When You Were Everything Page 22

  “Hon, we’ve been through this. It was time for a change. Your mother and I are going through a rough patch and we thought it would be best, for you, if I worked…elsewhere.”

  And this is how I lose whatever’s left of me: I don’t ask if he’s had a relationship with someone else, though I suspect, now more than ever, that Sloane wasn’t lying.

  I just nod and say, “Okay.” But the sight of the few freckles that dust his cheeks hurts me, because they’re a reminder that I come from him—someone who lies; someone who wrecks and ruins. Someone who can betray his family and keep it quiet.

  I turn and walk away from my favorite person, away from my favorite place, to the person I normally avoid at all costs and the place I like least, knowing that at least I can trust her to do me the small kindness of telling me the actual truth.

  I realize in that moment that I never actually asked my mom about what happened between them. I blamed her for the separation without knowing the truth about anything. I feel guilty about that now, but I hope it isn’t too late to make things right.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know how I get home as quickly as I do, but the subway ride is a complete blur. After leaving the library, that line from Othello is all I can think about: Men should be what they seem. One second I’m in Midtown Manhattan, and then, suddenly, I’m in Brooklyn, walking through the cold to my apartment.

  The two flights it takes to get to my floor have never felt so long. I’m choking back tears and hating myself for the way I treated Sydney and Willa, Jase, and Dom. I’m hating my father because he lied to me, and I’m already hating my mother for telling me some still-unknown truth.

  I reach my door and push it open and I nearly faint I’m so distraught and overcome with emotion. I sink onto the couch and take one last deep breath.

  “Mom?” I say. My voice comes out shaky and quiet. I should have known she wouldn’t be here. It’s the middle of the day, but I clearly wasn’t thinking. So I call her. I dial her work number instead of her personal one, and I lift the phone to my ear and wait.

  “Naomi Bell,” she answers. I guess she doesn’t have my cellphone number saved in her work phone, and something about that makes me tremble. There’s noise in the background, like she’s at a busy restaurant. And it is lunchtime, so maybe she’s meeting with a client.

  “Mommy?” I say softly.

  “Cleo? What’s wrong?” she asks. And her knowing just by my voice that something isn’t right tips me over the edge. A sob escapes my throat before I can stop it.

  “Hold on,” she says. I hear her excusing herself from the table. I can imagine her in a tight pencil skirt and blazer, in red lipstick that matches her nails. She’s a woman who still gets catcalls on the street even though she’s well into her forties. She’ll tell the guys off, too. She is a force to be reckoned with, made of beauty and power and smarts. And that’s why I feel like a near-constant disappointment to her.

  I came from a storm of a woman, but I’m just a drizzle of a girl.

  Daddy would be a fool to cheat on her with anyone. He has to know that.

  “Honey, what’s wrong? Where are you? Are you okay?”

  I cough until my voice works again. “I don’t know. There’s a rumor going around at school that Daddy…”

  I can’t bring myself to say it, but Mom starts speaking for me. “That he had an affair with Ms. Novak?” she offers. I’m so shocked at her words that I stop crying.

  “What?” I say.

  “Is that the rumor? Is that why you’re so upset? Well, it isn’t true, honey, okay? He didn’t do anything with her, but they were getting…inappropriately close.” On that word, I can hear a change in Mom’s voice. A crack that tells me it hurts her to say this. “That was why we decided he shouldn’t stay at Chisholm. We didn’t want the students to start to talk.” She clears her throat and I can see her perfectly in my head. She’s probably looking skyward, the hand that isn’t holding the phone bunched into a tight fist and slammed against her hip. “We were trying to protect you.”

  “Oh,” I say quietly.

  “So don’t listen to them, okay? If those kids are spreading some lie about your father having done something with your teacher, it isn’t true. Do you hear me?”

  I nod, though she can’t see me. “We can talk about it more later,” she says. “I’m at this lunch and…”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “But you’re okay?” she asks, and suddenly, armed with this new information, I’m at least a little better.

