“It was an old car,” Mom said. “We never bought any fancy equipment for it.” I opened my eyes to see my hand was shaking. I balled it into a fist to match the growing knot in my stomach. The dashcam was in my room, a mere ten feet from where the cops were standing. And the video was on the phone in my back pocket—it had automatically synced when the camera was in range, no password needed.
“That’s too bad,” Kellogg said. “A dashcam would have made our jobs very easy. But we have other avenues, don’t you fret.”
I suddenly realized I’d been holding my breath. I picked up the pot, then exhaled behind the swoosh of pouring coffee. A skilled detective might have sensed Mom was hiding something. But we were poor white trash, we didn’t get LAPD’s A-team. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or pissed.
I vaguely heard Kellogg ask if we wanted to file a stolen property report for the car, and then apologize that that cord, “whatever it was for,” was the only thing they had extracted before the car “disappeared.”
I tried not to think about what kind of people could disappear a car right under the cops’ noses.
But, as I was about to find out, they were capable of much worse than that.
CHAPTER 31
I spent the night in my mom’s hospital room. Just like old times, I thought as I contorted my body to fit on the narrow foldout cot. They discharged her first thing in the morning. I didn’t want people to wonder where I was—Calabasas High kids didn’t ditch—so I went straight to school wearing yesterday’s clothes and propped up by a triple espresso.
If any of my friends knew my mom had OD’d, they didn’t let on. Tricia from precalc hit me up for help with her test correction like always, Nicole asked to borrow my phone at lunch again because she was grounded and had hers taken away, and my English teacher still called on me to explain how Cordelia propels the plot in King Lear—and still tsk-tsked me when I didn’t know. I was having the high school experience I’d always dreamed about. I loved my shiny new locker, our fancy auditorium with recessed lights and padded seats, the chem lab with enough Bunsen burners so everyone got a turn. I tried not to think about how I got here, because those kinds of thoughts would have ruined the whole thing.
The bell finally rang. Butterflies twirled in my stomach as I scooped up my books and headed for the meeting place. I was relieved to see my mom was already there. She smiled at me when I got in the car, then asked about my day like everything was perfectly normal. I had told her that we didn’t have track practice that day, which was a lie. I didn’t want her to know I was afraid to leave her alone all day, because that would have made her feel guilty and sad, and we’d had enough of that.
When we got home, she said she needed to lie down, and went up to her room. A few minutes later, she called to me, so I went up and stood at her bedside.
“Sit,” she said softly, and I sat down on the bed. She grabbed my wrist, and she held it tight like you would a child’s.
“What I did yesterday,” she said, “was incredibly selfish.”
My throat got tight. I willed myself not to cry. I didn’t want to make her feel bad, her feeling bad is how we got here in the first place.
“I want you to have a big, full life. Have everything I never had. I guess I just didn’t want to get in the way of that, y’know?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what she meant. She was my mom, and the reason I even existed. How could she be in my way?
“Anyway, it was stupid, and I’m not going to do it again. I don’t want you to worry.”
She looked really tired, her undereyes were puffy and dark, so I nodded like I agreed, even though I was worried as shit.
“Libby came over this morning,” she said. “I was afraid to try to be friends with her. Afraid to try to be friends with anybody. I don’t know, maybe I thought I didn’t deserve to have friends?” Her voice went up like a question, so I nodded to let her know I understood.
“Did you tell her?” I asked, unsure what I wanted her answer to be. It was risky letting even a trusted friend in on our secret. But keeping everything all bottled up had proven dangerous, too.
“Not everything,” Mom replied, “but enough to feel like I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not anymore. And you know what? It felt good.”
She smiled, but I still felt uneasy. Is she telling me I should tell someone, too? And how much could I say if I did?
She squeezed my hand, then closed her eyes. I knew she wanted to sleep, so I swallowed my questions and went downstairs to start my homework. Shakespeare was hard enough when you could concentrate, so I didn’t make much headway. As I sat there reading the same three verses over and over, I thought about what she said about not deserving friends. And I realized I felt the same way every damn day, I just handled it by shopping and pretending.