. Josh and I barely acknowledge one another, Drew flings sex-bombs at me at every turn and I try to sidestep dress code violations. The rest of my time, I spend avoiding whatever it is that needs avoiding that day. Nasty looks from Tierney Lowell. Being propositioned by Ethan Hall. Everyone at lunch.

I’m passing through the courtyard on my way to my favorite empty bathroom where I can get twenty-five minutes of uninterrupted angst before heading to shop. I look at Josh before I start across. He’s already there. His third period is right off of it so he usually gets here first. I only let myself look at him now because he’s far enough away that no one will notice. When I get closer, I always make sure to avert my eyes because I’m afraid if I glance at him for even a second, the whole world will know everything that goes on in my head. I’m just walking by, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see that he’s looking down at his hands in the exact same position he was in the first time I saw him and I start wondering if he sits like that because he knows how amazing it makes his arms look.

“Sunshine.”

It’s so quiet that I almost don’t hear it, and thankfully, no one else can, but I know it’s real. He doesn’t look up until I stop and stare at him, wondering what the hell he’s thinking. Then he’s staring back at me like he couldn’t care less who sees.

“Sit.”

I walk over to him so at least I’m no longer standing in the middle of the courtyard. My back is to everyone else when I face him and narrow my eyes. What are you doing?

“Kara Matthews must have been on the phone half the night,” he says flatly. I already know this. At this point I’ve learned that Josh and I have been secretly screwing for weeks, but that now, he and Drew are just passing me back and forth. I guess he’s heard it, too, but I don’t have to answer to it. I just play dumb and walk away. I doubt Josh has to answer to it, either. I’m surprised anyone even got close enough for him to hear what they were saying. Most of them are usually too terrified that they’ll drop dead from being too near him, or worse, that they’ll have to acknowledge that he exists. I don’t know what this has to do with him calling me over in the middle of the courtyard. Giving them more ammunition is not usually his M.O.