  “I’m good,” I say. “See you tonight.”

  DUH

  I’m pacing around the living room trying to digest what my mother just told me. I’m relieved this is the half-truth my father was keeping hidden: that he was involved with someone else. At least it wasn’t a student, but the fact that it was my favorite teacher feels like an even bigger betrayal. I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with that part of the puzzle when our apartment buzzer rings. I don’t answer it at first, assuming it’s a delivery person paging the wrong apartment. But then it rings again and again, so I go to the door and press the button for the intercom.

  “Hello?” I ask.

  “Oh, thank God,” Sydney replies. “I thought I was going to have to search the whole damn city for you.”

  “Let us up,” a second voice says. Willa.

  “What are you guys doing here?”

  “What do you think, ya weirdo? There’s an awful rumor going around about your dad. You locked yourself in the bathroom. And then you disappeared from school and you haven’t been answering any of our texts!”

  “We sent a lot of texts,” Willa adds.

  “You didn’t have to come,” I tell them, my voice getting a little shaky. Truth is, I’m touched. “Everything’s fine,” I lie.

  “Oh my God, Cleo,” Sydney says. I can imagine her rolling her eyes. “I can’t with you.”

  I look through my window, but I can’t see them. They must be right up against the door. “Yeah, sorry. That isn’t even remotely true. Everything’s a mess,” I say, leaning my head on the wall above the intercom.

  Willa starts to chant. “Let us up, let us up, let us up!”

  I let them up.

  When I open the door, Willa immediately slips off her shoes and leaves them by the door. Her socks are covered in smiling avocados. She wraps me in a hug.

  “Jeez, kid. We were worried about you,” she says.

  Sydney doesn’t wait for her to let go before she wraps her arms around me too.

  “You left school?” I say, my voice muffled by the wool of Sydney’s peacoat and the puff of Willa’s parka. “For me?”

  “Duh,” Sydney says.

  Willa coughs. “Syd, I can’t really breathe?”

  Sydney lets us both go. “Sorry.”

  They take off their coats, tossing them onto the couch, and I lead them down the short hallway to my room. Willa pads over to my shelf of snow globes and shakes one right after the other, so that by the time I settle beside Sydney on my bed, the fake flakes and glitter in all of them are swirling.

  Willa sits cross-legged at my feet and leans her head against my knee, and Sydney scoots closer, slipping her arm around my shoulders. We watch the snow spin, and I don’t realize I’m crying again until Sydney uses the edge of her sweater sleeve to wipe my cheeks.

  “I’m so glad you guys are here,” I whisper. And they both, somehow, move even closer to me.

  I’m not ready to tell them what my mom told me about Ms. Novak, but I do tell them that the rumor isn’t true.

  “We never thought it was,” Willa says softly.

  I tell them what Valeria told me—that Sloane started the rumor about my family to get back at me for the email I sent months ago.

  When Sydney s
ays, “That email came from you? That…doesn’t seem like you,” I realize I never told her the whole story. And in that moment I decide to, because keeping secrets and telling lies is exactly how I ended up in this mess in the first place.

  I start at the beginning of summer, at the Fourth of July party where Layla and I first met Sloane. And even though I’m terrified of what they might think of me once the truth is in this room sitting between us, I tell them everything.

  “So,” I say, taking a deep breath after my whole ugly past has been revealed, “I decided I didn’t want to miss her anymore. She wasn’t worth the pain, or whatever, and I’d already ruined everything anyway. That’s why I started with the whole making-new-memories thing.”

  “Damn,” Sydney says. “That’s…way worse than I thought things had been. It was fucked up for you to send that email, but also, I kinda totally get it. I’m so sorry, Cleo,” she says, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. She tosses her hair and then looks up at me. “So when are we going to murder Sloane?”

