Acacia picked up the phone with: “Did Parker get ahold of you?”
Cassie twisted her ponytail around her fist and yanked, the pressure and pain grounding her. “Not until after Adam walked in on me and Erin making out in her kitchen.”
“Shit.”
“Tell me about it.”
“He didn’t kill you, at least. Unless this is your ghost calling me.”
Cassie laughed quietly at that. Dialing Acacia, she’d been ready to cry, but she couldn’t help herself when it came to this idiot.
“Still alive, unfortunately,” she said.
“Agree to disagree on the fortunateness of that fact.”
“Okay but it’d be easier to be dead than deal with this.”
“It’d be easier to be dead than to figure out what to eat for dinner every day, too, doesn’t mean it’s unfortunate to put a frozen pizza in the oven for the third night in a row.”
“Forget Adam,” Cassie said instead of admitting Acacia had a point. “How’d you convince Parker not to kill me?”
“Yeah, that took some work,” Acacia said. “And almost two months.”
“So she wasn’t just like, really obsessed with Sam after Valentine’s Day?”
“No, she definitely was. She just also wanted to murder you.”
Cassie huffed out another laugh. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Acacia made everything easier. Everything was still a mess and Cassie was still going to have to figure her shit out, but talking to Kaysh, it didn’t feel as impossible.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Acacia said. “She knew—on Valentine’s Day, she figured out that I’d known. I don’t know, my face or something when she told me about the texts. But I didn’t tell her any specifics, really, just that you were kind of hung up on her mom.”
Cassie tugged on her ponytail again. “Understatement of the year, it turns out.”
“Yeah,” Kaysh agreed. “Honestly, I wasn’t surprised Parker came to terms with y’all dating before you did.”
Cassie wasn’t sure they had yet. Erin didn’t want to date her, right?
There was a beat of silence, and then Acacia’s voice was quiet as she asked, “You’re not mad at me for lying to you?”
“I’d love to be,” Cassie said. “But it’d be a little too much pot calling the kettle, so nah.”
“That’s very mature of you.”
“Yeah, I’m trying.” Didn’t feel like she was mature enough for Erin, though. “Except I did basically run away from Erin and Parker because I got overwhelmed.”
“That’s okay,” Kaysh said without an ounce of judgment.
Things had gotten, if not scary, then at least intense, and Cassie had fled. Then again, when had she done anything else? This spring, she’d let Parker pull away from their friendship with almost no fight. And at the beginning of the school year, when her friend group had chosen Seth, she’d just … let them. It was easier to let people go than to admit you wanted them in your life. At least that way you wouldn’t have to chance rejection.
The only thing Cassie had ever admitted to wanting was Caltech. But that was …
Caltech had always been her dream, but not for the school itself. It was about getting away from home, from anyone who looked at her with pity. It was about a whole new life, sunshine and palm trees and no one who even knew enough about her to pity her. She’d been trying to run away from her life since she literally ran away from her mom’s trailer at twelve. She’d slept on the floor of Acacia’s closet and they’d told no one where she was. It was three days before her mom had even realized she was gone. The Webbs bought Acacia a trundle bed after that.
Cassie didn’t want to escape anymore.
She’d found a life worth staying for.
“You wanna talk about it?” Acacia asked.
She did. She wanted Acacia to tell her what to do. How to handle this. How to fix it. Kaysh would know. She had always been better with people than Cassie.
But Cassie needed to figure it out herself. She’d gotten herself into this mess. Acacia had already done enough work getting her out of it with Parker. If Cassie wanted to stay, she had to prove it.
“I think I gotta do this one on my own, babe.” She doubted herself even as she said it.
“It’s okay to need other people, you know?”
“Good, ’cause I’d be a fucking disaster without you.”