  I laugh a little, but Willa doesn’t say anything. She’s picking at my carpet.

  “There’s this Shakespeare quotation,” I continue. “Make not your thoughts your prisons. And I guess I was just trying to stop that from happening, you know? I was trying to think less about Layla and everything that happened. I’m always trying my hardest not to think about it. You’re actually the first people I’ve ever told the whole story to, and I’m terrified you’ll see me differently now.” I take a deep breath and steady my nerve. “Do you?” I ask.

  Sydney shakes her head and smiles slowly. Willa just rolls her eyes.

  “Nah,” Sydney says.

  “You’re stuck with us now,” Willa agrees.

  Sydney asks where the bathroom is a few minutes later, and I point her in the right direction. Once she’s gone, I slide onto the floor to sit beside Willa.

  “You okay?” I ask her. She’s been quiet for a while now, and even though it feels like we’ve known each other forever, we haven’t really. I don’t know her moods or what they mean yet. She looks at me, shrugs, and then lies down and stares up at the ceiling. I follow suit, our heads side by side, our bodies pointing in opposite directions.

  “You ever feel like you can’t miss someone without missing every person you’ve ever lost?” Willa asks. I twist my head to look at her. Because of the way we’re arranged on the floor I can’t see what her face looks like, only her profile—her messy, too-long bangs getting tangled in her straight eyelashes; her small nose and the pointed corners of her mouth. She keeps staring at the ceiling.

  I think of Gigi. “That’s exactly what I feel like,” I finally say. “That’s exactly what I feel like all the time.”

  “Shit’s dark,” she says. “So I get why you wanted to like, erase Layla, by going to all those places and doing more memorable stuff.”

  I nod, my braids dragging a little on the carpet.

  “Thing is,” Willa continues, “you kinda have to go through the dark to be sure you’re okay. And like, while I get the sentiment behind your project, why not just make brand-new memories instead of overwriting old ones? You don’t have to erase the bad things to be happy. Besides, the dark shit is important to remember too.”

  I look at my snow globes. I blink away tears as I think of all that I’ve lost. Willa props herself up on her elbows and shakes her bangs out of her eyes.

  “She hurt you bad. Let yourself feel it, and everything that comes with it.”

  When I glance over at her, she puts her hand on my shoulder. I just nod.

  “Oh my God, guys,” Sydney says, rushing back into my bedroom.

  I sit up fast. “What?”

  “Someone posted about the rumor!”

  Willa hops up and snatches Sydney’s phone from her.

  “Shit. This is bad. If anyone sees this…” Willa glances at me through her bangs.

  “What?” I ask, my eyes flying from Sydney’s face to Willa’s and back again. “What would happen?”

  “There would probably be some kind of investigation if like, authorities saw it, right?”

  “No way that would happen. It’s not even true,” I say.

  Willa shrugs. “I don’t think that matters, dude. Can we prove that it isn’t?”

  They both stare at me, and the one person who can prove it pops into my head like lightning.

  Novak.

  ONE MORE TERRIBLE TRUTH

  Willa puts on one of her favorite Korean dramas, and the three of us watch it together and hang out for most of the afternoon. Once they leave, though, I barricade myself in my bedroom for the next few hours, trying to decide what to do. Maybe I won’t need to do anything. Maybe this will all blow over and no one will see the post or even care about it. But what if someone does? What if my dad gets into serious trouble over a lie?

  I lie in the center of my bed, trying to make sense of what I know. Of what Mom meant by close. Of what could have been happening between my father and Ms. Novak that was so intimate that my dad needed to change jobs, and that, even after everything, my parents still split up.

  Soon, exhaustion from all the emotional stress of the morning sets in and I fall asleep. I don’t wake up until a reminder in my calendar chimes, telling me that I’m supposed to go to the diner tonight. But with this rumor going around, and after I yelled at Dom, I know I’m not going to.

  I call Dolly’s. Pop picks up. “Dolly’s Diner. How can I help ya?”

  “Hey, Pop,” I say. My voice sounds all croaky from crying or sleeping or both. “It’s Cleo. I’m not going to make it in to help out tonight. I’m not feeling well. Is that okay?”

  “Of course, honey. Dom mentioned you had to leave early from school. Anyway, take all the time you need.”

  I say thank you and hang up before I roll over to stare at the wall, praying that I can fall back to sleep and pretend everything that has happened today was a dream.

  The next time I wake up, my window is dark and Mom’s warm hand is on my shoulder.

  “Cleo, honey, how long have you been sleeping?”

  I glance at the time on my phone. “A while,” I say. I sit up and stretch and I watch my mother slip off her high heels.

  “What really happened with Ms. Novak?” I ask right away.

  She reaches up and pulls down one of my snow globes. It’s the one of Hogwarts. She shakes it and then crawls into bed with me. We watch the fake snow as it swirls around the miniature castle. I haven’t seen my mother this still maybe ever. I search her face and then her eyes find mine.

  She looks as if she’s sizing me up. She’s studying me like I’m a gas tank and my face is the gauge. Even though I called her a few hours ago sobbing, I still myself, putting on the best Poker Face I can muster. I try to look as tough as I can. And I guess she decides there’s enough room inside me for one more terrible truth.

  “Your father is in love with her, Cleo.”

  “In love…with Ms. Novak?” I say, stunned.

  She nods. “He came home one day and told me that he felt we’d been growing apart since your grandmother passed away.” She looks down at the snow globe again. “He said I’d been working like a fiend and that he felt like I had no time for him. He said I made him feel like nothing he did was ever good enough. And maybe I did throw myself into work after we lost her, but he got a little bit lost too.” She takes a deep breath, and I put my hand on hers where it still holds the snow globe. “I think he’d already decided to move on, and a bigger part of me wanted him to be happy than to stay with me if I made him sad. He could tell I wasn’t my best self with him either. So separating just made sense.”

  “So…did he cheat? On you?” I ask. I touch her perfect hair. I think of her intense and steady devotion to everything.

  “I wish it were that simple, Cleo. But no, not exactly. We wer
e changing, or maybe we’d already changed. And I don’t think either of us was willing to make the kinds of compromises and sacrifices the newer version of the other person needed.”

  I nod. I kind of understand that part at least. It’s like Layla and all the new music she started listening to, the way she got into makeup and hair and chorus and forgot about the things we both used to love. It’s like me wanting everything to stay the same when nothing was ever going to. For a second, I hate my father and Ms. Novak for hurting my mother as much as I hate Sloane and Layla for hurting me. But as my mother continues speaking, outlining her and my father’s slow descent, I see that she made some mistakes too, just like I did.

  None of this is as simple as it seems.

  “I wish you’d told me,” I say.

  “I always thought you deserved to know,” she says. “That people change. That love and life are fluid. That even your heroes can make choices that fall into shades of gray. But your father thought it was a bad idea, that it might be too complicated for you to handle. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he was just saying that to protect himself. To protect the way you saw him as this great, flawless guy.”

  I’m a little embarrassed that I was holding on to the childish sentiment of things lasting forever, of people being perfect. Even now, I don’t want to let it go.

  “He did know Layla and I were fighting, though,” I counter. “So maybe he thought it would be too much for me—this on top of everything else.” As soon as I finish the sentence, I can hear myself defending him even though I have no reason to. I don’t know when my father became superhuman in my head.

  * * *

  —

  We shift from my room to hers and order takeout. We’re talking and eating, sitting in the center of her big, soft bed, in a pile of bare brown feet and blankets.

  “Sorry,” I say to my mom, because I don’t want her to think I’m taking his side in this. We’ve all lost something because of what’s happened: a love; a life, even my own quiet innocence, though that couldn’t have lasted much longer. She smiles softly.